Odysseus Elytis

by Odysseus Alepoudhélis

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I Mayia tou Papadhiamandhi

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In the following review, Decavalles praises Elytis's rediscovery of the turn of the century prose writer Alexandros Papadhiamandhis in his I Mayia tou Papdhiamandhi.
SOURCE: A review of I Mayia tou Papadhiamandhi, in World Literature Today, Vol. 54, No. 1, Winter, 1980, pp. 149-50.

Deep intellectualand emotional affinity has obviously inspired this perceptive and brilliant, touching and revealing evaluation of Alexandros Papadhiamándhis by the outstanding contemporary Greek poet and 1979 Nobel laureate. Papadhiamándhis was a saintly man from the island of Skiathos whose several narrative tales, written around the turn of the century, made him the first original and unsurpassed master in modern Greek prose. His stories were all drawn from that Aegean island, the integrity of its closed and tiny world, its rocky natural beauty, its simple, unsophisticated and religiously inspired people, the picturesquenessand tragic nature of their lives. A poetic genius and a wise innocence in their author lent those narratives, in their strange mixture of elevated language and the demotic tongue, of exquisite art and careless journalistic improvisation, an irresistible charm. In subsequent years the prosaic narrow-mindedness of critics failed to see the inherent greatness and lasting universality of the stories.

Hence Elytis's affectionate concern to rediscover, reveal and defend, in his forty-five-page essay and the seventy-page selection that follows it, the personality and peculiar genius of the old master with whom he shares much in many respects; this fact makes the defense of Papadhiamándhis very much Elytis's own self-defense. Elytis too has suffered from the narrow-mindednessand prejudice of his younger critics. What he reveals and stresses in Papadhiamándhis is his love of life in its universality, its closeness to nature and its cycles—the things that make it stand beyond what is perishable in temporality. Papadhiamándhis is the last survivor and reporter of a small, marvelously integral, materially poor but spiritually rich world destined to die culturally in the experience of two world wars and what they brought.

Totally identifying himself with Skiathos, he raised that island into a poetic reality untouched by time's ravages. Out of quantities he built a world of quality in his mixing inseparably the physical with the spiritual essence. In his stories he dealt with "pure units," the souls "sculpted by the winds" and made "imperishable like sea-cliffs." He lent that reality his dream in its "continuous contact with the world beyond." His so-called "saintliness," his wise and tested innocence, never lost its humanity, its sensual desires, its eros for beauty in nature and in lovely girls, an eros for the physically unattainable (afthasto) which only imagination can reach. Apart from his undeniable poetic gifts, it was his human sensuality itself for physical and spiritual beauty and the beauty of words in their marvelous weddings that strangely made him the more saintly and the more pure.

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