Postings of poems by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos in English translation. This blog, launched in 2009 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the poet's birth, continues now after a two year break. All translations (and mistranslations) are by Scott King unless otherwise noted.
"perhaps the shattering of the poem will create the poem..." —Yannis Ritsos, from Hints (1970)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Clay: 10
Yannis Ritsos
Physical encounter down deep on mute stones in secret water darkness where they tangle the eels and reproduce.
Athens—January 17, 1978
from Clay (1980) [Collected Poems: IDelta ---pg 84-85]
Scott, I love Ritsos's short poems. Do you have a sense of his reasons for the changed format? Also, is the original Greek in free verse or rhyme? Drew
I love them too. Though sometimes, the smaller they are, the harder they can be to translate, the mis-steps are magnified.
The book-length sequences of small poems began, I believe, with Paper Poems in the early 1970s, but the tiny poems appear much earlier in collections like Notes on the Margins of Time and Exile's Journals in the 1940s. So these later sequences are more a refinement than a change, remembering that Ritsos's masterpieces are the long poems, poems like The Monstrous Masterpiece, The Victory Odes and Graganda, to name only a few of the fifty or so that remain to be translated. Ritsos rarely used rhyme; his very first books included verse and he has a book of nursery-rhyme-like poems, but that's about it.
2 comments:
Scott,
I love Ritsos's short poems. Do you have a sense of his reasons for the changed format? Also, is the original Greek in free verse or rhyme?
Drew
I love them too. Though sometimes, the smaller they are, the harder they can be to translate, the mis-steps are magnified.
The book-length sequences of small poems began, I believe, with Paper Poems in the early 1970s, but the tiny poems appear much earlier in collections like Notes on the Margins of Time and Exile's Journals in the 1940s. So these later sequences are more a refinement than a change, remembering that Ritsos's masterpieces are the long poems, poems like The Monstrous Masterpiece, The Victory Odes and Graganda, to name only a few of the fifty or so that remain to be translated. Ritsos rarely used rhyme; his very first books included verse and he has a book of nursery-rhyme-like poems, but that's about it.
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