• Diaries of Exile
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Archipelago Books

Diaries of Exile

Diaries of Exile

by Yannis Ritsos, translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Karen Emmerich

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Called “the greatest poet of our age” by Louis Aragon, Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is thoroughly entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this volume, a series of diaries-in-poetry Ritsos wrote between 1948 and 1950, during Greece’s Civil War, while a political prisoner first on the island of Limnos and then at the infamous camp on the desert island Makronisos. Even in these darkest of times, Ritsos dedicated his days to poetry, trusting in writing and in art as collective endeavors capable of fighting oppression, of bringing people together across distance and time. These poems offer glimpses onto the daily routines of prison life, the quiet violence he and his fellow prisoners endure, the ebbs and flows of the prisoners’ sense of solidarity, and the struggle to maintain humanity through language.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781935744580
Pages: 120
Publication Date:

Praise

Ritsos' breath raises a wind in which wafted and swirled flakes from the crust of our land, seeds of its vegetation and sparks of its sky. Without Ritsos' eloquence, Greeks would have forgotten how to name a major part of all those things that are there before their eyes, and restoration of his work to its totality is an imperative duty to the Greek nation itself, which deserves to regain its unity after nearly forty years of strife.
—Pantelis Prevelakis

Myth in Ritsos' works on three main levels reflecting the historical background, personal memory and contemporary social problems. Due to the symbolic weight that the myth carries, it enriches the psychological truth of the real-life persons that the poet carries within, as he also carries the emotional weight of a childhood destined to crumble under disease, disaster and grief.
—Chrysa Prokopaki

Ritsos writes of seasons shifting to reflect a coming darkness. The bitter desolation that is war. Hard, sharp, hostile words that paint a time too painful to remember and yet which must be written.
—Cathi Shaw

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