Ritsos in London

 
The Anglo-Hellenic League and Kings College London (KCL) hosted an event on 12 June to mark the publication of two new books about Yiannis Ritsos and to remember Edmund ‘Mike’ Keeley, who died last year, and who is regarded by many as the foremost translator of modern Greek poetry. In many translations he co-operated with the Orthodox writer and scholar, Philip Sherrard.
 

Yiannis Ritsos (1909-1990) was a most prolific poet who, it was said, published over a thousand pages of poetry. He was nominated nine times for the Nobel Literature Prize but was never awarded it. John Kittmer, who is a former British Ambassador to Greece and the President of the Anglo-Hellenic League, gave an overview of Ritsos’s life and poetry. He has as written a biography of Ritsos that is due to be published next year.
 
The two books in question are:
 

 ‘A Broken Man in Flower’ by David Harsent, a very fine poet and winner of many awards including the Forward Prize. This collection is ‘versions’ of, rather than a ‘translation’ of, the poetry Ritsos wrote in the Junta years while imprisoned or under house-detention on Samos. Harsent does not speak Greek but clearly has a great sense of Ritsos’s work. The collection includes the series of poems, each four lines long, 18 Λιανοτράγουδα Της Πικρής Πατρίδας (previously published in a pamphlet as ‘Homeland: 18 Bitter Songs’) which Ritsos wrote at the request of Mikis Theodorakis.
 
‘Monochords’ by Chiara Ambrosia who is an Italian film-maker and artist. ‘Monochords’ was a series of very short poems written by Ritsos in 1979, most are one or two lines long and were written at a rate of about ten a day. Ambrosia has created a series of 336 black and white images – linocuts – each representing one of the poems. She created one image each day during lock-down. The poems are translated by Paul Merchant.
 

David Harsent gave a powerful reading of poems from ‘A Broken Man in Flower’ and Chiara Ambrosia showed some thirty of the images on screen and voiced the translations. There followed a panel discussion which addressed questions such as
 
-         how important was it to Ritsos’s poetry that he was himself also a visual artist?
-         how integral was Ritsos’s politics to his poetry?
-         how important is it that Ritsos was Greek?
 

As a young man Ritsos was prolific; as he got older his poems tended to get shorter. It was suggested this reflected the shrinking of his world while in detention and the physical shrinking of his body with age. During lockdown, our lives similarly shrunk and we were less physically active. What Ritsos’s short poems achieve is an intensity of feeling that leaves the reader having to work harder; many will consider the effort worth it.
 
David Harsent: A Broken Man in Flower - Bloodaxe Books
Homeland: 18 Bitter Songs - Rack Press (out of print)
Chiara Ambrosia: Monochords - prototype
 
Richard Devereux