Giorgos Seferis as translator of T. S. Eliot

This essay focuses on how stylistic features of different literary traditions can converge in new poetic works through translation. One such example is represented by the Nobel Prize winning Greek poet Giorgos (George) Seferis, who translated many English poets, among them, T. S. Eliot. An interesting aspect of Seferis’s writing is the role played by translation in shaping his literary works. While many critics, such as E. Keeley (1956), G. Peron (1976), N. Vayenas (1989), have explored the similarities of content and rhetorical technique between the two poets, the influence of translation in shaping Seferis’s poetry has been largely ignored. This study addresses that scholarly gap through a comparative analysis of the corpus of Seferis’s translations of Eliot and that of his own poems written in the same period