‘Night comes slowly here’

In September 2020, in that improbable window when we thought Covid was almost over, I went on holiday to Greece and stayed for a few nights in Monemvasia, a walled coastal town. It turned out to be the birthplace of Yannis Ritsos, the great poet of the Greek left. He grew up in a house right by the gateway to the town. There’s a small statue on his old roof terrace.

The best short description of his life is from ’In Secret’, David Harsent’s versions of his poems: ’Ritsos (1909-1990) was born into a wealthy, landowning family, though his childhood was marred by tragedy. His father’s fortune was lost to gambling and political vicissitude; his father and, later, his sister were declared insane and confined to asylums; his mother and brother died of TB within months of each other; Ritsos himself fell victim to the disease and spent years in sanatoria. Ritsos’s commitment to Marxism caused his work to be banned, and the poet to be imprisoned or exiled, by successive right-wing regimes. He nonetheless continued to write and published in excess of 100 books.’

I began reading him in the mid-90s in a beautifully designed Anvil volume called ’Exile and Return’, with translations by Edmund Keeley. I also have ’Gestures’ (Cape Goliard, 1971), an Oxfam buy, the only book I’ve seen which reproduces his illustrations – monoprints, I think, from the look of them. ‘Ritsos in Parenthesis’ (1979, Princeton) is also a lovely edition because the Greek originals accompany Keeley’s translations. I like to see the look of the language, even though I don’t understand a word.

But the best translations/versions are from David Harsent’s ’In Secret’. They may not be the most accurate, but they ring true as poems. Harsent defends his methods in the afterword:

‘A poet’s vocabulary isn’t dictionary-definable and translations that provide a literal summary of what the poet said …. are street-maps of the place, not the place itself. It is, of course, the very accuracy that defeats the intention. A version is an attempt to re-imagine the piece, to test its pulse, to make a new poem in English that delivers its truth while ignoring the apparent truth that lies in precise representation.’

Here’s an example;

WAITING FOR DAYBREAK

Night comes slowly here. No one sleeps. We wait
for the hammer-blows of the sun on tin roofs,
on our heads, on our hearts; and wait for that to displace
the sound of gunfire from somewhere out in the darkness.

They are short, enigmatic, haunting poems, often with violence or armed conflict somewhere else, off-stage. The poem is, as it were, pre or post-violence; preparing, escaping, dealing with the consequences.

THE BOX

We measured up, we threw lime over the dead.
As we got aboard, a sickle moon broke through.
Four of us: one carried the iron-bound box on his lap
and huddled over it like a man warming himself
at his fireside. There was smoke low on the water.

John Ashbery wrote of Pierre Reverdy that ’the poems were… like novels, novels compressed into a tiny space by some supernatural force. We are left with only the mysterious essentials of a story…. we have the feeling that something enormous has happened, but we will never know any more of the drama than this.’

It applies to Ritsos, too. To my mind his poems are like scenes from the Greek film-maker Theo Angelopoulos (‘The Travelling Players’ is the key film, from 1975). Like Ritsos, he deals with the long aftermath of the Greek civil war in the late 40s, in scenes that are compelling but which don’t quite cohere, leaving us to puzzle and connect, to try to explain the gaps and absences to ourselves.

IN SECRET

They were calling across the water, calling a name.
Once he was sure it was his he ran and hid.
An ocean-going liner slipped out of the harbour
all lights blazing, on the upper-deck a woman
wearing a picture hat. It blocked his view
of the dark tower, the moon, the waiting scaffold.’