Six Nights on the Acropolis

ISBN: 1932455175

Author: Seferis, George

Condition: New

Winner of the 2006 Elizabeth Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association. One man. Two women. A group of free-thinking friends. Sex. Poetry. Mysticism. At once a tragic love story and a tale of artistic maturation. A saga of sexual adventure played out in the Greek landscape: the Acropolis, illuminated by the full moon and the blazing midday sun; the streets, coffee houses and tavernas of Athens; a marble quarry quaking in the summer heat; islands with deserted caves and rocky seashores. A portrait of Athens, a chaotic modern metropolis seething with refugees after the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, populated by a host of minor characters adding a tragic dimension, comic relief, and a hauntingly real sense of time and place. A bold, sometimes shocking, work of fiction by Nobel Laureate George Seferis, Six Nights on the Acropolis provides unique insights into Seferiss artistic apprenticeship, personal experiences, and emotional growth. Writing in the guise of his novels protagonist, Seferis permits himself levels of honesty and intimacy about love, sex, and art not possible in his poetry, essays, letters or journals. An experimental novel that daringly combines elements of the Romantic European tradition of the Bildungsroman with the Anglo-American Modernism that Seferis was among the first and most influential to introduce into Greece. Susan Matthias has done readers a great service by her spare, elegant, faithful and always readable translation of this most unexpected of twentieth-century literary novels. - From the Foreword by Roderick Beaton, Kings College London In Susan Matthiass clear-eyed version of this novel of early youth, we discover a Seferis who introduces us into privacies as unsettling - and as arousing - as anything in Gide or Proust. - Richard Sieburth, New York University