Description

Yannis Ritsos (19091990) is one of Greece s finest and most celebrated poets, and was nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize. Louis Aragon called him the greatest poet of our age . He wrote in the face of ill health, personal tragedy and the systematic persecution by successive hard-line, right-wing regimes that led to many years in prison, or in island detention camps. Despite this, his lifetime s work amounted to 120 collections of poems, several novels, critical essays, and translations of Russian and Eastern European poetry.The 1960 setting, by Mikis Theodorakis, of Ritsos s epic poem Epitaphios was said to have helped inspire a cultural revolution in Greece. In Secret gives versions of Ritsos s short lyric poems: brief, compressed narratives that are spare, though not scant. They possess an emotional resonance that is instinctively subversive: rooted in the quotidian but at the same time freighted with mystery. The poems are so pared-down, so distilled, that the story-fragments we are given the scene- settings, the tiny psychodramas have an irresistible potency The Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for the Winter Quarter, 2012."