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Corresponding with George Seferis, 1951–
1971
by edmund keeley
When George Seferis (pen name of George Seferiades1 ) received
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1963 — the first Greek Nobel
laureate in any category — the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish
Academy, Anders Osterling, concluded his presentation of the
poet by suggesting that modern Greece’s “rich literature has had
to wait perhaps too long for the Nobel laurels.” He was right: at
least two other Greek writers, Nikos Kazantzakis and Angelos
Sikelianos, had been nominated with enthusiasm in the past but
had failed to be so honored. And Seferis appears, in all humility,
to have taken up the Permanent Secretary’s theme by devoting
almost the whole of his Nobel lecture to an outline of the literature
of modern Greece, beginning with the poetry and drama of the
seventeenth-century Cretan Renaissance, the Ionian School of
Dionysios Solomos and Andreas Kalvos, and Seferis’s immediate
predecessors, the poets Kostis Palamas, C. P. Cavafy, and Sikelianos.
To most American lovers of poetry, only one or two of these names
are likely to have any significance, but as Seferis suggests, they
represent the most recent flowering of the longest literary tradition
in the Western world, whose language has survived in some form
since before Homer’s time.
There have actually been two persistent forms of the language,
the spoken and the purist, and these have struggled to dominate
literature in several periods of Greek history, most recently in the
conflict between “demotiki” and “katharevousa” that began even
before Greece liberated itself from Ottoman occupation in the early
nineteenth century. That conflict appears to have ended once and
1 George Seferis is sometimes rendered as Giorgos (or Georgios) Sepheris, and Seferiades
as Sepheriades (or Seferiadis).
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