Yánnis Rítsos

Yánnis Rítsos (in Greek Γιάννης Ρίτσος ), born on May 1st 1909 with Monemvassiá and dead the November 11th 1990 with Athens, was a Greek Poète .

“ poetry forever the last word

the first, always ” (Yánnis Rítsos)

Biography

Born with Monemvassiá in Laconie, junior by a family of land great landowners, it is impregnated by this " rocher" native, heavy of historical memories. Its soon devastated family (economic ruin, died of the mother and the older brother, madness of the father and the sister) and the personal disease (stays in sanatorium) mark its life and obsess its work. Proletarianized, precarized - he survives by calligraphiant legal documents the Order of lawyers and while taking part in spectacles of ballet dancing -, he adheres to the Greek Communist party at the end of the Twenties. This engagement will be worth to him to know the camps of “national rehabilitation” after the civil war which tears the country the shortly after the Second world war. But Rítsos still will divide with its generation of new tests when it is again stopped at the time of the putsch of the Colonels, in April 1967, and is off-set in the islands of Yaros then of Leros. It is at that time that its fame extends beyond its country, in particular in France under the impulse of Aragon which greets it like “the largest poet living” and conducts campaign for its release. With the fall of the Colonels in 1974, Rítsos acquires, with freedom, a statute hugolien of “national poet”.

Its work, until there of rather traditional invoice, opens with new infuences and approaches by certain aspects surrealism. In Greece, it meets a vast popular echo with several of its poems put in music by Theodorakis. If Rítsos remains faithful to the Soviet Communist party of obedience, unlike the majority of the Greek intellectuals who turn to a “eurocommunism” denouncing' 'intervention in Czechoslovakia, it does not continue of it less one work little conforms so that its public could expect some and who remains haunted by the original family tragégie: it revisits the great ancient myths by means of its memories of Monemvassia by publishing a series of dramatic monologs centered on the characters of Oreste, Phèdre, Helene, Philoctète, etc In margin of these important collections, Rítsos multiplies the series of very short poems which mix humor, visions nightmarish and notations of a sacrilized daily newspaper. The last period of its life is undoubtedly darkest: reached AIDS at one time when the disease is still held for a curse and a divine punishment in Greece, he dies in a great physical and moral insulation whereas crumbles, in the socialist countries, the dream for which he fought and suffered during so many years. Its old “militant” glory then will compromise its literary fame and will involve its work, abroad at least, in a discredit which it would amply deserve to leave.

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