Diaries of Exile

"Without Ritsos' eloquence, Greeks would have forgotten how to name all those things that are there before their eyes."Pantelis Prevelakis This long poem is a nuanced and moving account of the poet's time in exile, in which everyday events hide much that is threatening, oppressive, and spiritually vacuous. Lyrical and idyllic, these re-creations of Greek mythology justify Yannis Ritsos' reputation as one of the most honored in modern Greece. Plagued by tuberculosis, family misfortunes, and persecution for his Communist views, Yannis Ritsos(19091990) spent many years in sanatoriums, prisons, and in political exile while producing over one hundred volumes of poems, dramas, and translations.

One of Greece’s most prolific and widely translated poets, Yannis Ritsos (1909-1999) was born in Monemvasia. He lost his mother and an older brother to tuberculosis when he was young, and later contracted the disease himself. A lifelong, committed Communist, he fought in the Greek Resistance to the Axis occupation, sided with the Communists in the Greek Civil War, and subsequently spent years in detention centers and camps for political prisoners. The dictatorship of 1967-1974 landed him in internal exile yet again. Despite these many obstacles, Ritsos wrote more than a hundred volumes of poetry, plays, and translations. In 1976 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

Karen Emmerich’s translations from the Greek include books by Margarita Karapanou, Amanda Michalopoulou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Vassilis Vassilikos. Her translations of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. She has received translation grants and awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Modern Greek Studies Association. She is on the faculty of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon.

Edmund Keeley is the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English Emeritus and the Director Emeritus of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. His collaborative translations of the modern Greek poets, including C. P. Cavafy and the Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, and his translations of Yannis Ritsos earned him the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets and the First European Prize for the Translation of Poetry. In 1999 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.