SOURCE: A review of What I Love: Selected Poems, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 139-40.

In the following review, Carson criticizes Olga Broumas's translation of Elytis's What I Love for its inaccuracy.

Odysseas (or Odysseus) Elytis's great poetry is so rooted in the Greek language that transplantation into the alien soil of English is unlikely to take. How can one make readers unrooted in his Aegean world feel his seeming abstractions as emotions or respond deeply to "olive-tree," "whitewash," "Kore"? Each new graft by a serious translator brings fresh hope that the shoots will live, that more of Elytis will leaf in our foreign air.

Elytis's Greek varies, often in a single strophe, from literary to slang, from rhetorical to simple, from learned to folk-song-like. Profoundly personal without being at all confessional, he requires us to make the harsh and timeless Hellenic world of the...