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Yannis Ritsos – Poems

poetry by Yannis Ritsos
translated by Manolis

Preview

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."

Testimonial

One can certainly appreciate Ritso's poetry in terms of the social and cultural referents that weave in and out of his work. But that I fear would display a shallow sense of the poetic landscape he occupied so fully in time and space, and would ultimately reduce the value of his work to one of compensation and mastery. Instead I would focus my attention on the imaginal exploration he conducted, and the poetic voice he adopted which predisposed him to transformative yearnings, and an almost promethean moral burden to rescue life from the regressive miasma thwarting its potential. I doubt very much if Ritsos believed even for an instant that the archaic struggle of man against the forces that subdue him would end in freedom from illusory attachments and entanglements. On the contrary, what he skillfully presents in his work are mediating symbols, incarnating out of the depths of his awareness–diligently crafting a literary isthmus to the heart of his personal truth. Ritsos's life, wrought with imposed detentions, health limitations, and personal tragedies, bears witness to this attitude that paradoxically, is best understood as something yet to be experienced... a future homecoming of sorts. His is the poetry of waiting, and yearning, and finally projecting the heroic Eros of the Greek psyche: the dominant imperative of an unfettered existence at the zero point of man's subjectivity. Such an assertion I'm sure issued out of the odyssey of his life, a life sustained not only by the ancestral hiss of myth and political rationalism, but also by the differentiating activity of consciousness which works, collectively at least, in favour of the soul that still must survive its harness. Indeed, his poems lack the compliance of subjugation and the often wounded indulgence of a narcissistic persona. What they do exhibit however, is the very authentic human endeavour of striving, reaching... imagining, and somehow, against all odds, assimilating the dissonance of an encountered self in the midst of upheaval... and in what he had to intuit as a metaphoric fall from grace despite his religious denouncements. This desire for a unitary reality is the value I see, feel, and admire in his work. Ritsos was a poet who lived in chaotic but exciting times, and like Odysseus, was fated by the gods to take the scenic way home. I am awed by the integrating expanse of his gaze and by the process of his mind that was able to distinguish between reality and its representation... and also... also by the sense-memory in things he projected–things lost–but still things yet to be gained. He was a poet who survived the enchantment of rival impulses, as well as a poet who celebrated the sacred return of the imagination out of the deep ocean that contained him.

Ilya Tourtidis

Excerpt

If

Had you left at the appropriate moment
you wouldn't need so many pretexts later on
so much humiliation and indignity. By the entrance
two pails tipped over, wet shoes
hidden under the bed, ashes
glasses, mourning announcements. You never learned later on
the purpose and what was the difference. Searching
you postponed, you always postponed. Perhaps
even that was one way, like the cigarettes,
like the glance behind the curtain at the time
three naked women multiplied in the sky
with their white arms behind their hair–
and you carry on staying here
between two completely unlike statues
that both resemble you–one
painted completely red and the other black.                       

Athens, 15-3-71

Dead End

In the fall we heard horns of the ancient hunters
blare from under arches. The dowser        
sat by the door.
In front of Government House they burned kites. Farther on
the statue was alone, naked, completely shivering on its pedestal
(the one that had endured so much to become a statue)
now totally forgotten, secretly contemplated, in the rock
a new, amazing straddle, that would draw
hunters' attention, the butcher's,  baker's, widow's
disproving what he'd dreamed of the most: his unblemished
his glorified, his made-of-marble, comfortable, crucified        
motionlessness.

Athens, 17-3-71

Known Outcomes

For years and years he yearned; he undressed
in front of small or large mirrors,
in front of every window; he carefully tried
one or another pose, trying to choose, to create
his own, most natural, so that he'll become
the perfect statue of himself–although he knows
that usually statues are prepared
for the dead, and even more often
for some unknown, non-existent gods.

Athens, 17-3-71

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About the Author

Yannis Ritsos was born in Monemvassia (Greece), on May 1st, 1909 as cadet of a noble family of landowners. His youth is marked by devastations in his family: economic ruin, precocious death of the mother and the eldest brother, internment of the father suffering of mental unrests. He spends four years (1927-1931) in a sanatorium to take care of his tuberculosis.

These tragic events mark him and obsess his œuvre. Readings decide him to become poet and revolutionary. Since 1931, he is close to the K.K.E., the Communist Party of Greece. He adheres to a working circle and publishes Tractor (1934), inspired of the futurism of Maïakovski, and Pyramids (1935), two works that achieve a balance still fragile between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair...

The poems of his last book, Late in the night (1987-1989), are filled with sadness and the conscience of losses, but the humbly poetic way by which Ritsos restores life and the world around him, preserves a gleam of hope in an ultimate start of creativeness.

However, the poet lives the reduction of his health and the downfall of his political ideals grievously. Internally broken, he dies in Athens, November 11, 1990.

More on Yannis Ritsos

About the Translator

Manolis was born in the small village Kolibari west of Chania on the Greek island of Crete in 1947. At a young age his family moved first to Thessaloniki and then to Athens where he was educated, achieving a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science at Panteion Supreme School of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked in several different jobs over the years.

He attended Simon Fraser University for a year, taking English Literature in a non-degree program. He has written three novels, a large number of collections of poetry, which are slowly appearing as published works, various articles and short stories in Greek as well as in English. After working as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver, and stock broker, he now lives in White Rock where he spends his time writing, gardening, and traveling.

Towards the end of 2006 he founded Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company in Surrey, BC, with the goal of publishing literary books.

More about Manolis Aligizakis

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