Yannis Ritsos

Yannis Ritsos (1909–90) is generally considered to be – along with Cavafy, Seferis and Elytis – one of the most significant Greek poets of the last century. His life was, to say the least, troubled. From an early age, he was dogged by the tuberculosis that killed his mother and brother. His father and sister suffered breakdowns and spent time in institutions. His poem Epitaphios (1936), a lament for a young man shot dead by the police during a tobacco workers’ strike, was publicly burned by the Metaxas regime and his books banned. During the post-World War Two civil war – because he sided with the left – Ritsos was arrested and sent to prison camps. Then, in 1967, when the Papadopoulos military junta took control of the country, he was again arrested, again his books were banned, again he spent time in prison camps, before being confined to house arrest on the island of Samos. The violence and tyranny of dictatorship is often fractured by the surreal. In the poems collected here, written by Ritsos while in prison and under house arrest, that fracture in perception is a wound. A Broken Man in Flower has an introduction by John Kittmer and includes the text of an illuminating and vivid letter sent by Ritsos to his publisher in 1969 while under house arrest on Samos describing his life – and the lives of Greeks – under the repressive rule of the Colonels. David Harsent’s thirteen collections have won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Griffin International Prize. He is also a librettist: his collaborations with composers, chiefly with Harrison Birtwistle, have been performed at major venues worldwide.

Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, Academy of American Poets A bilingual edition of three major poetry collections by one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth century One of the most prolific and popular of modern Greek poets, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos’s poetry translated here—Parentheses, 1946–47, Parentheses, 1950–61, and The Distant—document a three-decade poetic journey that reveals the evolution of the poet’s sensibility. This bilingual edition also features an insightful introduction from translator Edmund Keeley, whom Paul Muldoon has called “the gold standard in translators of Greek poetry.”

La colecci n «Poes a port til re ne en esta antolog a los versos m s representativos de Yannis Ritsos, uno de los poetas griegos m s importantes del siglo XX. «Portentoso creador de im genes, su verso revela siempre las ra ces del dolor, acaso para conjurarlo . --Jordi Llavina, La Vanguardia Yannis Ritsos es uno de los grandes poetas griegos del siglo XX y una de las mejores voces de la poes a europea. Con una delicadeza excepcional, su lirismo se imbuye del pathos griego, y en sus versos, cargados de simbolismo, se hallan huellas del firme compromiso pol tico fruto de sus a os militando en el Partido Comunista. Violeta Gil, autora de Llego con tres heridas, nos ofrece en esta hermosa selecci n unos de los versos m s emblem ticos del poeta heleno. «Partiendo en dos la pena, igual que part an sobre la rodilla su pan de cebada . ENGLISH DESCRIPTION In this anthology, the "Flash Poetry" series collects the most emblematic verses by Yannis Ritsos, one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth century. Yannis Ritsos is one of the greatest Greek poets of the twentieth century and one of the greatest voices in European poetry. With exceptional gentleness, his lyricism is imbued with Greek pathos, and in his verses, charged with symbolism, we find traces of his firm political commitment, fruit of his active years within the Communist Party. Violeta Gil, author of Lleg con tres heridas, shares some of the most iconic verses of the Hellenic poet in this beautiful selection. "Splitting sorrow in two, same as they did their barely bread over their knee."

Returning to the island of Samos during the summer of 1979, where he had spent long periods of exile throughout his life, Greek poet Yannis Ritsos composed a remarkable collection of 336 single-line poems, written at a rate of about 10 a day: the Monochords, each line an essential observation of a moment; a personal archive of time past, present and future.In London in 2020, during a period of Covid confinement, artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio began responding to Ritsos’ words through linocut images: an experiment in entering the space opened by each poem, rendering it in line and shape; a daily ritual that accompanied her along a strange year of exile from life.'Yannis Ritsos composed monochorda, single-line poems, as antidotes to the concocted complexities silencing truth. Chiara Ambrosio’s linocuts, beautifully intermingled with Ritsos' words, add their own ascetic harmony to his monochorda thus boosting their pertinence to our dissonant age.' – Yanis Varoufakis'This meditative book is an inspiring act of repair twice over, for ordeals of seclusion, threat, and tedium past and present.' – Marina Warner'A major poem by one of the greatest European poets of the past 100 years, in an exemplary translation & with a further superb expansion into a year's journey of linocuts make this book a vessel that holds urgently needed communal life-force.' - Stephen Watts

The first half of the book is devoted to the poetry of Yannis Ritsos and includes several of his longer poems in their entirety. In the second half are selections of mainly shorter by poems by the other five poets, although it includes Gatsos' long poem "Amorgos".

Second Edition - 2018In 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 na ve 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

Perhaps Greece's most important poet, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos's poetry translated here--Parentheses, 1946-47, Parentheses, 1950-61, and The Distant, 1975--represent a thirty year poetic journey and a developing sensibility that link the poet's subtler perceptions at different moments of his maturity. In his introduction to the poems, and as an explanation of the book's title, Edmund Keeley writes: "The two signs of the parenthesis are like cupped hands facing each other across a distance, hands that are straining to come together, to achieve a meeting that would serve to reaffirm human contact between isolated presences; but though there are obvious gestures toward closing the gap between the hands, the gestures seem inevitably to fail, and the meeting never quite occurs." In terms of the development of Ritsos's poetic vision, the distance within the parenthesis is shorter in each of the two earlier volumes than in the most recent volume. There the space has become almost infinite, yet Ritsos's powerfully evocative if stark landscape reveals a stylistic purity that is the latest mark of his greatness. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Perhaps Greece's most important poet, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos's poetry translated here--Parentheses, 1946-47, Parentheses, 1950-61, and The Distant, 1975--represent a thirty year poetic journey and a developing sensibility that link the poet's subtler perceptions at different moments of his maturity. In his introduction to the poems, and as an explanation of the book's title, Edmund Keeley writes: "The two signs of the parenthesis are like cupped hands facing each other across a distance, hands that are straining to come together, to achieve a meeting that would serve to reaffirm human contact between isolated presences; but though there are obvious gestures toward closing the gap between the hands, the gestures seem inevitably to fail, and the meeting never quite occurs." In terms of the development of Ritsos's poetic vision, the distance within the parenthesis is shorter in each of the two earlier volumes than in the most recent volume. There the space has become almost infinite, yet Ritsos's powerfully evocative if stark landscape reveals a stylistic purity that is the latest mark of his greatness. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Without Ritsos' eloquence, Greeks would have forgotten how to name all those things that are there before their eyes."--Pantelis PrevelakisThis long poem is a nuanced and moving account of the poet's time in exile, in which everyday events hide much that is threatening, oppressive, and spiritually vacuous. Lyrical and idyllic, these re-creations of Greek mythology justify Yannis Ritsos' reputation as one of the most honored in modern Greece.Plagued by tuberculosis, family misfortunes, and persecution for his Communist views, Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) spent many years in sanatoriums, prisons, and in political exile while producing over one hundred volumes of poems, dramas, and translations.

Winner Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Winter 2012. Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him 'the greatest poet of our age'. He wrote in the face of ill-health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime's work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry. The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos's epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos's short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but, at the same time, freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given - the scene-settings, the tiny psychodramas - have an irresistible potency.

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.

In the dramatic monologues that make up The Fourth Dimension--especially those based on the grim history of Mycenae and its royal protagonists--the celebrated modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos presents a timeless poetic paradigm of the condition of Greece, past and present. The volume also contains a group of modern narratives, including the famous, and much-anthologized, "Moonlight Sonata." Ritsos, rightly, regarded the The Fourth Dimension as his finest achievement. It is now presented to English- speaking readers for the first time in its entirety. From "Philoctetes" All the speeches of great men, about the dead and about heroes. Astonishing, awesome words, pursued us even in our sleep, slipping beneath closed doors, from the banqueting hallwhere glasses and voices sparkled, and the veilof an unseen dancer rippled silentlylike a diaphanous, whirling wallbetween life and death. This throbbingour childhood nights, lightening the shadows of shieldsetched on white walls by slow moonlight.

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.

1991 Outstanding Academic Book of the Year--Choice. "Friar and Mysiades deserve much credit for providing, in one volume, the first full-range sampling of this fecund, variegated, and highly original poet in English."--The New Republic