Ritsos in Parentheses (The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation) - Softcover

Ritsos, Yannis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691603391 ISBN 13: 9780691603391

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Perhaps Greece's most important poet, 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, 1975―represent a thirty year poetic journey and a developing sensibility that link the poet's subtler perceptions at different moments of his maturity.

In his introduction to the poems, and as an explanation of the book's title, Edmund Keeley writes: "The two signs of the parenthesis are like cupped hands facing each other across a distance, hands that are straining to come together, to achieve a meeting that would serve to reaffirm human contact between isolated presences; but though there are obvious gestures toward closing the gap between the hands, the gestures seem inevitably to fail, and the meeting never quite occurs."

In terms of the development of Ritsos's poetic vision, the distance within the parenthesis is shorter in each of the two earlier volumes than in the most recent volume. There the space has become almost infinite, yet Ritsos's powerfully evocative if stark landscape reveals a stylistic purity that is the latest mark of his greatness.

Originally published in 1979.

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About this title

About the Author

Edmund Keeley is the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English Emeritus and the Director Emeritus of the Creative Writing and Hellenic Studies programs at Princeton University, where he taught for forty years. His novels, literary and historical studies, and translations have earned him the Rome Prize and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal and the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of several books published by White Pine Press: AN ALBANIAN JOURNAL (1997), SOME WINE FOR REMEMBRANCE (2002), and BORDERLINES: A MEMOIR (2005). His latest publications are his eighth novel, The Megabuilders of Queenston Park, and the poetry collection REQUIEM FOR MARY (Greenhouse Review Press, 2015).

Language Notes

Text: English, Greek

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0691603391
• ISBN 13: 9780691603391
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 204