In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos - Softcover

Ritsos, Yannis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907587217 ISBN 13: 9781907587214

Publisher: Enitharmon Press, 2012

Synopsis

Winner Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation Winter 2012. Yannis Ritsos (1909 - 1990) 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.

About this title

Review:

"It's sleight of word, and utterly charming. Perhaps the best method of reading such a poem is to turn the thing over and over in one's hands and get the feel of it." Beverley Bie Brahic, "Guardian""

"Harsent s mastery of implication and his ability to create an atmosphere using the simplest materials is given a shocking charge by the world he gets to inhabit through Ritsos." Declan Ryan, "Edinburgh Review""

"Harsent's mastery of implication and his ability to create an atmosphere using the simplest materials is given a shocking charge by the world he gets to inhabit through Ritsos." Declan Ryan, "Edinburgh Review""

""In Secret," which David Harsent calls 'adaptation or homage' rather than close translations, will be a fine addition to one's Ritsos shelf, or a good place to start one." Beverley Bie Brahic, theguardian.com"

"The sureness and versatility of his poetic ear and vocabulary free us to experience the deeper structures of Ritsos's poetry apparently without intermediary, and the experience is exhilarating." Susan Wicks, "Poetry Review Volume 103""

About the Author:

David Harsent has published ten collections of poetry. Legion won the 2005 Forward Prize for Best Collection. His most recent collection, Night, published by Faber in 2011, was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize, the Forward Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Enitharmon Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1907587217
• ISBN 13: 9781907587214
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 79