Poetry
Mythistorema
Μυθιστόρημα
George Seferis · 1935
Synopsis
Twenty-four short poems, in free verse, in which nameless travellers search for a land. The narrator becomes in turn Jason, Orestes or Odysseus, shifts from the first person to the third, and the text merges the ancient sea with today's, in a nostalgia that is the very desire for return.
Context
The poem appeared in 1935. It was written while its author was translating Eliot's Waste Land, to which he owes the mythical method and the dramatic monologue; the title joins myth and history. The figures of Homer serve there as a measure of the present rather than as ornament. Jacques Lacarrière and Égérie Mavraki gave it in French, in a volume of Poèmes, at the Mercure de France in 1963; Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, in English, in the Collected Poems.
Who it is for
Twenty-four brief fragments, available in French. It helps to know the Odyssey and the end of Greek Asia Minor.
Prizes and reception
It opens the mature poetry of its author, who will return to its themes for twenty years, until the Nobel Prize of 1963, the first for Greece.