tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post956578784751051964..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Under the clandestine sky: Yannis Ritsos: five poems from Exile and ReturnUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-22452696899265348802017-05-16T08:58:43.812-07:002017-05-16T08:58:43.812-07:00I'm not sure I like knowing what you and I kno...I'm not sure I like knowing what you and I know, Vassilis, but unfortunately I can't deny that we do indeed know it.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-64314050835923177622017-05-15T13:13:18.019-07:002017-05-15T13:13:18.019-07:00Looks like Ritsos' poetry wasn't prudish e...Looks like Ritsos' poetry wasn't prudish enough for the Nobel Prize Literature selection committee--he was rejected 9 times--but you and I know it wasn't primarily because of his language register, right?vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras)https://www.blogger.com/profile/14515165428574974933noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-12810182974618282092017-05-15T12:43:56.651-07:002017-05-15T12:43:56.651-07:00Ah, now I understand all the leginess.Ah, now I understand all the leginess.kenthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12448791356455016794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-21641943310016020812017-05-15T05:58:55.270-07:002017-05-15T05:58:55.270-07:00Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) talks about prudishness ...<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1q05ukl9t4" rel="nofollow">Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) talks about prudishness in art</a><br /><br />By the time these poems were writ Ritsos had lived and suffered through more than one dictatorship. He had been a communist, had spent four years in prison following the civil war of the late 1940s, had been arrested after the April 1967 military coup (the Junta of the Colonels), deported to a prison camp at Yiaros, then to another such camp on the isle of Leros. His health failing, he was shipped back to Athens for hospitalization, then remanded to his wife's home on Samos, and placed under house arrest. It was in these not exactly Arcadian circumstances of internal exile the poems were composed. They haunt as history haunts, popping up in the back of the mind like bubbles from the mouth of a sunken statue. The petrified figures in the poems seem to express a condition of isolation and estrangement, giving out mute cries, as figures in dreams.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-85887611207854786842017-05-15T05:34:39.014-07:002017-05-15T05:34:39.014-07:00Ritsos' great poems come from a period of dete...<br /> Ritsos' great poems come from a period of detention, imprisonment, exile and house arrest. There is an eerie oblique quality, an indirectional signalling of commentary on history by way of parabolic stories, a sinking deep into images which carry a burden no sketch of the surface picture could ever capture... maybe we don't know those stories, but Ritsos' poems help us "remember" them all the same.<br /><br /> Historical context is complicated in these poems. "One level of meaning is clearly intended to reside in the particular historical climate -- the imposed mood of the times, if you will -- that the dictatorship engendered. One constantly encounters imagery of dislocation, of intimidation, of lethargic and directionless motion, of exile in strange places and even within the confines of a particular neighborhood, as though the land were under siege and the people in it dispossessed of their normal habitations, their normal means of sustenance both physical and spiritual, or have become so disoriented by circumstances beyond their control that they have lost their power to act as human beings. In several poems the setting is evidently a guarded camp or barracks or building under surveillance...[The] landscape is now subject to violent distortion and the intrusion of unexpected anomalies. The inhabitants, haunted by death, are sometimes seen to be not merely terrified but petrified, turned into statues, and the statues into animated human beings moving cautiously through abandoned city streets emptied by undefined forces of evil..." -- from Edmund Keeley's Introduction to Exile and Return.<br /> TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com