Cleopatra Lorintiu « Elytis »

"Freedom to the mind "

a documentary about Odysseas Elytis, Greek  poet, Nobel prize 1979

 commentaries by Cleopatra Lorintiu

   These lines have become an emblem of the poetic state and of inner freedom revealing the triumph of the spirit and of the purity of art.

They emerged from the Hellenic land, matrix of the European civilization, crucible of myths. They emerged from the mysterious heart of the Peloponnesus, from the quiet sea of thoughts.
Odysseas Elytis, their augur, expresses in his works the magical Greece, silent depository of history, of inconsistencies and of disappointment, of enthusiasm and of chimeras.

The mythical realm allows Elytis to somehow identify himself with the poetic mode of life.  That is why when declaiming his verses the image of Greece takes shape naturally rising up immediately to the essence of pure existence.

   “For here I am-the one born for the little chores and the islands of the Aegean sea. The one in love with the quiver of the heavens. The one initiated by the olive leaves. I who sip the sun and kill the locusts. For here I am standing in front of the determined ones dressed in black clothes. I was given the Greek language and a humble house on the shores of Homer. My sole concern is my language on the shores of Homer. There in a world of fish, of weeds troubled by the winds, of green currents in blue waters, I have seen so many things putting on fire my bowels, mushrooms, jelly-fish, with the first words of the sirens, rosy shells, with the first shivers of the night. There pomegranates, quinces, dark gods, uncles and cousins pouring oil into huge amphora and the gentle breezes of the meadow filling up the air with rare perfumes of reed and of willow, of black herbs and of pepper roots, with the first chirping of the chaffinch, sweet songs with the first Hosanna!"

   The Greece set on fire by the summer sun! The Greece of the small villages and of the dusty horizons! The Greece of the temples and of the Acropolis, the Greece carved in rock breathes with every line urging us to purification through thought beyond the sufferings of a transient today, beyond the limping obstacle of all insignificant things.
    
Similar to a priest, similar to an initiated, Elytis ministers in the austere sanctuary of poetry. Perhaps the Nobel prize awarded to the writer in 1979, sixteen years after Seferis, brought a more thorough meeting with the world, with his contemporaries, with his readers.

Yet he didn’t change his way of living, simple, delicate, withdrawn, the lifestyle of a true poet.

On being awarded this flattering recognition Elytis declared: ”Men are thirsty for democracy and for freedom. Faced with violence I forget I am a poet and I become a man. And if I can, I will fight against this violence.

During the war as well as during the junta I expressed myself. Under the former circumstances I fought, under the latter I kept silent.

 Elytis was concerned first and foremost with writing his own work: “Prizes are secondary things, he said, though they have their importance. This time I feel I am identified with my country, that’s why I cannot refuse it. Of course, I don’t intend to go on a tour of conferences like some believe I would. Nor will I extend my small flat with the prize money. All I need is the strictly necessary things. I want to be pleased with what I have. I am no friend of useless objects.”

    What a wonderful advice for a simple life stripped of petty things and focused on its depths: “The lesson is still the same, he wrote. It is enough to express the things we love and to do this only by resorting to the minimum available means and to the most direct approach possible, that of poetry. Elytis’s work - a house with transparent walls, a fortress against all aggressions, a sacred space abstracted from the surroundings.

  “I wandered across the sky and I shouted. I was in danger of running into happiness. I lifted a stone and I aimed far away. The fate foreseen by the sun pretended not to see me. Then the bird of the little girl took a crumb of sea and rose up into the sun.”
   Iordan Chimet, who gave the Romanian public an extraordinary anthology of Elytis’s creation consisting of translations of important writers and fragments from his essential books, noticed that the Greek artist always kept himself far from the madding crowd refusing the devouring fame and the mirage of the spotlight. A single book has a plethora of literary works at its basis.

    Like Seferis, Odysseas Elytis reshapes tradition choosing it as the starting point for the innovation of the neo-Hellenic poetic language. Elytis is particularly sensitive to the distant echo of the myths of the Hellenic poetry, to the tone, to the interior speech, ultimately to its ethical rhythm above history and style. Haunted by the ancient dignity of poetic speech, Elytis opts for a harmonious vision where pain is devoid of any easy claims inserting itself with solemnity as a major structural component of fate.

   Elytis is a poet of the Greek landscape just as we see it today, but also of the landscape whose representation dates back to the great Hellenic myths, to the ancient theatre or to the history turned into legend. It is a landscape summarized in an idea and in a symbol of stone memories where incantations of the civilizing beginnings seem to find their echo

  The summer, the youth, the land, the memory, the city, the night- all live in stanzas. Man is but a lens in which the burning force of the landscape and of the seasons reflects itself.
Elytis never speaks of love in the present tense, he always gives it the shape of memories.

  However, to Elytis these memories include not only the past but also the present and the future. Every word about the lost paradise brings back to life the hope of a paradise which might be one day regained. Echo is the key word for Elytis’s poetry, the word he cherishes most. Sky-sea, sea-land, landscape-man, man-woman and even further the extensions of time past-present-future, all of them confront themselves in a permanent relationship with the echo.

   Archaic, harsh, ardent, even Cretan if we are to think of his native land, is the poet’s experience of the landscape: “In the village of my language pain is called the Shining. Or people exclaim: Oh, God, you spend so much blue so that we cannot see you! Everything is a drop of beauty quivering in the move of eyelids, transparent pain like mount Athos hanging from the sky”, the poet seems to whisper an endless poem which unfolds itself like a thread in the labyrinth.
 

  The poet sings the harsh dreams of the stone and of the sea, the Beotian clay, the desert pace of the cliffs, the quiet fields where the footsteps of time echo powerfully, the red petrified vineyards, the olive trees marching forward to embrace the tumult of the sea, the sailors and the hurricanes tattooed on their chests reminding us of Ulysses' traveling companions. The Greece we see today just like the Greece we have always known follows the eternal pattern of Heraclites circle in its poetic time.

“I have been so burned by the thirst for death that my light went back into the sun. This thirst is sending me now to the perfect order of the stone and of the sky. Therefore, I am the one I have been looking for. Oh, linen summer, wise autumn, short winter/ Life pays its dues to the olive leaves. And at night among the fools, together with a little grasshopper, this thirst reinforces the law of the unexpected.”

  Love is free. Love is triumphant. Thought is free too. Blessed by the wind the poet seems to summon us to a world of universal brotherhood serving beauty and poetry. Even today when despite the earthly design his spirit left the matter, his urge for inner freedom is just as powerful emerging from his verses with an amazingly current applicability.

others details about the documentary:

 a production of Romanian Television 2001

screenplay, voice , commentaries :Cleopatra Lorintiu

images: Aristica Popa (shooting in Greece ,1995)