Axion Esti

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.George Savidis was Professor of Modern Greek at the University of Thessaloniki and a Visiting Professor at Harvard. He edited the standard Greek editions of the poetry of Cavafy, Seferis, Sikelianos and Karyotakis, and with Edmund Keeley translated a selection of Cavafy’s ‘unpublished’ poems. He died in 1995.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.