Selected Poems by Yannis Ritsos. Middlesex. 1974. Penguin Books. 014042184x. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Greek by Nikos Stangos. Introduction by Peter Bien. 207 pages. paperback.
DESCRIPTION - Despite his major international reputation as one of Europe's most important poets today, this is the first English translation which attempts a comprehensive presentation of Yannis Ritsos's voluminous work. Both short poems and one long narrative poem have been selected to illustrate dominant features of his poetry - his arresting use of metaphor; his manner of injecting complexity into simple scenes; his remarkable skill of fusing the legendary past of Greece with Greek life today. Together these deceptively simple and very moving poems convey something of the lyric and epic qualities of a great painter in words.
The Penguin Modern European Poets offered a series of collections designed to present, in verse translations, the work of significant poets of the 20th century for readers unfamiliar with the original languages. The series includes: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Prevert, Quasmodo, Greek poets -Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, and Seferis, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gunter Grass, Vasko Popa, Sandor Weores, Ferenc Juhasz, Johannes Bobrowski, Horst Bienek, Eugenio Montale, Vladimir Holan, Anna Akhmatova, Gunnar Ekelof, Paul Celan, Amichai, Kovner, Sachs, Cesare Pavese, the Czech poets, Nezval, Bartusek, and Hanzlik, Ungaretti, Fernando Pessoa, and even Joseph Brodsky.
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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