The celebrated modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos follows such distinguished predecessors as C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis in a dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The shorter poems gathered in this volume present what Ritsos calls "simple things" that turn out not to be simple at all. Here we find a world of subtle nuances, in which everyday events hide much that is threatening, oppressive, and spiritually vacuous--but the poems also provide lyrical and idyllic interludes, along with cunning re-creations of Greek mythology and history. This collection of Ritsos's work--perhaps most of all those poems written while he was in forced exile under the dictatorship of the Colonels--testifies to his just place among the major European poets of this century. The distinguished translator of modern Greek poetry Edmund Keeley has chosen for this anthology selections from seven of Ritsos's volumes of shorter poems written between 1946 and 1975. Two of these volumes are represented here in English versions for the first time, two others have been translated only sporadically, and the remaining three were first published in a bilingual edition now out of print (Ritsos in Parentheses). The collection thus covers thirty years of a poetic career that is the most prolific, and among the most honored, in Greece's modern history.

Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses

Literature & Fiction

Keeley, Edmund

Yannis Ritsos

Poetry

Princeton University Press

In Greece, more than most places, past and present, living and dead, have always coexisted: against the backdrop of that spare, harsh, beautiful limestone landscape, ideas and heroes have battled through the centuries. Homer and Makriyannis tell the same story. Those who fought for freedom against a Persian invasion share voices and profiles with the anti-Nazi guerrillas of World War II - not to mention their common habit of internecine stasis, civil war. Feuds and vendettas, the endless remembrance of ancient wrongs, run unbroken from the doomed house of Atreus to the bloody political infighting that still surfaces today. Ghosts crowd the islands; Trojans and Turks are indistinguishable. All this is the fabric of the poetry of Yannis Ritsos. In the dramatic monologues that make up "The Fourth Dimension" - especially those based on the grim history of Mycenae and its royal protagonists: Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia - Ritsos presents a timeless poetic paradigm of the condition of Greece. These soliloquies (the speakers also include Ajax, Persephone, Helen and Phaedra) move effortlessly between mythic and modern realities, haunting yet immediate. The volume also contains a group of modern narratives, including the famous and much-anthologized 'Moonlight Sonata'. Ritsos regarded "The Fourth Dimension", rightly, as his finest achievement. Much of it previously untranslated, it is now presented to English-speaking readers for the first time in its entirety: the major work that demonstrates his status as one of the greatest poets of this century.

The Fourth Dimension

History & Criticism

Anvil Press Poetry

The last poems of this 20th-century Greek master are tinged with sadness and loss, but they also, in their candidly poetic reporting of the life and world around him, hum with vitality and an odd note of hope. Ritsos felt defeated in his own health and politics, but as a poet he experienced a surge of creativity that is fascinating to follow in its chronology and exactitude.

Late into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos

Oberlin College Press

The House Vacated

Parentheses Writing Series

Yannis Ritsos was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, like Neruda, his poems are saturated with a majestic political vision blended with great lyric sensitivity. His short poems are intensely meditative and introspective while his longer poems encompass the grand sweep of history. His poetry is deeply grounded in the Greek landscape and in life of its people. He was deeply influenced by his mother's and his brother's early deaths, by the misfortune of his early life, his own uprootedness and the severe poverty which afflicted Greece. The poetry is driven by a transcendent sensuousness and muted anger. It ranges from the sublime to the ordinary, from the mythic to the modern, from the overtly political to the deeply personal. Presented with the Greek en face, the poems affirm Ritsos's reputation as one of the truly important poets in the modern literature of Greece. This bilingual edition offers a sweeping assessment of his enduring achievement.

Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems

Manolis (translator)

Ekstasis Editions

In this amazing collection, Manolis introduces us to the life work of Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos. This translated collection paints the poetry of a man's life and as such it captures the great magnitude of that life lived. From the sea-soaked childhood through the impatient adventures of a naïve summer youth and shattered innocence. The reader can follow the poet, Ritsos, through the heartache of life to experience the shifting of his voice into a maturity that is cynical and painful but edged with truth. And all is enveloped in the metaphor of nature, upon the backdrop of a Greece, painted in white and pastel and gold, tastes and textures exotic and foreign but beautiful and real.  Ritsos writes of seasons shifting to reflect a coming darkness. The bitter desolation that is war. Hard, sharp, hostile words that paint a time too painful to remember and yet which must be written.  Ritsos writes about life and in this collection, spanning so many years, the reader is gifted with the true sense of a life experienced. One is able to see a poet play with form and style to reflect an abundance of shifting moods and experiences, each poem telling its own story but also echoing the larger story of life. Each poem is a snapshot of a place in time, of a moment in a life, of a story being told. The reader is invited to browse through a truly amazing anthology of observations, both personal and public. This collection reflects a depth and vastness that must be savoured and digested, revisited and reviewed. --Cathi Shaw, Ph.D., Communications Instructor, Okanagan CollegeWe should be grateful to Manolis for hauling this horn o' plenty to Canada. He doggedly traces the manifold styles and voices of the remarkable Ritsos, who is at times like Rilke, in his sweeping metaphors and comprehension of the human heart; at times Lorca, with his visionary surrealism: hand mirrors, shadows, statues descending their plinths; and at times Kay Ryan, with lyrics so fragile that they might crumble if touched. Yet Ritsos is always Ritsos. He suffered much personal and public violence, in the autocratic Greece of the 20th century, but his poems resist judgment. They flower with the force of humility and pathos. We readers are his brothers and children and comrades, under the hot sun which is and is not a god, beside the "endless sea." Love trumps Death. Every object is awake. "Every hour is our hour." --John Wall Barger, author of Pain-Proof Men, Lecturer at St. Mary's University Pantelis Prevelakis writes: "Ritsos' breath raises a wind in which wafted and swirled flakes from the crust of our land, seeds of its vegetation and sparks of its sky. Without Ritsos' eloquence, Greeks would have forgotten how to name a major part of all those things that are there before their eyes and restoration of his work to its totality is an imperative duty to the Greek nation itself, which deserves to regain its unity after nearly forty years of strife" Chrysa Prokopaki writes: "Myth in Ritsos' works on three main levels reflecting the historical background, personal memory and contemporary social problems. Due to the symbolic weight that the myth carries, it enriches the psychological truth of the real-life persons that the poet carries within, as he also carries the emotional weight of a childhood destined to crumble under disease, disaster and grief."

Yannis Ritsos – Poems

Libros Libertad

Poetry. Translated from the Greek by Martin McKinsey and Scott King. Bilingual Edition. Written in 1949 while Ritsos was detained on the Greek prison isle of Makronisos, the poems in PETRIFIED TIME (translated in its entirety and printed with the Greek en face) document this harrowing time in the poet's life. As Martin McKinsey states in his introduction to this collection, "Aside from their documentary interest, what makes them worth reading is their luminous imagery, drawing on the Greek oral tradition of fairytales and folksongs (especially Klephtic ballads), and the controlled power of their free-verse idiom. Their purposefulness should also serve as a reminder of what it means for an artist to step out of him or herself, and conceive of an art that is not simply a record or critique of what is, but a shaper of what will be."

Petrified Time: Poems from Makronisos

Red Dragonfly Press

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Books by Yannis Ritsos