Poetry
The Axion Esti
Άξιον Εστί
Odysseas Elytis · 1959
Synopsis
A long poem built like a liturgical service, in alternating prose and verse: the genesis of a world and of a language, then the passion, war, occupation and civil war, then praise. The country is less a land than a light and a syntax, and the speaker, in seeking what he is, ends by merging with it.
Context
The poem took more than seven years and follows the Orthodox liturgy step by step: psalms, odes and readings alternate within a learned architecture. Its author had fought in Albania in 1940 and then lived four years in Paris; he returned from there in 1952 with the idea of a monument-book that would give his country back to its people. Mikis Theodorakis composed an oratorio from it in 1963 and 1964, premiered in Athens on 19 October 1964, and the book became everyone's concern. Xavier Bordes and Robert Longueville translated it for Gallimard; Edmund Keeley and George Savidis into English, in 1974.
Who it is for
A long poem of strict architecture, and a difficult one. Theodorakis's oratorio offers a more accessible way in.
Prizes and reception
It received the first State Prize for poetry in 1960, and the oratorio drawn from it is still sung today.