Giannēs Ritsos

Yannis Ritsos

Called 'the greatest poet of our age' by Louis Aragon, Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is thoroughly entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland, Greece. Nowhere is this more apparent that in Diary of Exile, a series of diaries-in-poetry written by Ritsos between 1948 and 1950, during Greece's Civil War, while a political prisoner on the island of Limnos and later at the infamous camp on the desert island Makronisos. The poems offer glimpses into the quiet violence of prison life and the struggle to maintain humanity through language.

Diaries of Exile

Selected Poems, 1967-74

Exile and Return

The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos

Late into the Night

Hē sonata tou selēnophōtos

Selected Poems 1967-1974

The Moonlight Sonata

Il funambolo e la luna

Earinē symphōnia

The Moonlight Sonata : The Prison Tree and the Women : Farewell

Prison Poems

Nikos Stangos

Yannis Ritsos, Selected Poems

The Lady of the Vineyards

"When Yannis Ritsos’s Moonlight Sonata was published in France in 1961 the famous surrealist poet Louis Aragon called Ritsos the best poet in the world. Having read and studied the works of innumerable poets over the years, I have concluded that Aragon was right. I would also add that not only was Ritsos the greatest poet of his own time, he truly is the greatest poet who ever wrote. Not only for his colossal volume of work but for his expressiveness, his crystal-clear images, and the unique way he sees through his personal lens. His keen eye presents the reader with anything and everything pertaining to human life in such excruciating detail, with such amazing clarity, and in such beautiful poetics as no other poet has ever accomplished. Only a poet with these gifts could capture such an image as the following: The sea, the sun, the trees. And again, the trees, the sun, the sea. Pay attention: in this reversed repetition, the sun is still the center like lust is the center of the body"--

Selected Books

Yannis Ritsos, Poems

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.

Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses

Poems

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 hall where glasses and voices sparkled, and the veil of an unseen dancer rippled silently like a diaphanous, whirling wall between life and death. This throbbing our childhood nights, lightening the shadows of shields etched on white walls by slow moonlight.

Selected Poems of Yannis Ritsos

The Fourth Dimension

Athan Anagnostopoulos

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

Yannis Ritsos, Selected Poems, 1938-1988

Late Into the Night

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 hall where glasses and voices sparkled, and the veil of an unseen dancer rippled silently like a diaphanous, whirling wall between life and death. This throbbing our childhood nights, lightening the shadows of shields etched on white walls by slow moonlight.

Poiēmata, 1930-1960,

Giannēs Ritsos

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