Odysseus Elytis

      If you're not Greek, you may not know the work of Odysseus Elytis, though he won the Nobel Prize for poetry in 1979. I have, framed and hanging next to my desk, a letter he once wrote to me. He says:

     "I am thankful for your letter. I think that this sudden message of love coming from a far country is for a poet the only reward. In our times, poetry can reveal and join similar sensibilities despite distance and other obstructions. Most people try to deal with their loneliness by practical means without understanding that there is another reality just over their heads, the only true reality, where time and pain and death don't have the same power."

    Mike Keeley, who taught Creative Writing at Princeton, translated Elytis' poetry in a way which managed to keep the lyricism and exuberance of the original phrases. Keeley once said he thought "The Mad Pomegranate Tree" was even better in English than in Greek.

      In his English translation, the poem starts out this way:

In these all-white courtyards where the south wind blows

Whistling through vaulted arcades, tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree

That leaps in the light, scattering its fruitful laughter....

(Six Poets of Modern Greece, Thames and Hudson, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.)