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.

A Levant Journal offers selections from the notebooks Seferis kept during his diplomatic postings in the 1940s and 50s, and record his detailed impressions of Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Cyprus, Jerusalem, and the Dead Sea. With characteristic vividness and concision, Seferis reflects both on what he sees and what lies behind (and ahead of) the visible. Awarded the TLS-Hellenic Foundation for Culture Translation Prize, the book is edited, translated, and introduced by celebrated Seferis biographer and translator Roderick Beaton. With a new, insightful foreword by poet and translator A. E. Stallings.

“In these intimate writings, Seferis bears witness to our folly with such care and precision that we may begin to understand some of our own mad impulses.”

Christopher Merrill, Wilson Quarterly

“All lovers of Greek literature will want this book.”

Jeffrey Carson, The Athens News

“Seferis describes the difficulties of work and the anxieties of daily life as a diplomat being whisked from post to post to serve in Amman, Cairo, Cyprus, Damascus, Jerusalem…. We see these places as Seferis saw them … and we are touched by his observations.”

Library Journal

“[Seferis] is more Asiatic than any of the Greeks I met…. He is the arbiter and reconciler of conflicting schools of thought and ways of life. He asks innumerable questions in a polyglot language; he is interested in all forms of cultural expression and seeks to abstract and assimilate what is genuine and fecundating in all epochs…. He had a way of looking forwards and backwards, of making the object of his contemplation revolve and show forth its multiple aspects. When he talked about a thing or a person or an experience he caressed it with his tongue.”

Henry Miller

GEORGE SEFERIS was born in Smyrna in 1900 and moved with his family to Athens when he was fourteen. He was appointed to the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1926 and subsequently served in Athens, London, and Albania, before accompanying the Greek government in exile to Crete, Egypt, and South Africa. He was stationed in Cairo from 1942-44 and served as Ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq from 1953-56. His books of poems include Mythistorema (1935), Thrush (1947), and Logbook I, II, III (1940, 1944, 1955). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 and died in Athens 1971.

RODERICK BEATON is emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature, King’s College London. His many books include Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, The Greeks: A Modern Nation,  and, George Seferis, Waiting for the Angel: A Biography, which the New York Times Book Review called “gripping reading … definitive.” His most recent book is Europe: A New History.

A. E. STALLINGS is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Her books include This Afterlife; Like, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Olives, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A MacArthur fellow, she has translated Hesiod and Lucretius, and lives in Athens.

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