A Broken Man in Flower: Versions of Yannis Ritsos 
by David Harsent
Bloodaxe Books, £12.99

A LIFE-LONG communist, Yannis Ritsos was a titan of 20th century Greek poetry, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize in 1975 and nominated several times for the Nobel Prize.

Despite chronic ill-health, he fought with the Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation of Greece and supported the left in the subsequent civil war.

Between 1946-49 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps. 

His poem Epitaphios, became the anthem of the Greek left.

David Harsent is also a prize-winning poet and this is his second book of Ritsos interpretations, following 2012’s In Secret, and focuses on poems written by Ritsos while he was imprisoned and under house arrest, during and after the civil war, and at the time of the military junta dictatorship between 1967-74.

Writing was a proscribed activity during these periods and Ritsos was compelled to bury his poems in tin cans hidden around his prison compound. 

Ritsos is a poet whose work should perhaps be read in multiples, rather than with a studied focus on individual poems. The majority of the poems in this collection are short works, enigmatic and sometimes surreal, focusing on an object, a scene or a moment, along with one or two longer and more immediately accessible works. 

The meaning and gravity of the work unfolds incrementally, the atmosphere and mood which gradually emerges manifests an almost panoramic perspective via the accumulation of stiflingly small acts and spaces. And saying no to injustice and cruelty need not always require a raised fist: “He stood silent in the dock and strangely calm./ They questioned, cross-questioned. Not a word./ The judge was enraged. “Quiet!” he bellowed;/ his gavel hammered the bench, “Don’t listen to his silences!”

In 1968, Theodrakis asked Ritsos to write a resistance poem, which became the 18 poems of Homeland. In this rousing work, Ritsos makes reference to Greek history and mythology in rallying the people to overthrow the colonels, culminating in No Tears for Romiosini: “All that is Greece, all that is Greek, has a knife to its throat/ and a noose round its neck: which is when/ whatever it is that’s Greek, whatever it is that’s Greece,/ reaches into the sky and arms itself with the sun.”

Set to music by Theodrakis in 1972, the work became hugely popular. 

Harsent certainly captures something vital and lasting about the work. Without being fluent in Greek, it is difficult to know exactly how much of Ritsos there is in Harsent’s “versions”: the poems are not simply transcribed, but employ a poetic sensitivity using the materials and scaffolding of another language and idiom. 

But finally the work stands as a beautifully harsh indictment of militarism in Greece, and a testament to the human spirit, to artistic endeavour and the capacity for communism to instil hope and perspective when the jackboot of fascism has descended on the necks of the people.