SOURCE: A review of The Little Mariner, in Choice, Vol. 26, No. 6, February, 1989, pp. 946-47.

In the following review, Picken calls Elytis's The Little Mariner his "most important work since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature," but complains that Olga Broumas's translation fails to convey the musicality and imagery of Elytis's poetry.

The Little Mariner, published in Greece in 1985, and here translated into English for the first time, is quite clearly Odysseas Elytis's most important work since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. In it he attempts, as he has done in so much of his poetry, to correlate his ecstatic, lyrical response to the physical world with a somber, reflective, even philosophical meditation on his country's long history. It is a highly structured work, in which alternating prose poems and lyrical passages are separated by four "spotlights," shining into dark corners of Greek...