Subterranean horses

by Yiannis Ritsos, Minas Savvas (Translator)

English, Greek (translation)

Genres: Poetry

63 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Yiannis Ritsos (Greek: Γιάννης Ρίτσος) is considered to be one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century, together with Konstantinos Kavafis, Kostas Kariotakis, Giorgos Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age."

Yannis Ritsos was born in Monemvassia (Greece), on May 1st, 1909 as cadet of a noble family of landowners. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and his eldest brother from tuberculosis, the commitment of his father who suffered with mental disease and the economic ruin of losing his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos, himself, was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931.

These tragic events mark him and obsess his œuvre. In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) he became a member of the EAM (National Liberation Front), and authored several poems for the Greek Resistance. These include a booklet of poems dedicated to the resistance leader Ares Velouchiotis, written immediately upon the latter's death on 16 June 1945. Ritsos also supported the left in the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949); in 1948 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps.

Reviews

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subterranean Horses is Ritsos at his best. Strange, simple, elusively concrete. This book is like riding into Troy in the horse's belly.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ritsos is a joy to read. The poems in Subterranean Horses move from the quotidian with language that bends around the obvious to reach its epiphany. The plain speech that Ritsos uses (for I must believe this would be true in the Greek, too), is merely a tool (or an animal, if you prefer) to locate deeper streams of thought.

[thalia · Rating 3 out of 5]

For how committed to freedom and liberation Ritsos was, for all his brilliance with rhyme, allusion, reference, invocation, for being one of a few to bring Greek poetry back to international prominence, you’d think he’d be a little less like overtly patriarchal? Though some moments of queerness and tenderness of affection and gender-solidarity, there are still a lot of old tropes that take away from this work, for me, from being the classic it is so often spoken of being. Perhaps I am misreading these things, or the translations don’t get to the cultural nuances?