Ετερογλωσσικοι διάλογοι και ανα-σύνθεση στη Σαπφώ του Οδυσσέα Ελύτη

Abstract

An unexplored, but significant, aspect of the poetics of the work of Odysseus Elytis is his complex reception of the poetry and the figure of Sappho. This article, a small 'fragment' of a wider investigation into the reception of Sappho by Elytis and other Greek modernists, explores his reconstruction and translation of Sappho's poetic corpus. I argue here that Elytis' Sappho (1984) articulates a double discourse: on one level Elytis re-composes Sappho's poetics in a highly intricate manner, and on another level, he foregrounds his own lyrical identity and his affinities with the primordial indigenous symbol of lyricism. If in his collages the heterogeneous elements derive from the synthesis of deliberately fragmented images, in his re-composition of Sappho the métonymie material comes from the fragmented Sapphic corpus and from his own internal intertext. The result is the re-creation of poetic collages (syn-images / συν-εικόνες») where Elytis' voice is inscribed in Sappho's poetic discourse to re-articulate it by means of a heteroglossic ventriloquism. In this manner Elytis' Sappho constitutes a complex case of the construction of the literary self: by means of his function as reader and writer of the Sapphic corpus, and through a paradoxical combination of his act of depersonalization, on the one hand, and his appropriation of the Sapphic persona, on the other, Elytis produces a new reading and re-writing both of an exemplary poetic subject and of his own literary self.