Giannis Ritsos

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Giannis Ritsos (bust in front of the birth house in Monemvasia)
Birth house of Giannis Ritsos in Monemvasia with a bust of the poet

Giannis Ritsos or Jannis Ritsos ( Greek Γιάννης Ρίτσος Yiannis Ritsos , also transcribed into German with Jiannis and Yannis Ritsos ; * May 1, 1909 in Monemvasia ; † November 11, 1990 in Athens ) was a Greek writer , primarily a poet.

Life

Early years

Ritsos was born in 1909 as the youngest son of a landowning family on the Greek peninsula of Peloponnese . The eight-year-old pupil's first poems are known. The family became impoverished during his youth. He experienced the death of his mother and the eldest brother when he was twelve.

Jannis Ritsos spent his childhood in a “poor house where everyone died”, as he later wrote in the “Spring Symphony”. The poet, born on May 1, 1909, was not born into this. His birthplace was Monemvasia in the southeast of the Peloponnese. His father, who came from a wealthy aristocratic family, owned a lot of farmland and numerous vineyards. Nevertheless, the effects of the agrarian reform and the First World War as well as the father's addiction to gambling brought the family financial ruin. The boy, who at the age of eight, was inspired by his humanistically educated mother, wrote poetry, played the piano and painted, was hardly affected at the time. He was all the more affected by his mother's death in 1921, just three months after his brother's death. The father fell ill at the same time and was considered insane. In the summer of the same year he and his sister Lula were accepted into the high school of Gythion , which they finished in 1925, and then looked for work in Athens. Over the next few years, Ritsos worked as a secretary, calligrapher, director and actor in various offices and theaters. At the end of the 1920s he fell ill with tuberculosis, which repeatedly forced him to spend a total of seven years in sanatoriums until 1939. In 1933 he joined the left-wing cultural association "Protopori" (avant-garde). His social affiliation and his striving for totality, for a comprehensive worldview, he already demonstrated in the rhyming poems of the first two volumes "Tractors" (1934) and "Pyramiden" (1935), z. B. the poems “To Marx” and “To Christ” as well as in the “Ode to Joy” or in “Germany”, a poem that was written as a reaction to the book burning in 1933. The same fate also suffered Ritsos' 3rd book Epitaphios (Epitaph), which General Metaxas, who came to power on August 4, 1936, had it publicly burned along with many other books. Ritsos wrote this “mourning suit of a mother for her murdered son” in May of the same year, inspired by the tobacco workers' strike in Thessaloniki, and made references from the lamentation of Christ to the revolutionary protest of Gorky's “mother”. In December 1936, his sister Lula suffered a psychological crisis and had to be admitted to the Daphni mental hospital (where his father was already lying, who died there in 1938). Ritsos' deep emotional distress found its expression in "My Sister's Song" (1937). As in the “Spring Symphony” (1938) and “March of the Ocean” (1940), he broke away from traditional meter and rhyme in order to follow the inner musicality and rhythm of the language alone.

Occupation and civil war

During the German occupation, Ritsos stayed with friends in Athens and became a chronicler of the Greek people's will to resist. This, paired with a substantial connection to his homeland, he processed in "Romiosini" (Greek) and "Mistress of the Vineyards" (both 1945-1947). The counter-revolution, exported on Churchill's personal orders, which was supported by Truman's “vital interest in Greece” in 1947, deprived the Greek people of the fruits of their victory over the fascist occupation. Ritsos was arrested with thousands of others in 1948 and deported to the exile islands of Limnos, Makronisos and Agios Efstratios .

1950s and 1960s

After his release, which did not take place until 1952 - after sustained international protests, including from Aragon, Picasso and Neruda - Ritsos immediately became a member of the newly founded left-wing united front movement EDA (for which he ran in the 1964 parliamentary elections). In 1956 he published the monologue “Die Mondscheinsonate”, which brought him the first public recognition, the State Prize for Poetry. In the same year, the poem "Epitafios" experienced its second edition - after 20 years. Two years later, Ritsos made a selection and sent it to Mikis Theodorakis in Paris , who had asked for modern Greek poetry from his home country and set it to music within a few hours. He sent the songs to his composer friend Manos Chatzidakis to Athens. He chose Nana Mouskouri as the interpreter and made his own arrangements. In 1960 the record was produced, but Theodorakis was dissatisfied with the result, took the folk singer Grigoris Bithikotsis and the Buzuki player Manolis Chiotis and presented his own version of the Epitafios songs. These two record releases of the same work sparked a "minor civil war" (Ritsos) in Greece, which reflected different aesthetic attitudes, but to a certain extent also social contrasts. The songs in the “plebeian” variant of Theodorakis became a huge success, reached the taverns, the “high poetry” of Ritsos was sung, yes “eaten” by the common people, as the poet later noted ... The Theodorakis- Version prevailed and established the so-called "contemporary folk song" (Endechno Laiko Tragoudi), which still plays an important role in Greek music practice today.

Military dictatorship and late years

The junta period (1967-1974) buried the dream of a democratic Greece that was born in the 1960s. Ritsos was among the first to be arrested in April 1967, a few days before his fifty-eighth birthday. Many poems from the collection 'Die Wand im Spiegel' were created on the banishment islands Gyaros and Leros , the cycle 'Pförtnerloge' during his house arrest on Samos in 1970. The two short essays 'When rereading the poetry ...' and 'Stones, bones, roots' from these years also verbally document the apocalyptic resistance to any 'nightmare of night and day', an aesthetic approach that is also manifested in the poems of the 1970s and 1980s, yes, which apparently makes it possible for Ritsos at the same time to embrace all new trends and to take up poetic tendencies of the modern age (from the theater of the absurd to the nouveau roman and to the postmodern), to process them and to make them usable for one's own expression. In 1973, in the sixth year of the junta, Ritsos wrote his scenic poem "The Sondeur". The sixty-four-year-old poet contrasts the reality that surrounds him, deformed by the irrationalism of the colonels and in which he could not move freely, with his fantastic, irrational world of poetry, as if with this contradiction he wanted to point out the inadequacy of the rational method, that feeling that swings between despair, resignation and hope to put into words. This work, which is entirely in the tradition of European modernism, is an important example of the anti-dogmatic avant-gardism of its creator. Ritsos, which is particularly evident here, not only takes on what has been handed down, but also creates something new. Most of his more than 100 books, apart from the political poetry, which Ritsos summarized in a volume (comradely poetry) and which he himself did not accept as poetry, he wrote independently of audience expectations - and in it, like hardly any other Greek poet of the 20th century Century, researched and experimented. But the tendentious appropriation of his work by the "official" communist aesthetics on the one hand and, above all, the effects of the post-war history of Greece (civil war, right-wing extremist governments, junta) on cultural and intellectual life on the other, have blocked the view of the great poet and the neurer Ritsos.

Since 1974 Ritsos lived in Athens and in the summer on Samos. He died at the age of 81 in November 1990.

Works

The published literary work consists mainly of poems, lyrical dramas, monologues and prose pieces, in total there are over 100 publications in book form. Since 1957 he developed the aesthetic of “masking” in his ancient monologues ( The Return of Iphigenia , Agamemnon , Chrysothemis , anticipated in his Moonlight Sonata ), a dramatic-lyrical hybrid form of particular originality. There are more than 20 publications in German translation. Giannis Ritsos has drawn and worked as a visual artist since his youth. Some of his works, which have appeared in bibliophile editions, contain illustrations, some of them original graphics by the poet.

His first works Tractors (1934), Pyramiden (1935) and Epitaphios (1936) were symbolically burned during the Metaxa regime in the 1930s . Other well-known works are (in selection):

  • My Sister's Song (1937)
  • Spring Symphony (1938) , set to music by Mikis Theodorakis in the 1st movement of his 7th Symphony (Spring Symphony ) in 1982
  • March of the Ocean (1940) , set to music by Mikis Theodorakis in the 2nd movement of his 7th symphony (spring symphony ) in 1982
  • Old mazurka in the rhythm of the rain (1942)
  • The Lady of the Vineyards (1945-1947)
  • Insomnia (1941-1953)
  • The Neighborhoods of the World (1949-1951)
  • Romiossini (1945–47), first published in 1954 and set to music by Mikis Theodorakis in 1966
  • Moonlight Sonata (1956 ) - for this Ritsos received the First State Prize for Poetry in Greece in 1956
  • When the Stranger Comes (1958)
  • The Old Women and the Sea (1958)
  • The Dead House (1959-1962)
  • The Wall in the Mirror (1967-71)
  • Stones Repetitions Grid (1968-1969)
  • Papiernes (1970-1974)
  • Corridor and stairs (1970)
  • Eighteen little songs of bitter homeland (1968-1970) , written for Mikis Theodorakis and set to music by Mikis Theodorakis in 1972
  • The Sondeur (1973) (lyric drama)
  • Becoming (1970-1977) (collection of various poetry cycles)
  • Door knocker (1976)
  • Siegeslieder (1977-1983) (collection of various poetry cycles)
  • Erotica (1980-1981)
  • Monochords (1980)
  • Late, very late at night (1987-1989)

See also

Editions in German (selection)

  • Milos looped. Poems and poems . Publishing house Philipp Reclam jun. Leipzig 1979; with pen drawings by Giacomo Manzu .
  • Small suite in red major. Love poems from the cycle "Erotika" . Translated by Thomas Nicolaou , with stone drawings by the author. Volk und Welt, Berlin 1982, 2nd edition 1984, ISBN 3-353-00437-8 .
  • Poetry album . Selection of Asteris Kutulas , transferred by Hans Brinkmann, Asteris Kutulas, Dirk Mandel, Steffen Mensching , Thomas Nicolaou, Klaus-Peter Schwarz and Klaus-Dieter Sommer; New Life Publishing House, Berlin 1983.
  • The return of Iphigenia . Transfer of Asteris Kutulas ; Romiosini Verlag, Cologne 1986.
  • Delfi . With screen prints by the author, edited and transmitted by Asteris Kutulas , editions phi, Echternach 1987.
  • Chrysothemis . Transferred from Asteris and Ina Kutulas , Romiosini Verlag, Cologne 1988.
  • The tremendous masterpiece. Memories of a quiet person who didn't know anything . With an etching and seven reproductions of drawings by the poet, edited by Hans Marquardt , transcribed and with notes and annotations by Asteris Kutulas . Reclam-Verlag, Leipzig 1988, ISBN 3-379-00212-7 .
  • Agamemnon . With original illustrations by the author, edited and transmitted by Asteris Kutulas ; editions phi, Echternach 1990.
  • Poems . Selected, translated from the Greek and provided with an afterword by Klaus-Peter Wedekind. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-22077-2 .
  • The return of Iphigenia . Monologues. With stone drawings by the author. Translation and with an afterword by Asteris and Ina Kutulas . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt and Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-458-1218-2
  • The reverse images of silence . Poems. Greek and German. Translated from the Greek and provided with an afterword by Klaus-Peter Wedekind. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-41295-7 .
  • Monovassia . Poems. Greek and German. Translated from the Greek and provided with an afterword by Klaus-Peter Wedekind. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 3-518-41295-7 .
  • Martyríes - testimony . Three series of poems. Greek - German. Translated by Günter Dietz and Andrea Schellinger. Notes and afterword by Günter Dietz. Ivory Verlag 2009, ISBN 978-3-932245-96-1 .
  • Helena. Translated from the Greek by the LEXIS group (Andreas Gamst, Anne Gaseling, Rainer Maria Gassen , Milena Hienz de Albentiis, Christiane Horstkotter-Brussow, Klaus Kramp, Alkinoi Obernesser) under the direction of Elena Pallantza. Leipzig: Reinecke & Voß , 2017, ISBN 978-3-942901-23-9

Quotes

  • The reader notices that, in contrast to other well-known contemporary poets, whose works deal with personal experiences with the world, with the worlds, Ritsos hardly ever comes across anything that he actually came into contact with outside of his nation and its history or cultural history . As if there were only Greece and nothing outside to be included in the verse. And this moment too, call it introversion, call it narcissism, whatever the psychological terms, it gives this man something peculiar, strange, archaic, which, to let a picture speak, makes him the last specimen of a dying race of giants who live in a reserve and are only viable there. ( Günter Kunert , from the epilogue to: Jannis Ritsos, Milos looped, Reclam-Verlag. Leipzig 1979)
  • It's as if Jannis Ritsos knew the secret of my soul, as if he was the only one, yes, actually the only one, who could move me so much inside. When I had only read a few of his texts I did not yet know that he was the greatest of the living poets of this era to which we belong - I swear I did not know. I only found out little by little, with every further poem, I almost said: with every further secret; because every time I was shaken like a revelation, an apocalypse. Apocalypse of a person and a country - deep insight of a person and abysmal awareness, anchored in the culture of a country. ( Louis Aragon , from a foreword to the Gallimard edition of Jannis Ritsos' "Moonlight Sonata", Paris 1971)
  • I discovered Ritsos' poetry in my youth, in the late thirties. With his works he was one of my teachers, one of my few role models. Many years later, in my 7th Symphony, I used Ritsos' texts from the period that shaped my youth. The distances between us and the parallel development were not an obstacle for us, in order not to be able to be connected nevertheless due to a common sensitivity, and whenever we met, I had the impression that our coinciding thoughts, which are in the "epitaph ", in" Hellenism ", the" 18 Little Songs ", the" Quarter of the World "and finally in the 7th Symphony, ultimately belong to a single person who speaks with two heads. The two-headed eagle! This is how I see the connection between Ritsos and me. (Mikis Theodorakis in an interview with Asteris Kutulas, 1984)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ritsos, Giannis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ρίτσος, Γιάννης (Greek)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek writer, primarily poet
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Monemvasia
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1990
Place of death Athens