Winner of the 2014 PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation
Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this volume, which presents a series of three diaries in poetry that Ritsos wrote between 1948 and 1950, during and just after the Greek Civil War, while a political prisoner first on the island of Limnos and then at the infamous camp on Makronisos.
Even in this darkest of times, Ritsos dedicated his days to poetry, trusting in writing and in art as collective endeavors capable of resisting oppression and bringing people together across distance and time. These poems offer glimpses into the daily routines of life in exile, the quiet violence Ritsos and his fellow prisoners endured, the fluctuations in the prisoners’ sense of solidarity, and their struggle to maintain humanity through language. This moving volume justifies Ritsos’s reputation as one of the truly important poets in Greece’s modern literary history.
From this collection:
“Smooth-cheeked kid uncombed unwashed
at morning call with clouds for company
dark red sweater unbuttoned pants
still sleepy - a scrap of sleep melting in his hair
a rembetika song in his pocket
I’ll comb you, I’ll wash you, I’ll tighten your belt
I’ll take back all the words they took from me
the words no one knows to give me
the words I can’t ask for”
(Group read suggestion from Julie Jacobs, book club moderator.)
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