1963 : Giorgos Seferis

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1963 : Giorgos Seferis

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“for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture”

Born

:

13 March [O.S. 29 February] 1900

Place of birth

:

Urla, Ottoman Empire

Died

:

September 20, 1971

Occupation

:

Poet, Diplomat

Nationality

:

Greek

Notable award(s)

:

Nobel Prize in Literature 1963

Biography:

Seferis one of the most important poets and essayists modern Greek language. He was named after the then by the Greek Church still used the Julian calendar, 29 February and according to modern accounting, 13 March 1900 was born in Smyrna, now Izmir Turkish. Stylianos Seferiadis His father was a lawyer, wrote poems and translated ancient and foreign poets. His mother said Despo (short form of Despoina; Tenekidi born), his two younger siblings Ioanna (1902-2000, she married the late Greek President Constantine Tsatsos) and Angelos (1905-1950). Following the outbreak of the First World War settled Seferis’ family after Athens 1914, where he attended high school and 1917 was the high school. Seferis 1918 to 1924 studied law in Paris, 1924 spent a year in England, his English skills to improve returned 1925 to Greece back in 1926 and joined the diplomatic service in Greece. His first collection of poems turning appeared in 1931. After his work from 1931 to 1934 in the Greek Embassy in London, he represented his homeland from 1936 to 1938 as a consul in Koritza (Albania). Seferis married in 1941 after long relationship Maro Zannou and informed earlier this year to 1944 the fate of the Greek government in exile, took him and others to Crete, Egypt and South Africa led. After the liberation of Greece 1944 he returned to Athens and was back again in 1948 diplomatic services, in particular, he was ambassador from 1953 to 1956 in Lebanon, and from 1957 to 1962 in Britain. During the military dictatorship of 1967-1974 Obrist, he published a 29 th Dated March 1969 statement against the regime. His last months of life, he spent withdrawn. After the death of the poet, 20 September 1971 was his funeral into a demonstration against the dictatorship.

Works:

Selected works in Greek:

  • Strophe, 1931

  • I Sterna, 1932

  • Mythistorema, 1935

  • Imerologio katastromatos, 1940

  • Tetradio gymnasmaton, 1940

  • Dokimes, 1944

  • Imerologio katastromatos B, 1944

  • Erotokritos, 1946

  • Kichli, 1947

  • Treis meres sta monasteria tis Kappadokias, 1953

  • Imerologio katastromatos C, 1955

  • Tria krypha poiemata, 1966

  • Metagraphes, 1980

Selected translations into English:

  • The King of Asine and Other Poems / translated from the Greek by Bernard Spencer, Nanos Valaoritis, and Lawrence Durrell, Lehmann, 1948 – Lehmann, 1948

  • Poems / translated by Rex Warner – Little, Brown, 1960

  • On the Greek Style : Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism / translated by Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos – Little, Brown, 1966

  • Three Secret Poems / translated from the Greek by Walter Kaiser – Harvard University Press, 1969

  • Days of 1945-1951 : A Poet’s Journal / translated by Athan Anagnostopoulos – Belknap Press, 1974

  • Mythistorima and Gymnopaidia / with translation by Mary Cooper Walton – Lycabettus Press, 1977

Literature (a selection):

  • Kohler, Denis, L’aviron d’Ulysse : l’itineraire poetique de Georges Seferis – Les Belles Lettres, 1985

  • Beaton, Roderick, George Seferis : Waiting for the Angel – Yale Univ. Press, 2003

Awards:

1963: Nobel Prize in Literature.

Presentation Speech:

Presentation Speech by Anders Osterling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis, who was born in 1900 at Smyrna, which he left at an early age to accompany his family to Athens. After the Greeks were driven out of Asia Minor, and Seferis’s home town had gone up in flames, homelessness – ever the fate of an oppressed and scattered people – was to play a decisive role during his adult years in more ways than one. Seferis studied in Paris, then entered the diplomatic service, went into exile with the Free Greek Government when Greece was occupied in 1941, and was moved about from country to country during the Second World War, when he served his country in Crete, in Cairo, in South Africa, in Turkey, and in the Middle East. After six years as ambassador in London, he retired last year and returned to Athens to devote himself entirely to his literary work.

Seferis’s poetic production is not large, but because of the uniqueness of its thought and style and the beauty of its language, it has become a lasting symbol of all that is indestructible in the Hellenic affirmation of life. Now that Palamas and Sikelianos are dead, Seferis is today the representative Hellenic poet, carrying on the classical heritage; a leading national figure, he is also acclaimed abroad in so far as his poetry has been made available in translation. Here in Sweden his work was presented thirteen years ago by Hjalmar Gullberg, whose translations included the famous The King of Asine, the theme of which has a connection with Sweden because of our archaeologists’ successful excavations on this site. Using imagination as a tool, Seferis tries in this poem to penetrate the secret behind a name that is merely mentioned in a verse of the Iliad.

When reading Seferis we are forcibly reminded of a fact that is sometimes forgotten: geographically, Greece is not only a peninsula but also a world of water and foam, strewn with myriad islands, an ancient sea kingdom, the perilous and stormy home of the mariner. This Greece is the constant background of his poetry, in which it is conjured up as the vision of a grandeur both harsh and tender. Seferis does this with a language of rare subtlety, both rhythmical and metaphorical. It has rightly been said that he, better than anyone else, has interpreted the mystery of the stones, of the dead fragments of marble, and of the silent, smiling statues. In his evocative poems, figures from ancient Greek mythology appear together with recent events in the Mediterranean’s bloody theatre of war. His poetry sometimes seems difficult to interpret, particularly because Seferis is reluctant to expose his inner self, preferring to hide behind a mask of anonymity. He often expresses his grief and bitterness through the medium of a central narrative figure, a kind of Odysseus with features borrowed from the old seamen in the lost Smyrna of the poet’s youth. But in his hollow voice is dramatized much of Greece’s historical fatality, its shipwrecks and its rescues, its disasters and its valour. Technically, Seferis has received vital impulses from T. S. Eliot, but underneath the tone is unmistakably his own, often carrying a broken echo of the music from an ancient Greek chorus.

Seferis once described himself, “I am a monotonous and obstinate man who, for twenty years, has not ceased to say the same things over and over again.” There is perhaps some truth in this description, but one must remember that the message he feels bound to convey is inseparable from the intellectual life of his generation as it finds itself confronted with ancient Greek civilization, a heritage that presents a formidable challenge to the impoverished heir. In one of his most significant poems Seferis describes a dream in which a marble head – too heavy for his arms, yet impossible to push aside – fell upon him at the moment of awakening. It is in this state of mind that he sings the praise of the dead, for only communication with the dead conversing on their asphodel meadows can bring to the living a hope of peace, confidence, and justice. In Seferis’s interpretation the story of the Argonauts becomes a parable halfway between myth and history, a parable of oarsmen who must fail before they reach their goal.

But Seferis animates this background of melancholy resignation with the eloquent joy inspired in him by his country’s mountainous islands with their whitewashed houses rising in terraces above an azure sea, a harmony of colours that we find again in the Greek flag. In concluding this brief presentation, I should like to add that the prize has been awarded to Seferis “for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture.”

Dear Sir – In honouring you, it has been a great privilege for the Swedish Academy to pay its tribute to the Greece of today, whose rich literature has had to wait, perhaps too long, for the Nobel laurels. Extending to you the congratulations of the Swedish Academy, I ask you to receive from the hands of His Majesty, the King, this year’s Prize in Literature.

Nobel Lecture:

December 11, 1963

Some Notes on Modern Greek Tradition

A poet particularly dear to me, the Irish Yeats, Nobel Laureate in 1923, on his return from Stockholm, wrote an account of his trip that “The generosity of Sweden -” The Bounty of Sweden “. I thought, when the Swedish Academy gave me the great honor of his choice. “The generosity of Sweden” for us is much older, much larger. I believe that no Greek, learning the tribute you paid to my Nation, could not forget the selfless efforts, patient and human done so perfectly by Sweden at home or during your peace archaeologists or during the war missions of the Red Cross, and I did not mention many other gestures of solidarity that we see today. When your King, His Majesty Gustav VI Adolf, I handed the Nobel diploma, I could not help myself to remember with emotion the day when Crown Prince, II had taken to contribute in person excavation of the Acropolis in Asin. When I first met Axel Persson, the man the general court, which was devoted also to this search, I had called my sponsor. My sponsor, yes, since Asin me donating a poem. In the town of Missolonghi, a granite monument is dedicated to Swedes died for Greece during the struggle for our Independence. Our appreciation is more durable than the granite. One evening, at the beginning of last century, in the streets of the island of Zante, the poet Dionysios Solomos heard at the door of a tavern, an old beggar who recited, reaching out, a popular ballad on the fire of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The poor man said: The Holy Sepulcher of Christ, has not burned; Where does the Holy Light, another fire can not go. Solomos, says the story was taken such enthusiasm that came into the tavern and ordered a drink for those inside. The story is very significant for me, I have always regarded as a symbol of the gift of poetry that our people depositing into the hands of a prince of the spirit, begins when the resurrection of modern Greece. This image is a long preparation, it is not yet complete. I intend to tell you about some men who were counted in the struggle for Greek expression, since we breathe the air of freedom. Forgive my presentation that will be enough, I do not want to abuse your patience. Our problems start when the Alexandrina, dazzled by the masterpieces attics, began to teach what is correct and what is wrong to write, starting in other words teach purism. They had not counted with the fact that language is a living organism and that nothing can prevent it from changing. Indeed they had to be strong: they have caused many generations of purists, who have perpetuated until today. They are one of two main currents of our language and our traditions, which have never interrupted. The other current that remained long despised, the current vulgar, popular or oral. It is as old as the first. There is no shortage of written material elsewhere. I was moved, the day that I’ve read, stored on a papyrus of the second century, a letter from a Marine to his father. It was news, the presence of this language strikes me and I felt bitterness at the thought that for many centuries a variety of feelings remained Unspoken, covered forever by the great shroud of purism and beauty speak rhetoric. The Gospels too, you know, are the vernacular of the time. If we think of the apostles who wanted to be understood and felt by the people, we can only consider some difficulty with the vagaries humans who have fights break out in Athens at the beginning of this century at a translation Gospel, which today still want the translation of the word of Christ is illegal here. But I anticipate. These two schools have pursued a parallel track until the fall of the Greek Byzantine Empire. On the one hand, scholars of a thousand ornaments adorned the mind. On the other hand, the people who watched with respect, while remaining confined in its own modes of expression. I do not think there has ever been during 1’ere Byzantium reconciliation of the two, I want to say something like that has been observed in the art of frescoes and mosaics, some years before the end of the empire under the Paleologus. Then the imperial art and folk art provinces have combined to give a splendid revival. However Constantinople dying long before falling. When at the end, it is taken, an easement repeatedly secular covers the entire nation. Many are scholars, who “carrying heavy urns filled with ashes of the ancestors,” as the poet said, in the West will spread the seeds of what we call the Renaissance. But this Renaissance – I hear the term in its strict sense, when we use this word to indicate the passage of the Middle Ages to Modern Times – we have not known for our good or our evil. There is one exception: that of some islands, mainly Crete. The island was living under the domination of the Venetians. Thence in the sixteenth century, we see be developed poetry and drama in verse, in a language alive beautifully, perfectly sure of itself. If we think that this time, major painting flourished on the island and at the same time, by mid-century, was born and raised the great painter Theotocopoulos Domenicos Cretan, said to be el Greco, tested more than punishment for the fall of Crete for the fall of Constantinople. Because, finally, Constantinople was an organization that had already received a mortal blow, brought in 1204 by Crusaders. He survived. Crete was the opposite in all its force. And we can only look with a strange feeling of bitterness and faith in the destiny of this land which Greek men always prepare a revival just squander gusts of history. We think the word that the poet Calvos wrote to General Lafayette: “God and our despair.” Anyway this revival of Crete crumbles in the mid seventeenth century. At that time, many Cretois took refuge in the Ionian islands and other parts of Greece. They were carrying with them their poems, they already knew by court, and were immediately adopted into their new homes. They sometimes united with folk songs, songs that people of mainland Greece had kept with their legends for many generations. There are signs suggesting that some of them date back to pagan times, others appear over the centuries, as the cycle of Digenis Akritas, from the Byzantine period. They show us that through the ages the same attitudes to work and grief, joy, love and death are repeated constantly. But at the same time, they have expressions if fresh, if a free and if they make us human touch of how the finger from Greek spirit is always like himself. I have avoided so far to give you some examples. Although I am immensely indebted to my translators – thanks to them that you have to know me – my sad feeling hopelessly distorted by translating my language in a language that is not mine. Excuse me, if I can not help but at this time to make an exception. It is a very short poem that is the death of a loved one: Me to keep thee, I place three sentinel: the sun on the mountain, the eagle on the plain, and the fresh wind from north I had to ships. The sun has set, the eagle was asleep, and the fresh wind from north won ships. Charon found the right opportunity and you took. I gave you a pale reflection of the poem, but in Greek it goes away. This is a very simplified history. This is the heritage that the old beggar, one night before a tavern Zante remit to Dionysios Solomos. This image comes to mind every time I think of him and what he gave us. In the history of Greek poetry of our time, figures and strange cases abound. It was, for example, more natural, I suppose, that poetry of a people marine, agricultural and warrior, started by a cantor to rough and simple feelings. The opposite happened. It should begin with a man that had the demon of the absolute. He was born on the island of Zante. I must point out immediately that the culture of the Ionian Islands, at that time, much higher than that of mainland Greece. Solomos was educated in Italy. It was a great European, very aware of the problems facing the poetry of his century. It could be a career in Italy, he wrote poems Italian; encouragement does not fault him. He preferred the narrow gate: he decided to do his work in Greek. Solomos had certainly known poems that Cretan refugees had brought with them. He was a fervent supporter of the vernacular and an enemy of purism. His views on this issue we have been kept in his Dialogue of the Poet and the letter pedantic (he meant the word in the sense that Rabelais uses the word Sorbonicole). I quote at random: “Have I anything in my mind,” cried he, “that freedom and language? “Or” Submit yourself to the language of the people, and if you’re strong enough, conquiers it. It is this conquest that began and it is through this company that became a large Greek. Solomos is without doubt the author of the anthem to freedom, the first to represent our national anthem, and other poems that were set to music and sung extensively in the last century. This is not because of what his legacy counts for us, because it has a plot so that his final time permits, the path to be taken by the Greek expression. He loved the language and worked all his life to raise the level of poetry which he dreamed. It was an effort that exceeded the forces of one man. Its major poems, such as free besieged, inspired by the siege and suffering of the town of Missolonghi, there would still fragments, dust swept away by a diamond worker in the grave. We have only fragments and white represent the struggle of this great soul stretched the rope with a bow that was breaking. Many generations of Greek writers would address these fragments and the whites. Solomos died in 1857. In 1927 it published for the first Woman of Zante, who devotes great prose, as had been spent long great poet. Very It is a text which made a deep incision in our minds. Significantly, the fate wanted Solomos, seventy years after his death, this message by replying to the concerns of new generations. It has always been a beginning.

Andre Galvos is a contemporary of Solomos and one of the most isolated of Greek literature. We did not even a portrait of him. Friend of Ugo Foscolo, the Italian poet, he would soon become scrambled with him. Born on the island of Zante and having lived many years in Corfu, it seems to have had no contact with Solomos. A slim volume of twenty odes, and publish it with barely exceeded their thirties, is all his work. In his youth he traveled: Italy, Switzerland, England. It is a proud man, imbued moral ideas of the late eighteenth century, dedicated to virtue, hating tyranny. His poetry is inspired by the grandeur and pain of a martyr. We are moved when we see that this man, who was deprived of his mother as a child, identified in the depths of his conscience love of the mother lost and the homeland. His language is irregular, its rhythms are personal; he has before him an ideal classic, it disdains what he calls the “monotony poems Cretan, who had given so much to Solomos. But he and brilliant images so they seem immediate, so to speak, to rip her. After a lonely life in Corfu, devoted to teaching, he finally leaves the Ionian islands. He married a second time and goes to London with his wife open a boarding school for girls in a small town in the province English. He stayed there for 14 years until his death, without giving signs of life in Greece. I could make a pilgrimage in these regions, that haunts the shadows of Tennyson. An old man who loved this country told me he had once interviewed old women, octogenarians, who were students Calvos; their memories were full respect for their former master. But again I could not free myself of the image of this man without a face, dressed in black, striking his lyre, on a promontory isolated. Opens its fall into oblivion. Without doubt, his voice was not in conformity with the taste of the unreal and romantic rhetoric, which was rampant in Athens at the time. It was rediscovered to the 1890s by Kostis Palamas. It had matured in the meantime. These are the years when young forces of modern Greece beginning to burst. This is the time when the struggle for language is growing. It was not without exaggeration, it was also natural. This struggle continued after many years. It exceeds the literature. It is characterized by a willingness to confront this in all areas. It turns fervently to the public. It rejects the forms and utterances. It certainly intends to preserve the heritage of ancient, but at the same time she turns to the people it wants to illuminate one by the other. She wondered what we are, we are now. Scientists and teachers are involved. This is when the days are major work on Greek folklore, and again to settle the conscience of the continuity of our oral tradition and the need for critical thinking. Kostis Palamas plays a large role in this movement. I was a teenager, when I first saw it was a conference. He was a man of very small, but impressed by the depth of his eyes and his voice rich with something broken in the background. His opening is huge and it covers the shadow of decades of the Greek literary life. He has spoken in all genres of poetry, lyric, epic, satirical, it is also our most important critic. He had an amazing knowledge of foreign literature, showing once again that Greece is a crossroads and that since Herodotus and Plato, it has never been closed to foreign currents, especially in its best moments. Palamas was inevitably enemies, often among those who had taken advantage of what had opened. I consider it a force of nature, before which the review appears petty. It is as if a force and pent accumulated for over a thousand years of purism had finally broken its dikes. When water is released for flood plain thirsting, you can not ask that they only carry flowers. Palamas had a deep awareness of all corners of our tradition, ancient, Byzantine, modern. A whole world of things are unstated urged in his soul. This world, his own, he has released. I do not want to argue that its abundance has not hurt, but the people who had gathered around his coffin in 1943, had certainly felt something of what I just said, when at the last moment goodbye, it entonna spontaneously in front of the occupation authorities, our national anthem, the anthem to freedom. One hundred and fifty four poems are the work of Constantine recognized Cavafis, which is the antithesis of Palamas. It is a rare case of poet, whose driving force is not the verb; abundance of speech is its danger. It was in this flourishing Hellenism of Egypt, now endangered. Apart from rare absences, he spent his whole life in Alexandria, his hometown. What characterizes his art, his refusal. It is also his sense of history. I do not history as narrative of the past history that I live in the present, illuminating our present life, its tragedy and its fate. I Proteus compared to the Alexandrian coast, including Homer tells us that change constantly forms. Its tradition is not the folk tradition that Solomos or Palamas have expressed is the scholarly tradition. Where they are inspired by a song or a popular legend, it will use Plutarch, or a chronograph or obscure the facts and gestures of a Ptolemec or a Seleucid. His language is a compound fact that he had sent a good family of Constantinople, his family and that his ear caught in the streets of Alexandria – a man in the city. He loves the country and the times when the boundaries are not well defined, where the characters and beliefs are fluid. Many of his characters are partly pagan and Christian party, or living among a very mixed population – “Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes” – as he said. When we acquired some familiarity with his poetry, sometimes one wonders if this is not a projection of our lives in the past, or if history has not decided any a coup d’invade our existence. His is a world which is opening to life by the grace of a young body. His friend E. Mr. Forster told me that when he recited for the first time a translation of his poems, Kavafis surprised, exclaimed: “But you understand, my dear Forster, you understand! – “So you understand, my dear Forster, you understand.” Until we lost the habit of being understood. Time has passed since Kavafis and has been widely translated and commented, I think at this moment in pure poet and that was your generous Hellenistic Hjalmar Gullberg, who introduced Kavafis Sweden. But Greece has several aspects, not all are initially easy. I think of the poet Angel Sikelianos. Him, I’ve known. It is not easy n’oubile his voice when he recited his verses. He had something of the splendor of a bard of another time, but at the same time an unusual familiarity with our land and people of the campaign. All loved her. They called simply “Anghelos”, as if one of them. He knew quite naturally connect the words and behavior of Parnassus a shepherd or a village with the world he lived sacred. A possessed the god, a force made of Apollo, Dionysos and Christ. One of his poems, wrote a Christmas night, during the last war, is entitled: “Dionysus in the cradle.” It begins: My sweet child, my Dionysus and my Christ. The truth is that amazing thing to observe how the old pagan religion came together in Greece with our Christian Orthodoxy. In Greece, Dionysus was also a god crucified. The man who felt so strong and called the resurrection of man and the world is, however, the same who said: “The only way is death.” He understood that life and death are two sides of the same thing. I would see, each time I spent by Greece. He suffered a long illness, but the force that inspired never left until the end. One evening at his home after fainting which we had concern, he said: “I saw the absolute black, it was indescribable beauty.” Now I would like to conclude this short presentation with a man that I always kept near me; he supported in difficult times, where any resource seemed lost. In a country of contrasts that is mine, it is an extreme case. This is not an intellectual. But the intellect to cut itself sometimes needs refreshing, as the dead calling fresh blood before answering Ulysses. He had learned to read and write a little, at the age of thirty-five years to be able to tell, he says, what he had seen during the War of Independence, where he had taken part very active. His name is John Makriyannis. I compare it to one of those old olive tree trunks to home, shaped by the elements and can, I believe, teach wisdom. He also has been shaped by human elements, for many generations of human souls. He was born in the late eighteenth century, in mainland Greece near Delphi. It tells how her poor mother from collecting firewood, had been taking pain of childbirth and gave birth in a wood. This is not a poet, silly singing is in him, as it has always been the soul of the people. When a foreigner, a Frenchman, visits him, he calls at the table: “My host,” he says, “wanted to hear our songs and I’ve made him some.” It is gifted with a unique power of expression, his writing looks like a wall that is built stone by stone, all his words work and have roots and has sometimes movements Homeric style. This is the man who taught me most in terms of prose. He does not like the false pretenses of rhetoric. In a moment of anger, he exclaims: “And you have appointed a new head to the citadel of Corinth, a pedant! His name was Achilles and heard the name Achilles, you believed it was the Achilles and illustrates that the name would fight. It is never the name that battle, which combat is the value, patriotism, the virtue “. But at the same time, we understand the love he’s ancient heritage, when, to soldiers who want to sell two statues of foreigners, he said: “Even if you pay ten miles thalers, n ‘they agree not leave our soil. It is for them that we fought. ” When you consider that the war had left many wounds on the body of this man, one has the right to conclude that these words have some weight. Towards the end of his life, becomes a tragic destiny. His wounds gave him intolerable suffering. He was persecuted, thrown in jail, tried and convicted. In his desperation, he wrote letters to God: “And you do not hear us, you do not see us …” This is the end. Makriyannis died around the middle of last century. His memoirs have been deciphered and published in 1907. It took many years for young prissent aware of its true scope. I have talked about these men, because their shadows have not stopped me from my trip to Sweden has started and because their efforts represent in my mind the efforts of a body tied for centuries, when the links are broken, finally finding it back to life, research and gropes its natural movements. My presentation was probably several defects. The failure of simplification, which deforms. The default, I’m not a personal thing. I have certainly not very large figures. For example those of Adamandios Korais or Alexandre Papadiamandis. But talk if we do decide to choose? Excuse me if I have sinned. Indeed I have indicated, as simply as possible, several milestones. All around them and time that separates these men, there is, of course, many generations of workers who toiled and sacrificed their lives to advancing the spirit a little closer to that expression that to many faces ‘is the Greek expression. I also wanted to express my solidarity with my people. Not only with the great masters of the mind, but with the unknown, the ignored, even those who have examined a single book with the same fervor that we look at an icon, with children, who were making hours walking to go to schools far from their village, “to learn letters, good things of God,” as the song says. To recall once again my friend Makriyannis, “we should not say me, but I must say we”, because nothing n’acheve alone. I find it well so be it. I need this solidarity, because if I do not understand men to home, with their virtues and vices, I feel that I can not understand other men at the large world. I do not have talked about the former. I do not want you tired. Perhaps should I add a few words. Since the fifteenth century, since the fall of Byzantium, they become increasingly heritage of mankind. They are steeped in what we call – by shortcut – European civilization. We are pleased that so many nations contribute to make them closer to our lives. As for us, we are still some things inalienable. If I m’observe reading Homer in these simple words: Daozi helioio – I say today: “dwz always hliou -” sunlight “- I have a familiarity that is rather a collective psyche that an effort to know. This is a note, so to speak, whose harmonic spread far and this is a very different touch that can give a translation. After all we speak the same language – and the feeling of a language is both the emotion of knowledge. A language impaired, if you will, by changing several thousand years, but still true to itself. It bears the fingerprints of gestures and attitudes repeated through the ages to us, and simplify sometimes surprising Mainieri problems of interpretation, which appear to other very difficult. I will not say that we are on the same blood – because I hate racial theories – but we still inhabit the same country and we look the same mountains finish in the sea Maybe I used the word tradition, without the obvious stress that tradition does not always. It concerns the contrary by the ability to break the habit, it is that it proves its life force. I do not have talked not of my own generation, this generation which has fallen on the heavy burden of moral rehabilitation after the exodus of a million and half people of Asia Minor and who witnessed a unique phenomenon in Greek history, reflux on the soil of Greece, the polarization of our people scattered around the world in centers flourishing. Finally I’ve not only talked about the generation that came after us, the one whose childhood and adolescence were wounded during the last war. She probably new problems and other points of view: Greece industrialize more. Nations increasingly closer. The world is changing. His movements will accelerate. It seems that own the world today is to appoint pit is in the human soul, is in the universe around us. The concept of time has changed. It is a painful youth and worried. I feel its difficulties, which are not in fact far removed from ours. A great worker for our freedom, Righi Pheraios, taught: “To think freely, think”. I would like by our youth to look at the same time saying engraved on the lintel of the door of your Uppsala University: “Think freely is good, just think is better.” I finished. Thank you for your patience. Thank you also that “the generosity of Sweden` I can finally feel person, I hear this term in the sense that it gave Ulysses, Guand responded to the Cyclops Polyphemus “outiz” – person in this mysterious Current Greece.

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