SOURCE: "Elytis's Sappho, His Distant Cousin," in World Literature Today, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 226-29.

In the following review, Decavalles asserts that although Elytis and Sappho were separated by time, their common language and culture enabled Elytis to bring new life to Sappho's work.

To those familiar with Odysseus Elytis, it is no surprise that the 1979 Nobel laureate has now lent his modern voice to that old "distant cousin" of his, as he calls Sappho. This was almost bound to come. After a lengthy flirtation, these two representatives of a three-millennia poetic tradition have finally joined in a poetic-erotic embrace, an identification through which the younger poet has poured new life and voice into the older one. Elytis has even restored the much-fragmented Sappho to her inherent fullness.

The fate of Sappho and her poetry through the ages is well known. The originality she once brought to poetry...