Ritsos in Parentheses

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 an Winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, Academy of American PoetsA bilingual edition of three major poetry collections by one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth centuryOne 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.”