Just a little more
And we shall see the almond trees in blossom
The marbles shining in the sun
The sea, the curling waves.
Just a little more
Let us rise just a little higher.
--George Seferis
Giorgos (or George) Seferis was a 20th century Greek poet. His real-world name was Georgios Seferiades, and his real world job was as a diplomat. He represented Greece in the UK both in the 1930s and again as Ambassador from 1957 to 1962. In 1936, he translated Eliot's The Waste Land into Greek. As a poet he was considered both a European modernist and a continuation of Greek tradition. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. He died in Athens in 1971.
I've come across him recently as a real-life character in Henry Miller's luminous The Colossus of Maroussi, a book-length account of Miller's months in Greece in 1939 just as World War II was beginning. It was Miller's own favorite of all the books he wrote. Another Greek poet, George Katsimbalis is more prominently featured, but Miller is rhapsodic about Seferis as well.
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