Selected Poems 1940-1979

Odysseus Elytis, born in Crete in 1911, began to publish his poetry in the 1930s. He took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania in 1940–41. He was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance during the Nazi occupation. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1979 ‘for his poetry which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man’s struggle for freedom and creativeness’. He died in Athens in 1996.Edmund Keeley translated the poetry of Cavafy, Seferis and Sikelianos with the late Philip Sherrard. His translations of Yannis Ritsos received the Academy of American Poets’ Landon Award and the EU’s First European Prize. He is a novelist whose non-fiction works include Cavafy’s Alexandria and Inventing Paradise. He lives in Princeton, NJ.Philip Sherrard (1922–1995) lived his later years on the island of Evia. Among his many books perhaps the best-known are two studies of modern Greek literature, The Marble Threshing Floor and The Wound of Greece, and the later Edward Lear: The Corfu Years. With Edmund Keeley he translated the Complete Poems of George Seferis, the Selected Poems of Angelos Sikelianos and co-edited the Selected Poems of Odysseus Elytis.