Awards

• Winner of International Lenin Peace Prize 1975

Overview

Yannis Ritsos wrote Exercises 1950–1960 after being tortured and detained during the Greek Civil War. Incredibly, the poems are filled not with bitterness but with amazement—at a solitary leaf, a rope ladder, rose and grey light. Alongside such tenderness, of course, the nation state stretches out in the sun, teeth bared. What to say about the human condition? Not long after completing these poems, Ritsos was again imprisoned.

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9781946604422

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Author Information

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) was a prolific Greek poet and communist. Throughout his life, he was imprisoned multiple times for his support of the Greek Left and his resistance to the rotating fascist powers which had gripped Greece through the middle of the twentieth century. He was a winner of the Lenin Peace Prize and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Spring Ulmer was awarded a 2020 NEA Translation Grant for her translations of Yannis Ritsos’s Exercises 1950–1960. Her translation of Ritsos’s “Autumn” won the 2016 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. She is also the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles (selected by Sonia Sanchez for the 2007 Kore Press First Book Award); The Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay Press); Bestiality of the Involved (Etruscan Press), and Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (selected by Diane Seuss for the 2022 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize).

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