Farewell to Ritsos: The Fourth Dimension, trans. Beverly Bardsley and Peter Green (Anvil, 1993); Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses, trans. Edmund Keeley (Princeton UP); (and references to Selected Poems, trans. Nikos Stangos, Penguin, 1974; Exile and Return, trans. Edmund Keeley, Anvil, 1989; Chronicle of Exile, trans. Minas Savvas, Wire Press, 1977; La sonate au clair de lune, trans. Gerard Pierrat, Seghers, 1974)
and as afternoon fades, rose-pink on the windowpane,
you have the sense of the keen knife losing its edge
from the blood and milk of the flowers - a complex, strange, sensation
of terror and slaughter, a blind, fine, fragrant and boundless beauty,
a stark naked absence. So it is. All things have forsaken us.
(Bardsley/Green)
It has emerged, more and more irresistibly, since his death in 1990, that Yannis Ritsos (b.1909) was the world's greatest living poet up to that moment. Chance has put into my hands two older volumes of translations (La sonate au clair de lune, and the Penguin Selected Poems of 1974), to put beside the new volume from Bardsley and Peter Green, following the wonderful Exile and Return from Edmund Keeley, which first alerted me to Ritsos.
The back of my copy of The Moonlight Sonata (33rd edition, 1987) lists ninety-seven books by Ritsos. From this we should subtract 6 novels, 2 plays, two more books of prose, the second version of Martiries, and the four volumes of Poiimata, collected poems (which were actually selected poems). This still adds up to over 80 volumes of poetry. (This was anyway five years before his death.) I don't have a way of measuring up, but it's possible (from the extent of Poiimata) that the total tips over 3,000 pages. One thinks of the five years older Neruda; who was similarly prolific, similarly developed a simple register of poetry without abandoning the highest ambitions of art, and was as popular. Nazim Hikmet (Human landscapes from my Country) springs to mind, as a prison poet of high ideals and insatiably curious about the human figure.
I don't suppose there's much point me extracting the information from the excellent Introductions to these various volumes. I'd just like to record my lack of support for the Greek Communist Party, to which Ritsos adhered (so far as I can make out) all his life from the age of eighteen. The background of a great deal of R's poetry is the Civil War, in three rounds from about 1943-9 (recently recalled in Stratis Haviaras' great novel The Time of Hunger). The communists, rejecting the election results, gambled on the fervour (and high-quality arms, held over from the partisan war against the Germans) of their minority support to seize power by force; the resulting bloodshed was quite appalling. The death of so many comrades and innocents in the Civil War, and the long-term persecution of the survivors in the shaky legality of subsequent decades, are a presence which animates a great deal of Ritsos' poetry. The winning regime was sub-fascist, enraged, and with minority support. I don't suppose for a second that the Greek Communist Party is more admirable than the Polish, East German, or Albanian parties; I say this to emphasise Ritsos' independence from all the reductive rhetoric of European Marxism, where every little breeze seems to whisper the downfall of capitalism. Ritsos, instead, is the least abstract and most sensuously direct of poets. Just reading one or two poems can hardly reveal Ritsos' true qualities; reading a hundred of them reveals an inexhaustible depth, the bare mystery of perception in the world. I should also point out that I'm not a paid-up Philhellene: this would be difficult since nationalism, Marxism, and Christianity all fill me with horror. I'm not very interested by Cavafy or Elytis. If I do have fascinations for whole cultures, they would have to be French or Jewish, not Greek.
Probably half of this extraordinary production has been translated into Western European languages. The Gallimard poetry catalogue lists nine volumes of Ritsos, a total of 1600 pages; but the front of Pierrat's book lists another eight volumes of translation into French from other publishers. Clearly, if you can read French, you can read a lot of Ritsos.
Someone who reminds me of Ritsos is Iain Crichton Smith:
It seemed that there were masts. It seemed that men
buzzed in the water around them. It seemed that fire
shone in the water which was thin and white
unravelling towards the shore. It seemed that I
touched my fixed hat which seemed to float and then
the sun illumined fish and naval caps,
names of the vanished ships. In sloppy waves,
in the fat of water, they came floating home
bruising against their island.
('The Iolaire')
the coloured windows give way to plain.
the horsemen crossing the moor are comrades
going the other way into the country
of the undisciplined and free.
Here there is the Land of the Straight Lines
with a banner black and silent,
a black mirror
with the image of an old rose.
('If you are about to die now')
The fact that one can extract brilliant stretches from Crichton Smith emphasises how consistently he has padded them out with sentiment and explanations.
In a well-known passage, Leonardo da Vinci remarks that between two distinct positions of the hand there is an infinite gradation of intermediate positions, each one unique. (I presume this derived from the study of mechanics.) This infinite diversity of site of real, three-dimensional, objects can be compared with the series observable when a certain number of people are taking up positions in relation to each other. The acuity of poverty: someone in an internment camp, with a good chance of never getting out of it, deprived of paper, makes up poems so simple and so highly stylised that each one is memorable. The human beings there, the civil dead, are always making unique groups, shapes never recorded in any painting, pattern emerges as soon as one accepts its inconstancy. Ritsos drawing on stones (as he did in the camp) is a metaphor for his poems. It is as if some artist had no means other than a few helpers, but produced a photograph compelling by the gestures and group geometry of the people in it; and unforgettable. But that artist could also, by sufficient pains and discipline, produce a long series of photographs, by the same means, of which each one was striking. A number of artists have perceived the possibility of a Total, Serial, and Minimal art, but few have persevered for long without relapsing into circularity, the greed of habit. Human groups certainly are more variable than the bamboo shoot, of which thousands of studies by Chinese artists exist. This human milieu is the home of our minds; for each diverse situation there is a specific emotion. So Ritsos' poverty of means, avoiding the lushness of old religious terms, of similes, of rhetorical flourishes and paradoxes, is closely related to his fluidity and lack of obviousness, for all 'poverty'. R is a humanist, and has in a sense refused fantasy and a personal cosmology; although he has also exploited the possibilities of the long poem, and of highly integrated legato passages. One thing he has consistently avoided is statements which sum up long stretches of time: avoiding the despair of unlimited periods of confinement, he has found out how to produce constantly unique shapes only by breaking down the error of memory which makes time constant. He is incapable of saying 'those years were all the same', or 'life under Communism will be like this indefinitely' or even that people have fi xed natures, and so repeat themselves. His Hauptwerk is called he tetarte diastase, the fourth dimension; everything is provisional, as if life were a piece of music with no bar structure. And so his poems really are all unalike and all necessary.
I suppose I ought to review the translations - although I can't read the original Greek. Certainly they are less diverse than the originals: when we read that 'R grafted his earlier elegiac mode ... on to the root stock ... of Greek folk-song, the demotiko traghoudi. Employing a fifteen-syllable line and rhymed couplets, he preserved the feel of this superb form: its verve engendered by weariness and hardship' (Peter Bien), we know that even someone as brilliant as Edmund Keeley can't bring it across. None of the books available to me includes anything from before 1955; it is possible that Ritsos' early work was crudely Socialist Realist - his first book was called Tractors. Certainly his later work is a standing shame to every abuse of poetry by propagandists. I don't find that the versions of Nikos Stangos or Minas Savvas read as good English poetry. Gerard Pierrat's versions seem entirely convincing. Edmund Keeley, however, earns whatever crown of laurel we are able to supply; his work as a translator is both copious and magnificent.
It has been suggested that the high point of R's œuvre is the dramatic monologues written between 1956 and 1972 and collected together in a Greek volume called The Fourth Dimension in 1972. Several of these are in the Pierrat volume, which also includes Martiries (Temoignages). The whole has now been translated by Beverly Bardsley and Peter Green, Classics Professor at the University of Texas, who was a cult figure among classicists at my school, I seem to remember. In their version, this is total poetry, in the sense that after reading long stretches of it you can't even remember what your previous life was like:
to cut short this waiting and uncertainty,
to preserve intact the resolution of night
with all its ratified and accepted weight,
as well as the eternal presentiment that after midnight
twelve maskers would decapitate
the two stone lions at the gateway - as in fact happened.
The maskers are evidently the shaggy kallikantzari described by Dumezil in Le probleme des centaures, but that's another story.