Poetry as Recomposition: Odysseas Elytis Translating Sappho

Abstract

Odysseas Elytis’s introduction to his essay on Theofilos, the Greek painter of naive art, focuses on a highly sensual perception of the ‘legendary’ Lesbian landscape, which is viewed as woman and is described (in a lyrical manner) as such.1 The connection or intersection of landscape and woman is typical in surrealist poetics, in which nature is transformed into woman, a universal principle of life and death, and of movement and stasis.2 Surrealist poetry and art explore the metamorphoses of the instant,3 while metaphor constitutes the principal device employed in surrealist aesthetics for the recomposition or the reconstitution of reality.4 Yet, the legendary land of Aeolis is not only the homeland of Theofilos and the fatherland of Elytis, but also the dream-like and indefinite feminine χώρα (as described in Plato’s Timeus 52), which has been associated, both historically and culturally, with the love poetry of Sappho. Actually, the textual description of the Lesbian landscape mentioned above is materialized visually in Elytis’s collage Ο κόλπος της Γέρας, which appears in the very beginning of his book entitled Σαπφώ.