SOURCE: "The Two Voices of Odysseus Elytis," in The Washington Post Book World, September 6, 1981, pp. 8, 14.

In the following review, Economou explores the two narrative voices present in Maria Nephele and compares Elytis's Maria to Dante's Beatrice.

That The Nobel Prize for Literature creates a specialized, sometimes ephemeral, industry for translators and publishers is a fact of modern literary history. It is also true that a good deal of poetry of the 1979 recipient of the prize, the Greek poet Odysseus Elytis, while not popular in this country at that time, was fairly widely translated and available to those who make it their business to know the international literary scene. The publication of an English-language version of his Maria Nephele, therefore, can be as easily regarded as part of a continuity of interest as it can an inevitability in the wake of his award by the Swedish Academy.

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