Ritsos in Parentheses

ISBN: 9780691603391 出版年：2015 页码：203 Ritsos, Yannis Princeton University Press

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.