writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

duty to preserve this in our memory.
Moreover, the position in which I chanced to be at that time gave me the opportunity
to know the spirit and the deeds of some exceptional men and women, superb in their
heroism. I considered it my obligation to commemorate all that I had witnessed of their
lives so that they should stand as lessons and examples in times when national ideals may
not hold the dominant place they then had.
I hope I shall be forgiven for many omissions and imperfections of various kinds.
I present unaltered a text which is a piece of my life. As I cannot change my life which
is passed, so I could not change these pages, nor did I wish to change them. 11 .
These words lead to the conclusion that the composition of the work responds to her need to find
an escape, a refuge in a highly critical moment of her own life as well as the history of her country.
Thus, although initially the work was purely personal and initiated with the intention of escaping to
the reality and expressing her own feelings, as the work advances, it reveals that the objective to give
evidence of the events consolidates itself. When Ioanna Tsatsos wrote The Sword´s Fierce Edge she
was writing a diary, an intimate document, however, when she published it twenty years later, she
was already publishing a historical document that is intended historicist 12 .
When it was said that the intention of Ioanna Tsatsos is to give evidence of some people that she
considers that should not be forgotten due to their personal or artistic value, we must allude to her
work My brother George Seferis. The death of her brother, the poet George Seferis in 1971 dealt a
hard blow to her, that inspired two of her best works, the poetic collection Elegy and the poet's
biography My brother George Seferis, which is also her own autobiography. The intention of this
work is clearly expressed: «I dedicate these pages to the young people who loved Seferis. Perhaps
they may help in difficult hours of doubt» 13 . What she wants is to present the life of her brother as an
example to young people who may find themselves in a similar situation. Although, in My brother
George Seferis, she does not narrate only a poet's biography and the historical events of those times,
but also her own autobiography. She seems to be completely aware of this, not only because of the
existence of two parallel actions, biography and autobiography, but also because there are many
events that are described in relation to her, that have nothing to do with the poet. They are passages
that could have been elided perfectly without the biography of the poet being altered. Examples of
this constitute a trip she made with her father to the United States, a relationship she had in her
youth or the pages she dedicates to the poet Ánguelos Sikelianos without specifying what relation he
had with her brother. This is due to the desire to make known her own role in the events. Hence, she
is presented to us, first, as the sister of the poet.
Throughout this biography, the author reveals how she supported her brother since she was a
child until one of the last moments of his life, when he was preparing his statement against the
dictatorship and at the moment of his death. This support she offered to her brother is evident either
through the narration or through many passages of the letters that the poet sent to her.
The author has thus presented as one of the few people who understood the poet and as an
intermediary between Seferis and his father, whose relations met some disagreements. A prime
example is when she points out that in the summer of 1921, she persuaded her father to allow her
brother to go to the countryside to prepare quietly his September exams. However, in her
correspondence of those years, she seems to know nothing about this matter. This fact must be
considered as a small alteration of the reality in her favour because of her desire to emphasize her
role as the poet's sister.
Throughout these two works, The Sword´s Fierce Edge and My brother George Seferis, Ioanna
describes in detail her autobiography and she presents her different roles as George Seferis’ sister, as
one of the first students of the Faculty of law, as a mother and as a heroine of the Occupation,
writing about her collaboration with Archbishop Damaskinos and with some resistance groups,
especially with Colonel Dimitrios Psarros’ one, EKKA. This is in relation to Philippe Lejeune’s theory
on «Illusion d´éternité» 14 . At the end of the Occupation, however, a gap is produced and we lost her
trail until 1974.
Similar to My brother George Seferis is the work Poetry and Hades in which she describes her
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