Giorgos Seferis

Giorgos or George Seferis (/səˈfɛrɪs/), the pen name of Georgios Seferiades (Γεώργιος Σεφεριάδης;  [O.S. February 29] 1900 – September 20, 1971), was a Greek poet and diplomat. He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and a Nobel laureate. He was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962.

Seferis (1921)

George Seferis in 1963

Quotes

• Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
  • "Greek poet's odyssey", 17 Jan 1964, LIFE Magazine, ‎Vol. 56, No. 3, Page 75.

Quotes about Giorgos Seferis

A Levantine Nobel Prize laureate, Georgis Seferis, a Greek who lived for many years in Egypt, wrote: "And things that came later had the self-same/calmness which you see here,/they had this calmness because no soul/was left to us to think about,/none except the strength to carve some signs in stones/that touched now more deeply, beneath remembrance." Thus wrote Georgis Seferis, a true Levantine.

• • Shulamith Hareven "On Being a Levantine" in The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)

• The focal point of Greek-American cultural interest has definitely shifted in recent decades. Where formerly there was a somewhat affected and strained focus on classical Hellas, the contemporary awareness is much more in tune with the literature of modern Greece. This shift has almost been entirely due to the increasing availability of English translations of modern Greek writings, for not many American-born Greeks comfortably read novels or poetry in the original Greek. The beginnings of the new mood can be traced to the translations of the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis in the 1950s. These also stimulated interest in other Greek writers, notably the poets Constantine P. Cavafy, a product of the Greek diaspora in Alexandria, Egypt, and George Seferis, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1963.
  • Peter C. Moskos, Greek Americans: Struggle and Success (2013)