Odysseas Elytis Critical Essay | Critical Review by C. E. Fantazzi

SOURCE: A review of What I Love: Selected Poems, in Choice, Vol. 24, No. 4, December, 1986, p. 632.

In the following review, Fantazzi states that Olga Broumas's translation of Elytis's What I Love loses the music, the images, and sometimes the sense of the original.

Broumas, who translated these poems, has an obvious devotion to her fellow countryman, Odysseas Elytis, whose voice she professes to recreate in English, "with an accent, idiosyncratic," as she states in her prefatory note. She does indeed give him a distinct voice in English, but the accent and the idiosyncrasies are so pronounced that the renditions are often incomprehensible. Elytis is a difficult poet in Greek, shunning punctuation, running words into one another in clusters with little syntactic joining, but one can catch the sense, and the music of his language is enchanting, the imagery limpid and luminous, reflecting the effulgence of the Greek...
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