[...] Mikra Syrtis is a rare book. Thanks to the willingness and love of friends, you can only find it. Since its printing in 1955 until today, few words have been spoken about it by select individuals. Surprisingly, Seferis believes that "the rhythm falters, or the pressure is not strong enough. "Maybe I am not the right recipient," he adds. (Seferis will explain this attitude in another letter to G.P. Savvidis.) Savvidis, Triantafyllopoulos, and Daskalopoulos are amazed at the book's neglect. However, we should look at the era of "interesting, full of strange attempts, adventures, and conflicts; conflicts not only, as before, between virtues and vices, but - and this is the most tragic - between the virtues themselves.

What did Mikra Syrtis do to be overlooked? The virtues of other genres of poetry that were being written at that time. And what sets it apart from them? The fact that it does not have their legitimacy. Symbolic poetry, it condenses the cores around which the individual visions of defeat poetry revolve and takes on their meaning. It reminds us of what they chose to forget: a cosmological sensibility, a prophetic language, an expressiveness rooted in its own place. Lorenzato remembered when poets like Giannis Ritsos, Manolis Anagnostakis, and Aris Alexandrou forgot and celebrated their presence. And as we know, memory requires generosity and despair and indifference, in order to be able to restore the ruins without falling into self-indulgent nostalgia or the pleasure of destruction. "Mikra Syrtis" is the first, essentially generous effort of post-war man to gather whatever could be saved.

Because the war did not only destroy a world, with its moral and aesthetic embrace. It annihilated the mental reserves of people, dried up their ambitions. The civilization of the one-dimensional man. The fragmentation of intellectual beauty. Sicilian had already seen it:

Behind you, the world burns like Troy,
and its fire shines in the depths
of the past, like the windows shining with the sunset
of a city in flames and suddenly,
they sink into twilight. [...]

(from the book's text)