Ten choruses from the “rock”

Coming soon...

‘A man returns to his homeland foreseeing that he will be killed, and he is killed.’ This is how T.S. Eliot summarises the ‘somewhat limited action’ of this play, which he wrote for the Canterbury Festival in June 1935. Murder in the Church is the first complete play that Eliot wrote for the stage. Today, Eliot’s work has been exhaustively analysed; numerous references have been made to Murder in the Church, ranging from Aeschylus to Sherlock Holmes. As was clear from the outset of this note, my aim was not to confuse the reader with such details, which I believe would weigh them down. The work is simple; if articulated correctly and heard correctly, in keeping with its rhythm, it needs no props; it stands on its own. From the foreword by Giorgos Seferis (Athens, July 1963)

-

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is one of the seminal works of modern world poetry. It was published in Greek in 1936, translated by Giorgos Seferis. The definitive edition, edited by Professor G. P. Savvidis, includes the translation of The Waste Land, and three other important poems by T.S. Eliot: “The Hollow Men (1925)”, “Marina (1930)” and “The Difficulties of a Politician (1932)”. The volume is supplemented by extensive prefaces and analytical commentaries by Seferis, which constitute an exemplary “initiation” of the reader into Eliot’s poetics and poetry.

The objective aesthetic value of the Four Quartets is self-evident. In them, the poet summarises the whole of the human adventure and, with a unique ability to delve into it, demonstrates its purpose in an irrefutable manner. The function of the text is unique in its power, unity and variety, in its multifaceted symbolism, its images, metaphors and allegories. The first part of the book presents the four quartets (Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding) in the original and in Greek. The second part includes an extensive interpretative essay by the translator and a bibliography of T.S. Eliot.