Böcker av Yannis Ritsos

Greek poet Yannis Ritsos' remarkable collection of 336 single-line poems, composed in 1979, with linocut responses by artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio, created in 2020; each line and image an essential observation of a moment, a personal archive of time past, present and future.

Second Edition - 2018In this amazing collection, Manolis introduces us to the life work of Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos. This translated collection paints the poetry of a man's life and as such it captures the great magnitude of that life lived. From the sea-soaked childhood through the impatient adventures of a naïve summer youth and shattered innocence. The reader can follow the poet, Ritsos, through the heartache of life to experience the shifting of his voice into a maturity that is cynical and painful but edged with truth. And all is enveloped in the metaphor of nature, upon the backdrop of a Greece, painted in white and pastel and gold, tastes and textures exotic and foreign but beautiful and real.Ritsos writes of seasons shifting to reflect a coming darkness. The bitter desolation that is war. Hard, sharp, hostile words that paint a time too painful to remember and yet which must be written.Ritsos writes about life and in this collection, spanning so many years, the reader is gifted with the true sense of a life experienced. One is able to see a poet play with form and style to reflect an abundance of shifting moods and experiences, each poem telling its own story but also echoing the larger story of life. Each poem is a snapshot of a place in time, of a moment in a life, of a story being told. The reader is invited to browse through a truly amazing anthology of observations, both personal and public. This collection reflects a depth and vastness that must be savoured and digested, revisited and reviewed.- Cathi Shaw

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".

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.

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

The last poems of this major Greek poet are tinged with sadness and loss, but they also hum with vitality and an odd note of hope.

In the dramatic monologues, especially those based on the grim history of Mycenae and its royal protagonists, this work presents a poetic paradigm of the condition of Greece. It also contains a group of modern narratives, including the famous, and much-anthologized, "Moonlight Sonata."

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: "e;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."e; 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.

Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) is one of Greece's finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos's short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that have an irresistible potency.