Epitaphios - Softcover

Yiannis Ritsos

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0992740967 ISBN 13: 9780992740962

Publisher: Smokestack Books, 2014

Synopsis

On 10 May 1936 the 27-year old Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos saw a newspaper photograph of a woman weeping over the body of her son, a Salonica tobacco-factory worker killed by police during a strike. Two days later the Communist Party newspaper Rizospastis published a long poem by Ritsos. Dedicated to the heroic workers of Salonika and drawing on the fourteenth-century Greek Orthodox Epitaphios Thrinos, the poem combines Mary lament at Christ s tomb with popular Greek folk traditions of resurrection and Spring to create a universal lament sung by every bereaved mother who sits and mourns on the blood-stained street with her heart flayed, her wing broken. Although Epitaphios was banned in Greece for many years, in the 1950s an expanded version of the poem was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis and recorded by Nana Mouskouri. This is the first time Epitaphios has been published in book form in English. Yiannis Ritsos (1909-1990) was one of most prolific European poets of the 20th century. The author of more than a hundred books of poems, plays, fiction, translations and essays, his work has been translated into over forty different languages. He won the Lenin Peace Prize and was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Picasso drew his picture. Louis Aragon called him the greatest poet of our age. The Metaxas dictatorship burned his books at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens in 1936. After the Civil War he was imprisoned for four years on the concentration-camp islands of Lemnos and Makronisos. His books were banned in Greece until 1954. In the 1960s he was imprisoned on Samos for three years by the military junta.

About this title

About the Author

Rick M. Newton is Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Kent State University, Ohio. He has written extensively on the works of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Kazantzakis and Ritsos. His many translations include three works by Yiannis Ritsos, Testimonies, 3x111 Tristichs and The Annihilation of Milos He lives in Ohio.

Edition details

• Publisher: Smokestack Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: Greek, Modern (post 1453)
• ISBN 10: 0992740967
• ISBN 13: 9780992740962
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 60