"A young artist's first fruits ... oozing with creative blood and the delirious fever of a creator's dream ... a poem youthful and sick, beautiful and morbid, moral and immoral." Such was the welcome that Nikos Kazantzakis received from his senior contemporary, poet Kostos Palmas, on the publication in 1906 of *Serpent and Lily,* translated here for the first time.

The novella, Kazantzakis' first published work, tells of an artist whose infatuation with his model becomes a passion and then a torment from which only murder can release him. Three years before its writing Kazantzakis had experienced, as an adolescent in his native Crete, his first taste of sexual love. the memory of his behavior in the affair later filled him with remorse. When he returned to Crete for the final semester of his student years, he poured his remorse into a prose poem shimmering with all the erotic imagery of a resurrected ancient world.

An allegory? Translator-editor Theodora Vasils offers by way of answer Kazantzakis' early untranslated essay "The Sickness of age," published almost simultaneously with *serpent and lily.* In this artistic manifesto, Kazantzakis sees modern man liberated from a repressive religious past into what at first seems a fresh, pagan, animal innocence. And yet there is a flaw in the Liberation. Something still enslaves, and tortures. In the morbid young hero of *Serpent and Lily,* who leads his beloved to his bed over which he has hung a human skull -- an adornment that he views as "the most lascivious ornament for a bed," we see the young Kazantzakis in a devastating first encounter with the artistic questions of his life.