Odysseas Alepoudelis, as was his real name, was born on 2 November 1911 in Heraklion, Crete. He was the youngest of six children of the Lesbian businessman Panagiotis Alepoudelis and his compatriot Maria Vrana. His father settled in 1895 in Heraklion, where he founded a soap and nuclear soap factory, and two years later married his mother.
With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Panagiotis Alepoudelis moved his business to Athens and settled with his family at 98a Solonos Street. At the age of six, Odysseus enrolled at the private Makris Lyceum, then located on Ippokratous Street. In 1918, his older sister Myrsini died at the age of 20. In 1923, one year after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the Alepoudelis family travels abroad (Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Yugoslavia). In 1924 he met Eleftherios Venizelos in Lausanne, who was the political idol of his family.
In the autumn of 1924 he enrolled in the 3rd High School for Boys in Athens and the following year he lost his father. It was during this period of his school years that his first intellectual interests manifested themselves. He collaborated with the magazine Diaplasis of the Children, read Greek and French literature and in 1927 he came into contact with Cavafy's poetry. In 1928 he receives his high school diploma and is introduced to the poetry of Kostas Karyotakis. Throughout these years Odysseus visited one of the Aegean islands almost every summer, a fact that would influence the lyrical underpinnings of his poetry.
1929 was a decisive year for his poetic path. He discovers surrealism and reads Lorca and Eliar. He writes his first poems and sends them under a pseudonym to magazines. In 1930 he enrolled at the Law School of the University of Athens and his family moved to 146 Moschonisia Street (America Square). In 1933 he becomes a member of the Ideocratic Philosophical Group of the University and participates in events and discussions with Ioannis Sykutris, Ioannis Theodorakopoulos, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos and Konstantinos Tsatsos.
In 1935 he meets the poet and psychoanalyst Andreas Embiricos, who will have a decisive influence on his poetry, as well as the folk painting of Theophilos, which will have a significant influence on the pictorial orientation of his poetry. In the same year, his friend and fellow artist George Sarantaris brought him into contact with the literary society that published the pioneering magazine Nea Grahmata. The group included, among others, George Seferis, George Theotokas, George Katsibalis and Andreas Karantonis. Nea Grahmata will publish his first probationary poem entitled To Agaios, signed Elytis.
In 1936 he meets the poet Nikos Gatsos and from then on they share a long and close friendship. The painters Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Gikas and Yannis Moralis joined their company, as well as the poet Nikos Karidis, creator of the publishing house Icarus, which would publish most of Elytis' books. In the same year he would interrupt his law studies and join the army. He would be discharged as a reserve officer in 1938.
In December 1939, when World War II had broken out, he would publish 300 copies of his first collection of poems entitled Orientations, a bright ray of light in "the clouds of the world". In 1940, the Alepoudelis family moves to 31 Ithaca Street and in the same year Samuel Beau-Bovi translates Elytis' first poems into French.
With the outbreak of the Greek-Italian war (28 October 1940), he is conscripted as a second lieutenant and the cold winter of the 1940s finds him on the front line of fire. On 13 December 1940 he advanced with his company into Albanian territory. In early 1941 he suffers from abdominal typhus and is taken to the hospital in Ioannina, dying. He miraculously escapes death and is transferred to Athens. His long recovery coincides with the German invasion of Greece and the subsequent occupation.
In 1943 he releases his second collection of poems, Helios the First, together with the variations on a ray, an allegorical resistance in the Occupation, camouflaged in a surrealist form, like Gatsos' Amorgos and Engonopoulos' Bolívar, published in the same year.
In 1945 he collaborates with the surrealist magazine Tetradio. He publishes translations of Lorca's poems and one of his own works, the elegy Song of Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Lieutenant of Albania. In the same year, on the recommendation of George Seferis, he is appointed programme director of the National Radio Foundation (EIR), a post from which he resigns shortly afterwards. During this period he was engaged in painting, which was an old occupation, complementary to his poetry.
In 1948 he left Greece, which was being tested by the Civil War, for Switzerland and from there to Paris, where he settled. There he became acquainted with the avant-garde of the French intelligentsia (Breton, Eliard, Jara, Kami) and came into contact with visual artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and Giacometti. In 1950 he visited Spain and at the end of the same year he settled in London, where he worked with the BBC.
In 1952 he returned to Greece and the following year he rejoined the EIR as programme director, a position he held for only one year. In 1959 he published Axion Esti, a highlight of Greek literature. The poet dives into the roots of Greek myth and draws on material and forms, images and sounds, achieving a dramatic composition in which the lyrical "I" is identified with the epic "we" and modern writing is combined with a fortune, ancient Byzantine and modern. This work by Elytis would be widely acclaimed and become "the property of the people" when it was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis in 1964.
In 1967, the coup d'état of 21 April found him translating passages from Sappho in his new residence at 23 Skoufa Street. In 1969 he left Greece for the second time and settled in Paris, where he remained until 1971, when he returned to Greece for good. After the fall of the dictatorship, he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of the E.I.R.T. and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Theatre for the second time (1974 1977). Despite a proposal by the New Democracy party to be included on the electoral list of the State deputies, Elytis refused, remaining faithful to his principle of not being actively involved in political practice. In 1977 he also refused to be promoted to the rank of Academician.
In 1979 came the great moment for the poet. On 18 October the Swedish Academy announces that he will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his poetry, which, on the basis of the Greek tradition, describes with aesthetic power and high intellectual discretion the modern man's struggle for freedom and creation". The Swedish Academy's statement notes that Axion Esti is one of the masterpieces of 20th century poetry. Elytis attended the traditional award ceremony on 10 December 1979 in Stockholm, receiving the prize from King Charles Gustavus of Sweden and receiving worldwide publicity.
The following years would be sufficiently creative for Elytis, with major publications of his works in poetry, essay and translation. The accolades and honors for his work, both in Greece and abroad, would continue and intensify. Odysseas Alepoudelis will pass away on 18 March 1996, at the age of 85.
Odysseas Elytis was one of the last representatives of the literary generation of the thirties, one of whose characteristics was the ideological dilemma between Greek tradition and European modernism. Elytis himself described his own position in this generation as strange, noting that 'on the one hand I was the last of a generation that leaned on the sources of a Greekness, and on the other I was the first of another that accepted the revolutionary theories of a modern movement'.
Source: sansimera
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