Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, Academy of American Poets
A bilingual edition of three major poetry collections by one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth century
One of the most prolific and popular of modern Greek poets, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos's poetry translated here-Parentheses, 1946–47, Parentheses, 1950–61, and The Distant-document a three-decade poetic journey that reveals the evolution of the poet's sensibility. This bilingual edition also features an insightful introduction from translator Edmund Keeley, whom Paul Muldoon has called "the gold standard in translators of Greek poetry." Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) was a Greek poet who was imprisoned and exiled and had his works banned in his home country because of his Communist politics. His books include The Fourth Dimension and Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses (both Princeton). Edmund Keeley (1928–2022) was a distinguished translator of modern Greek poetry and professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Princeton University. Praise for Yannis Ritsos
"Ritsos is the old-fashioned kind of great poet. His output has been enormous, his life heroic and eventful, his voice is an embodiment of national courage, his mind is tirelessly active."-Peter Levi, Times Literary Supplement
"A major poet. . . . What I find remarkable about Ritsos' poetry is its ability to make extraordinary constructs out of the most unforcedly ordinary ingredients. . . . Ritsos is also a great bard of loneliness, but of loneliness ennobled and overcome."-John Simon, Poetry
