Ritsos in Parentheses - Princeton Legacy Library

Publisher Marketing: Perhaps Greece's most important poet, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos's poetry translated here--"Parentheses, 1946-47, Parentheses, 1950-61, and The Distant, 1975"--represent a thirty year poetic journey and a developing sensibility that link the poet's subtler perceptions at different moments of his maturity. In his introduction to the poems, and as an explanation of the book's title, Edmund Keeley writes: "The two signs of the parenthesis are like cupped hands facing each other across a distance, hands that are straining to come together, to achieve a meeting that would serve to reaffirm human contact between isolated presences; but though there are obvious gestures toward closing the gap between the hands, the gestures seem inevitably to fail, and the meeting never quite occurs." In terms of the development of Ritsos's poetic vision, the distance within the parenthesis is shorter in each of the two earlier volumes than in the most recent volume. There the space has become almost infinite, yet Ritsos's powerfully evocative if stark landscape reveals a stylistic purity that is the latest mark of his greatness. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contributor Bio:  Keeley, Edmund Edmund Keeley taught English, Creative Writing, and Hellenic Studies at Princeton for forty years until his retirement as Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English Emeritus. In addition to his seven novels and his literary and historical studies focused on Greece, he has published fifteen volumes of poetry in translation, including the collected poems of Cavafy and Seferis (in collaboration with Philip Sherrard) and selected poems of Eltyis and Ritsos. Among his awards are the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. He was elected Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens and Honorary Member of the Hellenic Authors Society.