The Fourth Dimension: Selected Poems of Yannis Ritsos. Boston. 1977. David Godine. 0879231815. Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven. 157 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - None would dispute that Yannis Ritsos is the finest living Greek poet. Peter Levi in the Times Literary Supplement calls him ‘one of the greatest poets now living.' The author of innumerable volumes of poetry, he has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize; like Theodorakis, who has set many of his poems to music, he has become a cultural hero in Greece; and his poems are available in translation throughout Europe. Yet no comprehensive collection of his work has before now been published in the United States. The Fourth Dimension, translated by Rae Dalven, contains a generous selection that spans forty years of Ritsos's work, including both his terse but lyrical short poems and the rhapsodic long poems that are his greatest achievement. Ritsos, now in his sixties, has always been a champion of liberty and consequently has spent much of his life in exile or in prison. From the suffering endured for his beliefs, he has wrought remarkable political poetry - not so much in its espousal of particular ideology as in its celebration of human freedom and the independence of the Greek people. Like his great predecessors Cavafy and Seferis, Ritsos is an unmistakable voice. Observing the world around him, he makes connections between the most commonplace acts and the context in which they occur. He sees both the trees and the forest. With his capacity for detailed observation, the diversity that produces both delicate lyrics and grand dramatic monologues, the political passion of his prison poems, and his identification with the common man, Ritsos is a major poet whose work cannot be ignored by anyone seriously interested in contemporary literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yiannis (or Yannis) Ritsos (1 May 1909 - 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and eldest brother from tuberculosis, his father's struggles with a mental disease, and the economic ruin his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos himself was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931. In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractorin 1934. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair. The landmark poem Epitaphios, published in 1936, broke with the shape of Greek traditional popular poetry and expressed in clear and simple language a message of the unity of all people. In August 1936, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power and Epitaphios was burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. Ritsos responded by taking his work in a different direction: he began to explore the conquests of surrealism through the domain of dreams, surprising associations, explosions of images and symbols, a lyricism illustrative of the anguish of the poet, and both tender and bitter souvenirs. During this period Ritsos published The Song of my Sister (1937) and Symphony of the Spring (1938). During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) Ritsos became a member of the EAM (National Liberation Front) and authored several poems for the Greek Resistance. These include a booklet of poems dedicated to the resistance leader Aris Velouchiotis, written immediately upon the latter's death on 16 June 1945. Ritsos also supported the Left in the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949); in 1948 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps. In the 1950s 'Epitaphios', set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, became the anthem of the Greek Left. In 1967 he was arrested by the Papadopoulos dictatorship and sent to a prison camp in Gyaros. Today, Ritsos is considered one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century, together with Konstantinos Kavafis, Kostas Kariotakis, Giorgos Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age." He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as the Stalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared "this prize is more important for me than the Nobel." His poetry was banned at times in Greece due to his left wing beliefs. Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953).
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