Yannis Ritsos

Ritsos was born on 1 May 1909 in Monemvasia, the fortress town on a rock off the coast of the southern Peloponnese, into a family of landowners that lost everything in his childhood. Tuberculosis and mental illness ran through the family: his brother and mother died of tuberculosis, his father and a sister were committed to psychiatric hospitals, and Ritsos himself spent the years 1927 to 1931 in sanatoria. He came out of them a communist and a poet, and published his first collection, Τρακτέρ (Tractor), in 1934.

In May 1936 a photograph in a newspaper showed a mother kneeling over her son, shot by police during the tobacco workers' strike in Thessaloniki. Ritsos wrote Επιτάφιος in a few days; in August the new Metaxas dictatorship burned the book publicly at the foot of the Acropolis, beside the Temple of Olympian Zeus. During the occupation he joined the left-wing resistance, and after the civil war he paid for it: from 1948 to 1952 he was held in the prison camps of Limnos, Makronisos and Ai Stratis, writing poems and burying them in bottles.

The 1950s and 60s were his great creative years, until the colonels' coup in April 1967, when he was arrested again and sent to the camps on Gyaros and Leros and then to house arrest on Samos. International protest, including from Louis Aragon and Pablo Neruda, helped free him. In 1977 he received the Lenin Peace Prize. He died in Athens on 11 November 1990 and was buried in Monemvasia.

Επιτάφιος (Epitaphios, 1936) is written in the fifteen-syllable line of Greek folk song and in the voice of the mother: she talks to her dead son about his eyebrows, his hair, the spring he will not see. In 1960 Theodorakis set eight of its stanzas, and the recording with Grigoris Bithikotsis, «Μέρα Μαγιού μου μίσεψες» (One day in May you left me), is the beginning of modern Greek popular song as we know it. Ρωμιοσύνη (Romiosini, written 1945–47), a long poem on the Greek people, their mountains and their resistance, was set by Theodorakis in 1966: «Αυτά τα δέντρα δε βολεύονται με λιγότερο ουρανό» (These trees cannot make do with less sky) and «Όταν σφίγγουν το χέρι» (When they clench their fist) are sung at every political rally.

But Ritsos also wrote long, quiet dramatic monologues that have nothing to do with politics. Η σονάτα του σεληνόφωτος (The Moonlight Sonata, 1956), which won the State Poetry Prize, is spoken by an ageing woman in black in an old house, asking a young man to let her walk with him as far as the corner; it was praised by Aragon and made him known in France. The monologues of Τέταρτη διάσταση (Fourth Dimension, 1972) give voices to figures from the ancient myths, Orestes, Helen, Ismene, Persephone, as old people looking back. Beside these stand thousands of short poems, often only a few lines, about a chair, a window, a stone, a gesture, written at enormous speed; in total he published over a hundred collections, more than any other Greek poet. His language is simple and visual, close to spoken Greek, which makes him a good poet to read early.

Listen first to Theodorakis's Επιτάφιος and Ρωμιοσύνη; «Μέρα Μαγιού μου μίσεψες», «Αυτά τα δέντρα» and «Θα σημάνουν οι καμπάνες» (The bells will ring) are part of the common Greek songbook, sung at concerts, funerals and demonstrations. Pupils read extracts from Ρωμιοσύνη and Η σονάτα του σεληνόφωτος in lyceum. In Monemvasia his house, just inside the main gate of the lower town, carries a plaque and a bust, and his grave is in the town cemetery. Streets named Γιάννη Ρίτσου exist across Greece, and the small stones he painted with faces and figures during his years in exile have been exhibited many times. He is, with Kavafis, Seferis and Elytis, one of the four Greek poets of the twentieth century that every Greek can name.

• Epitaphios was publicly burned by the Metaxas dictatorship in August 1936, only months after it was published.
• In the prison camps of 1948–52 he wrote on whatever paper he could find and hid the poems in bottles buried in the ground.
• He was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times and received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1977.
• He painted pebbles, roots and bones with faces and figures; hundreds of these little works survive.