The motif of travelling in Greek poetry in the interwar period

Auteurs

  • Fotiny Christakoudy-Konstantinidou Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" image/svg+xml

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.60056/CCL.2017..91-98

Mots-clés :

Greek poetry, travelling, Nikos Kavvadias, Constantine Cavafy, Georgios Seferis

Résumé

The cosmopolitan travelling of Greek poetry begins with the emblematic work of Cavafy Ithaka (1910). However ‘travelling’ will vary its meaning in the following decades and will become the turning point for realizing the despair and the irreversible loss of the ideal by the so-called generation of the 1930s whose sense of tragic doom will cement the topos of the ‘lost native land’ in Greek literature. In its wanderings during the interwar period Greek poesy shows us ‘travelling’ (act equal to separation from/acquisition of new space and time) as sadness, but also as an adventure and infinity (N. Kavvadias); as an action, that is pointless (The City, C. Cavafy), and yet obtains absolute dimensions as a bearer of knowledge and wisdom (Ithaka, C. Cavafy), while in the end in G. Seferis’s verses the voyage reaches its total disembodiment, but also its transformation into something new – into an individual/ ancestral memory (obviously the only possible island of salvation), into a transcendent immortality of a universal human consciousness.

Biographie de l'auteur

  • Fotiny Christakoudy-Konstantinidou, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"

    Fotiny Christakoudy-Konstantinido [Фотини Христакуди-Константиниду] is a Senior Assistant Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Sofia St. Kliment Ohridski since 2005 (Department of eneral, Indo-European and Balkan Linguistics, Faculty of Slavic Studies). In 2007 she received a Ph.D. degree with a thesis on the topic of The modern literary movements in Greek poetry (first decades of the 20th c.) developed at the Institute for Balkan Studies. Currently, she has been working on different authors from Greek 20th c. poetry such as Nikos Kavvadias, Kostas Ouranis, Kostas Karyotakis, etc. (or poets from the so-called ‘second symbolist wave’). She has published articles on the work of Greek symbolist poets from the 1890s (K. Hadzopoulos, L. Porfyras, etc.), Odysseas Elytis, the problem of Greek diglossia, presenting also in Greek the poetry of Bulgarian authors such as Nikola Vaptzarov and Valery Petrov.

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Publiée

2025-11-06

Numéro

Vol. 3 (2017)

Rubrique

Pars pro toto. Proceedings of the Literature Session of the 11th CONGRESS OF SOUTH-EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

Licence

Creative Commons License

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Comment citer

The motif of travelling in Greek poetry in the interwar period. (2025). Colloquia Comparativa Litterarum, 3, 91-98. https://doi.org/10.60056/CCL.2017..91-98