Yannis Ritsos – författare

A collection of poems that present what the author calls "simple things" that turn out not to be simple at all. It presents a world of subtle nuances, in which everyday events hide much that is threatening, oppressive, and spiritually vacuous.

Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, Academy of American PoetsA bilingual edition of three major poetry collections by one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth centuryOne 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.”

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.

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".

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.

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

While many serious readers in Canada will have been exposed to the ancients, and to the works of some, high-profile modernists-like Cavafy, Seferis and, perhaps, even Ritsos -most modern Greek poetry has remained largely out of reach for English-speaking monoglots. But that is changing quickly, chiefly as the result of the efforts of one man.Enter Manolis Aligizakis, a Greek-Canadian poet of considerable lyrical achievements of his own. Quite apart from having published many volumes of his own much-celebrated poems, Manolis has, for years now, devoted himself to preparing high-quality and nuanced translations of the works of modern Greek poets. He has to this point given us his take mainly on the above-mentioned and better-known writers (for which we are all grateful).Now, however, he has graduated to a truly Heraclean undertaking, one that opens the door for English-speaking readers to the work of many highly respected Greek poets who, it is to be regretted, are essentially unknown outside their own country. Neo-Hellene Poets: An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry, 1750-2018 is a skeleton key to the poems of 60 Greek moderns whose writings, we can now easily see, deserve a wider readership. The deft and skilled translations that make up the Anthology are helpfully supplemented by brief but informative biographical profiles of the subject poets, putting them on the map for Englishspeaking readers in a way that has never been done before.