Giorgos Seferis

Seferis was born Giorgos Seferiadis on 29 February 1900 (13 March in the Gregorian calendar) in Vourla, today Urla, a small town near Smyrna on the coast of Asia Minor. His father, Stelios Seferiadis, was a lawyer and later a professor of international law in Athens. The family moved to Athens in 1914, and in 1918 Giorgos went to Paris to study law. While he was there, in 1922, the Greek army was defeated in Asia Minor and Smyrna burned. The Greek world of his childhood was wiped out, and that lost homeland runs quietly through all his poetry.

In 1926 he joined the Greek Foreign Ministry. Over the next thirty-six years he served in London, Korçë in Albania, Pretoria, Cairo and Ankara, following the Greek government into exile in Egypt and South Africa during the Second World War. His last post was the most senior: ambassador in London from 1957 to 1962, during the hard negotiations over Cyprus. In 1963 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first ever for a Greek writer.

Retired in Athens, he refused to stay silent under the military junta that seized power in 1967. On 28 March 1969 he issued a public statement against the dictatorship, broadcast by the BBC, in which he said he could see the precipice towards which the regime was leading the country. He died in Athens on 20 September 1971. His funeral turned into one of the first mass demonstrations against the regime: thousands followed the coffin singing Άρνηση.

Seferis published little and polished everything. His first collection, Στροφή (Turning Point, 1931), announced a new, bare voice after the rhymed verse of the previous generation. Μυθιστόρημα (Mythistorema, 1935), his best-known book, is a sequence of twenty-four short poems in which figures from Homer and the tragedians wander through the modern Greek landscape, tired and homeless, looking for a meaning that has been lost: «Ξύπνησα με το μαρμάρινο τούτο κεφάλι στα χέρια» (I woke with this marble head in my hands). Ancient stones, the sea, ships and statues are his recurring images; the tone is quiet and melancholy, never shouted.

The three volumes of Ημερολόγιο Καταστρώματος (Logbook, 1940, 1944 and 1955) follow the war years and his travels; the third is devoted to Cyprus. Κίχλη (Thrush, 1947), named after a sunken ship he saw off the island of Poros, is his most demanding long poem, a meditation on light, justice and death. Τρία κρυφά ποιήματα (Three Secret Poems, 1966) was his last book of verse. He also wrote essays (Δοκιμές), translated T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land into Greek as Η Έρημη Χώρα (1936), and kept a diary for most of his life, published after his death as Μέρες (Days), which many readers love as much as the poems. The Nobel citation praised his lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture.

Listen first to Άρνηση (Denial), from Theodorakis's 1961 song cycle Επιφάνια: Greeks of every age sing it at tables and demonstrations, often without thinking of it as a poem. Poems such as Ελένη (Helen), Ο βασιλιάς της Ασίνης (The King of Asine) and Επί ασπαλάθων (On Gorse), his last poem, published in 1971 as a protest against the junta, are read in Greek secondary schools. In Athens you can visit his house at Agras Street 20 in Pangrati, just below the Panathenaic Stadium, and his grave in the First Cemetery. The house where he was born still stands in Urla, Turkey. Streets named Σεφέρη exist in almost every Greek town, and his line «Όπου και να ταξιδέψω η Ελλάδα με πληγώνει» (Wherever I travel, Greece wounds me) is quoted whenever Greeks argue about their country.

• He was born on 29 February 1900, a date that exists only in leap years, so he had a real birthday just once every four years.
• During the Second World War he followed the Greek government-in-exile from Crete to Egypt and South Africa, writing poems in Pretoria and Cairo.
• His translation of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1936) came out a year after Μυθιστόρημα; Eliot's influence on that book is plain, and the two poets later met in London.
• At his funeral in 1971 the crowd sang Άρνηση to music by Theodorakis, a composer whose work the junta had banned.