His real name was Georgios Seferiadis.
He was born in Smyrna on February 29, 1900, and was the firstborn son of Stelios and Despo (née G. Tenekidis) Seferiadis. Before his birth, another little girl, Maria-Ioanna, had been born on January 16, 1899, but she died on May 7 of the same year. In 1902 his sister Ioanna was born—later the wife of Konstantinos Tsatsos—and in 1905 his brother Angelos.
In 1906 he began his schooling at the Ch. Aronís Lyceum. In 1914, the year in which he started writing his first verses, and with the outbreak of the Great War during the summer, the family migrated to Greece. Giorgos Seferis enrolled in the Model Classical Gymnasium of Athens, from which he graduated in May 1917 with an average grade of 8.35/10. He then enrolled in the Law School of the University of Athens.
On July 14, 1918, his mother, together with her two sons and her daughter Ioanna (later the wife of Konstantinos Tsatsos), went to Paris, where their father Stelios was working as a lawyer. Stelios Seferiadis wished for the entire family to settle in Paris and for his son Giorgos to pursue his studies in the French capital. Giorgos Seferis remained there until the summer of 1924, engaging intensely with literature—translations, readings of French classics, and the writing of poetry—and obtained his law degree in October 1921.
At the end of August 1924, he moved to London to improve his English in preparation for examinations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although he attempted to pursue a doctoral degree, he ultimately abandoned the effort. In February 1925 he returned to Athens, and in 1927 he was appointed to the diplomatic service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an embassy attaché.
On August 24, 1926, his mother died of renal failure. In July 1928, under his real name G. Seferiadis, he published in Nea Estia the text “An Evening with Monsieur Teste,” a translation of a work by Paul Valéry. In 1929 he accompanied Édouard Herriot on his trip to Greece.
In May 1931, under the pseudonym G. Seferis, Strophe was published, and in the same year he was appointed vice-consul and subsequently head of the Greek General Consulate in London, where he remained until 1934. In May 1932 his work A Night on the Shore was published, and in October The Cistern (I Sterna), dedicated to Giorgos Apostolidis. In 1933 his father, Stelios, was elected rector of the University of Athens and was admitted as a member of the Academy of Athens.
In 1934 Giorgos Seferis returned to Athens, and in January 1935 he began his collaboration with the journal Nea Grammata, republishing The Cistern. In October 1936 he was appointed consul in Korçë, where he remained until October 1937, when he was transferred to Athens as head of the Directorate of Foreign Press of the Undersecretariat of Press and Information. He himself denied involvement in issues of domestic press censorship; his responsibilities mainly concerned relations with foreign diplomatic missions and foreign correspondents.
On February 13, 1937, he published in Nea Grammata a letter concerning the use of the demotic (vernacular) Greek language.
The Transition to Africa and the Middle East
On April 10, 1941, Giorgos Seferis married Maria Zannou, and on April 22 the couple followed the Greek government into exile. They were stationed in Crete, in Chania, where Seferis worked as secretary to Nikolaoudis and supervised the publication of the first issue of the Government Gazette after the departure of the Greek government from mainland Greece.
On May 16 he arrived in Egypt, at the port of Port Said, and remained in Alexandria. In August, Giorgos Seferis accompanied Crown Princess Frederica and her two children, Sophia and Constantine, to Johannesburg and from there to Pretoria, serving at the Greek Embassy there until 1942. In April 1942 they returned to Cairo, but when the decision was made to close the Greek Embassy in Cairo and the Greek Consulate in Alexandria, they departed for Jerusalem. He returned to Cairo in June 1942, and on September 22 he was officially appointed Director General of Press for the Middle East.
On March 10, 1943, he delivered a lecture on Kostis Palamas, followed by two more lectures on Ioannis Makriyannis—on May 16 at the Rialto Cinema in Alexandria and later in Cairo. At the end of March 1944, he published his Essays (Dokimes) in Cairo. During the same period, he was appointed Director of Press at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position whose duties did not particularly appeal to him.
With the assumption of the premiership by Georgios Papandreou in April 1944, Seferis was removed from the Press Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He attributed his dismissal to high-ranking individuals who had been among the audience at his lectures on Makriyannis and who disagreed with the views he expressed there. Nevertheless, he remained in the service of the ministry as a senior public official. With the appointment of Georgios Kartalis as Minister of Press and Information in June 1944, Seferis was placed in the position of secretary for Eastern affairs, according to the description used by his political superior.
From the Liberation to His Appointment to the Greek Embassy in London
In early September 1944, Giorgos Seferis accompanied the Greek government to Italy (Naples), and on October 22 he returned to Athens. In May 1945, the Regent Damaskinos proposed that he assume the position of Director of his Political Office, essentially serving as his personal secretary. Seferis did not seek this post and was rather hoping for his retirement from service. In September 1945, he accompanied Damaskinos on a visit to London and urged him to raise the issue of the union of Cyprus with Greece. His return was linked to Seferis’s encouragement of Damaskinos to assume the office of Prime Minister.
In the summer of 1946, his professional promotion was obstructed, due—as noted by Alexandros Xydis—to his service under the Regency, as well as his service in the Middle East. During the same period, he was appointed to the administrative boards of the National Theatre and the National Radio Foundation. In September of that year, he resigned from service to the Regency.
On February 26, 1947, he was awarded the Palamas Prize for his poetry—the first such award ever bestowed—accompanied by the sum of one million drachmas. In the summer of 1947, his professional advancement was again impeded, until the Greek ambassador to Ankara requested that Seferis be transferred there as an adviser. After undergoing surgery, he departed in February 1948.
In the summer of 1950, Ikaros published his collected poems. At the end of December 1950, he returned to Athens; in March 1951 he went back to Ankara to hand over his duties to his successor, and on April 20, 1951, he was appointed Counsellor at the Greek Embassy in London. At the end of August 1952, he was promoted to Minister Plenipotentiary, Second Class, with immediate transfer to Beirut, where he arrived at the end of December of the same year.
In November 1955, he was in Athens on official business and suffered from a stomach ulcer, an illness that would recur later in his life. Seferis sought a transfer to London in order to better serve, from his position, the Cyprus issue. Eventually, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Evangelos Averoff-Tositsas, appointed him Director at the Ministry with responsibility for Cyprus in June 1956. From November of that same year, he participated in the Greek delegation seeking to promote Cyprus’s right to self-determination through the United Nations.
On June 15, 1957, he arrived in the British capital to assume his duties as Ambassador of Greece. The Foreign Office commented on the change in the Greek diplomatic post in London, stating that the change of ambassador “cannot be pleasing to us,” while the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Sir Frederick Hoyer-Millar, remarked: “[…] Mr. Seferiadis will likely be rather troublesome […]”.
In the spring of 1960, Seferis secured the repatriation to Greece of the remains of Andreas Kalvos. In the autumn of the same year, he met Mikis Theodorakis in London, and shortly thereafter the first public performance of four of his poems set to music took place, under the general title Epiphany (Epifaneia).
On June 9, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in Philology by the University of Cambridge. At that time, Seferis was still serving as Ambassador in London. His diaries, entitled Days (Meres), which he had begun writing in 1925, came to an end on Tuesday, December 27, 1960 (Days VI). That same year, he wrote about Andreas Kalvos (Essays, second volume) on the occasion of the transfer of Kalvos’s remains to Athens.
On August 20, 1962, he definitively left the Greek Embassy in London and was placed at the disposal of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
According to the testimony of Konstantinos Tsatsos, members of the Academy of Athens—Elias Venezis, Konstantinos Triantafyllopoulos, and Christos Karouzos—had proposed the Nobel Prize–winning poet as a candidate member of the Academy and asked him not to refuse his election. However, again according to Tsatsos, “people of the Lambrakis Group” and his wife since 1941, Maro (1898–March 29, 2000)—“all enemies of the Academy”—pressured him not to accept membership.
The Awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature
In 1963, Giorgos Seferis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The announcement of the award was made on Thursday, October 24, while the official ceremony took place on December 10 in Stockholm.
According to the committee’s archives, Seferis was officially nominated in 1963 by the writer and member of the Swedish Academy, Eyvind Johnson, while he had been nominated three additional times (in 1955, 1961, and 1962). In 1961 he was nominated by the poet T. S. Eliot, and in 1962 he was nominated both by E. Johnson and by Konstantinos Trypanis, Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Oxford. His selection, among 80 candidates from around the world, was supported by all members of the Committee, with the exception of one member who believed that the work of Samuel Beckett (who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969) deserved a more positive evaluation than that of Seferis. The secretary of the committee, Österlund, argued that the choice of Seferis represented an opportunity to pay a splendid tribute to modern Greece, a linguistic and cultural area that had waited a very long time for recognition at this level.
At the moment when your King, His Majesty Gustaf VI Adolf, handed me the Nobel diploma, I could not help but recall with emotion the days when, as Crown Prince, he had personally insisted on contributing to the excavations of the acropolis of Asine. When I first met Axel Persson, that generous man who had also devoted himself to this excavation, I called him my godfather. Yes, because Asine had given me a poem…
The King of Asine was the poem to which Giorgos Seferis referred during that celebratory ceremony for Greece on December 10, 1963. The subject he developed, in the French language, at the Swedish Academy was entitled “a few words on modern Greek tradition.” The now Nobel laureate poet spoke of the “many faces of Greece,” choosing as his “milestones” Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Kalvos, Kostis Palamas, Constantine Cavafy, and Ioannis Makrygiannis.
I spoke to you about these people because their shadows have never ceased to accompany me since the moment I began my journey to Sweden, and because their efforts represent, in my mind, the movements of a body chained for centuries, which, when at last its bonds are broken, feels its way forward, comes back to life, and seeks its natural movements…
The awarding of the Nobel Prize constituted a major event for Greece. “The Swedish Academy wished to express its solidarity with today’s living, spiritual Greece,” Seferis declared. “He was chosen for his superb lyrical style, inspired by a profound feeling for the Greek cultural ideal,” announced the Swedish Academy. The international press concurred, describing the selection as “excellent and outstanding.”
After the Nobel Prize
On April 16, 1964, Giorgos Seferis was proclaimed an honorary doctor of the University of Thessaloniki. In the summer of the same year, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Oxford, and in June 1965 he became an honorary doctor of Princeton University.
In 1967, the dictatorship of the colonels overthrew the Constitution in Greece, suspending individual freedoms. In September 1965, Seferis declined an offer from the University of Illinois to teach there the following year as a visiting professor. In July 1967, he wrote the preface to the publication of the poems of his brother Angelos. In November of the same year, he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and accepted. He was also invited to teach at the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard for the academic year 1969–1970, but he declined in an official letter to the university’s president—an act that constituted his first open statement against the regime.
In 1968, left-wing figures approached him seeking his support. Mikis Theodorakis asked him to contribute to the public performance of his own poems set to music, but Seferis considered this futile. He was also asked to intervene so that Yiannis Ritsos could undergo surgery. In the autumn of 1968, he traveled to the United States and read his poems at Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, and Washington universities, as well as at the YMCA in New York.
On March 28, 1969, Seferis spoke publicly for the first time against the Junta. His statement was broadcast by the Greek Service of the BBC, Radio Paris, and Deutsche Welle. As a result, he was stripped of the honorary title of ambassador and of his right to use a diplomatic passport. In a three-page letter from Pipinelis to Seferis, this decision was justified on the grounds that his statement had been broadcast by Soviet radio and was therefore considered anti-national propaganda.
In July 1970, Eighteen Texts was published, including, as its first piece, Seferis’s poem The Cats of Saint Nicholas. On July 22, 1971, he was admitted to Evangelismos Hospital with symptoms of an ulcer, which had troubled him for the previous fifteen years. He died on Monday, September 20 of that year. Two days later, his funeral took place and developed into a silent procession against the dictatorship. After his death, his personal diary, entitled Days…, as well as his Political Diary, were published.
Seferis’s language is dense and incisive, condensing in his poetry what he himself succinctly called the “anguish of Romiosyne.” A living, indigenous tradition walks hand in hand with modern European education. In his poetic, essayistic, and translational work, modern Greek literature recognizes in him one of the great classics of the twentieth century.
Poetry Collections
• Strophe, Estia, Athens, 1931
• On a Foreign Line, Estia, Athens, 1931
• The Cistern, Estia, Athens, 1932
• Sketches in the Margin, offprint from Ta Nea Grammata, Athens, 1935
• Mythistorema (Novel), Kastalia, Athens, 1935
• Gymnopaedia, offprint from Ta Nea Grammata, Athens, 1936
• Notebook of Exercises (1928–1937), Tarousopoulos Press, Athens, 1940
• Logbook I, Tarousopoulos Press, Athens, 1940
• Logbook II, private edition, Alexandria, 1944
• Logbook II, Ikaros, Athens, 1945
• Last Station, offprint from To Tetradio, 1947
• Thrush, Ikaros, Athens, 1947
• Logbook III (under the title Cyprus, Where It Was Appointed for Me), Ikaros, Athens, 1955
• Three Secret Poems, French Institute Press, Athens, 1966
• Notebook of Exercises II, Ikaros, 1976 (posthumous edition)
• On Aspalathoi…, Le Monde, Athens, 1971 (posthumous edition)
Novels
• Six Nights on the Acropolis, Ermis, Athens, 1974 (posthumous edition)
• Varnavas Kalostefanos, MIET, Athens, 2007 (posthumous, unfinished)
Essays
• Essays, Giouli Press, Cairo, 1944
• Essays, Fexis, Athens, 1962
• Selections from the Essays, Galaxias, Athens, 1966
• Essays, Ikaros, Athens, 1992 (posthumous edition)
Translations
• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, Ikaros, Athens, 1949
• T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, Ikaros, Athens, 1963
• Transcriptions, Ikaros, Athens, 1965
• The Song of Songs, n.p., Athens, 1965
• The Revelation of John, Ikaros, Athens, 1966
Correspondence
• George Seferis – Philip Sherrard, This Dialectic of Blood and Light: An Exchange, 1947–1971, Denise Harvey, 2015
Translations of His Works into Other Languages
• Yorgos Seferis, Seferis Íntegro (Συνολικός Σεφέρης), Spanish translation by Miguel Castillo Didier, Ediciones Tajamar, Santiago de Chile, 2016
BIOGRAPHIES
