1969: Yannis Ritsos

1969

Yannis Ritsos - Greece

Interned

Yannis Ritsos was born in May 1909 in Greece. In 1934 his first collection of poems entitled Tractor was published and the same year he joined the Communist Party of Greece. Two years later, in 1936, his second collection of poems O Epitaphios was published and followed by The Song of My Sister (1937) and Symphony of Spring (1938). His early writing has been described as "militant" and "doctrinaire". Copies of O Epitaphios were symbolically burned in front of the Acropolis under the fascist Metaxas government.

During the Greek civil war Ritsos joined the anti-fascist resistance and was eventually arrested. He spent four years in detention camps in Greece during which time he continued to write poetry, with the collections Romiosyni published in 1947, and The Moonlight-Sonata in 1956.

Under the military junta which ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974 he was interned on the Greek islands of Yaros, Leros and Samos before being moved to house arrest in Athens. Despite being banned from publication until 1972, he continued to write and paint.

He died in Athens on 11 November 1990. Over his lifetime, Ritsos published 117 collections of poetry, novels and theatre plays. He is said to be Greece's most widely translated poet. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature nine times in his career and in 1975 was awarded the Lenin Prize for Peace.

Writing Sample:

We were to stay here, who knows how long. Little by little we lost track of time, of distinctions - months, weeks,
Days, hours. It was fine that way. Below, way down,
there were oleanders; higher up, the cypress trees; above that, stones.
Flocks of birds went by; their shadows darkened the earth.
That's the way it happened in my day too, the old man said. The iron bars
were there in the windows before they were installed, even
if they weren't visible. Now
from seeing them so much, I think they're not there - I don't see them.
Do you see them? Then they called them guards. They opened the door,
pushed in two handcarts full of watermelons. The Old man spoke again:
Hell, no matter how much your eyes clear up, you don't see a thing.
You see the big nothing, as they say: whitewash, sun, wind, salt.
You go inside the house: no stool, no bed; you sit on the ground.
Small ants amble through your hair, your cloths, into your mouth.

Broadening in This Prison Where I Live, ed. Siobhan Dowd (London: Cassell, 1996). ISBN: 0-304-33306-9