Yannis Ritsos

Yannis Ritsos was born in Monemvasia, Greece, on May 1, 1909, into a wealthy family whose members were beset by poor health. His father, Eleftherios Ritsos, suffered from mental illness, and both his mother, Eleftheria (née Vouzounara), and older brother died of tuberculosis when Ritsos was twelve, leaving him in the care of relatives. He attended Athens Law School briefly in 1925, then succumbed to symptoms from tuberculosis. As a result, he was hospitalized in Sotiria Sanatorium in 1927 for several years. 

In the 1930s, Ritsos worked as an actor and a dancer. He joined the Greek Communist Party in 1934 and published his first poetry collection Trakter [Tractor], that same year. Two years later, his third book, Epitaphios [Funeral Lament], was burned at the foot of the Acropolis during the reactionary regime of the dictator Ioannis Metaxas. Ritsos, who fell ill and was hospitalized again in 1937, did not publish freely again for nearly a decade. In 1960, the composer Mikis Theodorakis set the book-length poem to music. 

In 1944, toward the end of the Nazi occupation of Greece, Ritsos joined the Communist guerrillas. Between 1948 and 1949, during the Greek Civil War, he was arrested and spent four years in the Kontopouli prison camp on Lemnos. He was then transferred to the desert island of Makronisos where he became involved in fellow prisoners’ theatrical productions. While there, he penned his next poetry collection, Petrified Time: Poems from Makronisos. According to the introduction, which includes a note from Ritsos, the poems were written between between August and September 1949, shortly before he and others forced into political exile were transferred from the prison. The collection was not published until 1957. He was freed in 1952, a year after a third transfer to the island of Agios Efstratios, but was arrested and exiled again in 1967—this time to the island of Leros—after the start of the military dictatorship that overtook Greece. 

After becoming ill again in 1968, Ritsos was transferred to Samos, where his wife, a pediatrician, operated a medical practice. While there, he was placed under strict house arrest. He returned to Athens in 1971, but spent summers on Samos in 1972, 1975, and 1979, where he composed the poems that were published in the collection Monochords.

During his career, Ritsos penned 117 books of poetry, in addition to three plays, four essay collections, and nearly a dozen translations, including the work of Nâzim Hikmet, whose work he translated into Greek. He published seven poetry collections in 1972, 1974, and 1975, respectively. In 1978, he published eleven poetry collections. His work has been translated into more than forty languages and printed in several hundred editions. In the 1960s, during a stint in then Czechoslovakia, he completed an anthology of the work of Czech and Slovak poets. 

Ritsos won the first Greek National Prize for Literature in 1956 for his long poem “The Moonlight Sonata.” Thereafter, he was honored with twenty-two international poetry prizes during his lifetime, including the Great International Award for Poetry from Belgium, the Georgi Dimitrov International Award from Bulgaria, the Alfred de Vigny Prize from France in 1975, and, in 1976, the Etna-Taormina International Prize in Poetry from Italy. Ritsos received the Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by the then Soviet Union, in 1977. Several months before his death, he was awarded the Frederic Joliot-Curie Medal from the World Peace Council. He was elected to numerous European literary academies and received honorary degrees from the universities of Thessaloniki, Birmingham, Leipzig, and Athens. He was short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature numerous times. 

Ritsos died on November 11, 1990, in Athens, Greece. He was buried in Monemvasia. He left behind fifty unpublished poetry collections.