Odysseas (or Odysseus) Elytis's great poetry is so rooted in the Greek language that transplantation into the alien soil of English is unlikely to take. How can one make readers unrooted in his Aegean world feel his seeming abstractions as emotions or respond deeply to "olive-tree," "whitewash," "Kore"? Each new graft by a serious translator brings fresh hope that the shoots will live, that more of Elytis will leaf in our foreign air.

Elytis's Greek varies, often in a single strophe, from literary to slang, from rhetorical to simple, from learned to folk-song-like. Profoundly personal without being at all confessional, he requires us to make the harsh and timeless Hellenic world of the poems into our own truth, and so professes a Shelleyan belief in Poetry's transforming magic. His poetry depends on musical values for its urgency and to conjoin word and inner feeling, so to change us through our relationship with language—something like a mixture of Stevens and the Pound of "Drafts and Fragments."

Thus Elytis demands more than the translator's usual patience and discipline, a discipline to which Olga Broumas has evidently not submitted herself. Since all but two early pieces in What I Love have been accurately translated by others, one wonders why her translations are shockingly inaccurate. There is not one poem in the book that is carefully or skillfully rendered. Examples of lapses in simple accuracy, giving one per page (there are many more on each page cited here, as on every page) from the first four pages: "greens" for "gardenpatch" (p.5), "arbor" for "grapevine" or "vineyard" (7), "drawing" for "dreaming" (9), "sharing" for "portioning out" (11). Printing the Greek en face amounts to hubris.

Such inaccuracy would be somewhat less culpable if the translations captured Elytis's rich, allusive poetic sensibility or were themselves at least good English. They fail in both respects. Let us examine one of Elytis's most graceful lyrics, the twenty-two-line "Small Green Sea" (translated by others twice before). The image of Kore, the maiden, is crucial to all of Elytis's books. She embodies the beginnings of fertility, fresh and virginal: she is Poetry herself. He calls her by many names. Here she is Sea (Thalassa), whom he wishes to educate in Ionia, where so much of the Greek miracle began. He would have her inspire him through all of Greek history with divinity, to be communicated in a sexual embrace. In the second line Broumas tones down Elytis's urgent phrasing: her "I want to adopt you" ought to be "How I would like to adopt you." Four lines later Broumas renders the simple word for "little tower" as "tight tower," whatever that may mean. Two lines later Elytis wants Sea to learn "to turn [rotate] the sun," not, as Broumas has it, "turn to the sun." In line 14 Broumas writes, "Go through Smyrna's window" for Elytis's "Enter Smyrna by the window." Her line 17 reads, "With a little north a little levantine." What she wants with the north and a diminutive Eastern gentleman I cannot tell: Elytis wants Sea to return "With a little bit of Northwind a little Eastwind." When the poet sleeps with Sea to get the essence of Ionia, Broumas either misunderstands or (as I suspect) suppresses this act. Broumas's "come back / Illegally to me to sleep / To find deep in your keep / Pieces of stone the talk of the Gods" (the clanging rhymes are gratuitous) should be something like "come back / Little Green Sea thirteen years old [this line is omitted by Broumas] / So I may sleep with you illicitly / And find deep in your arms / Pieces of stones the words of the Gods." Broumas has lost the poem. This is not an isolated instance of bowdlerization. In the last stanza of "Ode to Picasso" and in the biting fourth stanza of "Maria Nefele's Song" (whose astringent meter and rhyme are not even suggested), Broumas again alters the sexual imagery Elytis clearly intends, and on page 71 she translates "buttocks" as "thighs." If Elytis's sexuality discomfits or offends her, she should leave his work, drenched in the erotic, alone.

Half of What I Love is made up of out-of-sequence selections from Elytis's book-length poem Maria Nefele. Broumas strives for a punchy style; this could have been appropriate here. To see why it is not, let us look at "Nefelegeretes" (Cloud-Gatherer). The ancient Greek word is a frequent Homeric epithet for Zeus. The first line literally is, "Ah how beautiful to be cloudgatherer." Broumas translates this as "Ah how beautiful to hang out with the clouds." The slang does not fit. In the next line her word-for-word translation "on old shoes" misses the idiomatic meaning Elytis intends, "for the heck of it." In the first line of this poem's second stanza, Broumas's "to reap unpopularity" should be "enjoy unpopularity." Nine lines later, "the fat people" should be subject, not object, as here. Broumas's penultimate line, "and with large leagues open yourself freely to cry," is incomprehensible; an idiom, the Greek means, "and with great strokes you swim out to weep freely." As translated here, the poem is unintelligible. Broumas has not worked out the poem's meaning before translating.

Perhaps Broumas's own grammar is insecure: "don't be afraid / of what is written you to feel" (89); "I they threw me from the doors outside" (87). Her "It's me to who shouts" (43) must be making Elytis sad. If sometimes her style is usefully crisp and direct, as in certain lines of the difficult piece titled "The Monogram," in no poem is her version superior to her predecessors', although improvement is the point of retranslation.

What I Love has a handsome cover, but the words "Nobel Laureate" on it may mystify the reader who finds the book's contents unworthy of that award. May I recommend Kimon Friar's Elytis translations The Sovereign Sun, which is what the Nobel Committee read?