A Levant Journal

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Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, poet, essayist, diarist, and diplomat George Seferis stands as one of the giants of twentieth-century literature. His poetry has long been recognized for its lyric purity, its charged sense of history, and its economy. His no-less marvelous prose extends his preoccupation with tradition into a more daily register, and his journals, in particular, graph the meeting of the poet’s sensibility and the landscape where present confronts past.

A Levant Journal offers selections from the notebooks Seferis kept during his diplomatic postings in the region. Covering the years 1941-44 and 1953-56, they record his detailed impressions of Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Cyprus, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, and various other sites he visited while working there. With characteristic vividness and concision, Seferis reflects both on what he sees and what lies behind (and ahead of) the visible, as the journals include superb passages of travel writing and meditations on the Levant’s Hellenistic legacy, the holy sites of the region, the history of prominent British women travelers to the area, the future of British imperialism, and of course the turbulent politics of his day. As such, the journals move between private and public dimensions of the poet’s life and provide an intimate look into Seferis’s world.

Winner of the 2008 TLS-Hellenic Foundation for Culture Translation Prize.