The celebrated modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos follows such distinguished predecessors as C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis in a dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The shorter poems gathered in this volume present what Ritsos calls "simple things" that turn out not to be simple at all. Here we find a world of subtle nuances, in which everyday events hide much that is threatening, oppressive, and spiritually vacuous--but the poems also provide lyrical and idyllic interludes, along with cunning re-creations of Greek mythology and history. This collection of Ritsos's work--perhaps most of all those poems written while he was in forced exile under the dictatorship of the Colonels--testifies to his just place among the major European poets of this century. The distinguished translator of modern Greek poetry Edmund Keeley has chosen for this anthology selections from seven of Ritsos's volumes of shorter poems written between 1946 and 1975. Two of these volumes are represented here in English versions for the first time, two others have been translated only sporadically, and the remaining three were first published in a bilingual edition now out of print (Ritsos in Parentheses). The collection thus covers thirty years of a poetic career that is the most prolific, and among the most honored, in Greece's modern history.

Yannis Ritsos is one of Greece's most prolific, distinguished and celebrated poets whose many honors include the Alfred de Vigny Award (France, 1975) and the Lenin Prize (U.S.S.R., 1977). "Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938-1988" features more than 440 poems from 43 of Ritsos' short and long poems by the editors, an index of 117 of Ritsos' books of poetry, translation, fiction, essays and drama, and more than 25 illustrations based on Yannis Ritsos' celebrated paintings on rocks. The work of 17 translators, "Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938-1988" is a monumental volume that generously represents 50 years of this gigantic poet's work.

In the dramatic monologues that make up The Fourth Dimension--especially those based on the grim history of Mycenae and its royal protagonists--the celebrated modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos presents a timeless poetic paradigm of the condition of Greece, past and present. The volume also contains a group of modern narratives, including the famous, and much-anthologized, "Moonlight Sonata." Ritsos, rightly, regarded the The Fourth Dimension as his finest achievement. It is now presented to English- speaking readers for the first time in its entirety. From "Philoctetes" All the speeches of great men, about the dead and about heroes. Astonishing, awesome words, pursued us even in our sleep, slipping beneath closed doors, from the banqueting hall where glasses and voices sparkled, and the veil of an unseen dancer rippled silently like a diaphanous, whirling wall between life and death. This throbbing our childhood nights, lightening the shadows of shields etched on white walls by slow moonlight.

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 14th 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.

Award-winning poetry in a bilingual edition, by Portugal's best-known living poet.

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Yannis Ritsos was, without question, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. This collection of essays by Peter Bien is the first book of literary criticism in English devoted entirely to the work of Yannis Ritsos. A fine and substantial introduction to this great modern Greek poet.

Odysseus Elytis (1911-96) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. With Seferis and the 'Generation of the Thirties', he introduced French Surrealism into Greek poetry. Kimon Friar's classic translation The Sovereign Sun begins with his brilliantly sensuous early poems. It has large selections from his master work, Axion Esti (1959), and includes the whole of his Heroic and Elegiac Song for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign (1945). His Nobel Prize citation stated: 'Against the background of Greek tradition, his poetry depicts with sensuous strength and clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.'