Monochords by Yannis Ritsos

Monochords by Yannis Ritsos
Translated by Paul Merchant, Tavern Books, 2017.

Monochords by Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) is not a traditional collection of aphorisms. There are many statements conveying wisdom and insight, but this book is primarily a diverse collection of quick observations and fragmentary vignettes.

The short entries, some not even complete sentences, make more austere the thinking which tilts toward the stoic. Statues appear in several of the numbered entries—and they make me think of the ‘archaic smile’. Ritsos hardened by life and Greek politics, but not dulled or unfeeling. In these brief entries he remains rather amused and still hopeful. I can almost see the smile rising at the corners of the lips of a closed mouth, as he prepares to speak. He’s ready to be fanciful and light in face of a world that both worries and wearies us:
   -1-
   With a bird for a pillow, I lie awake night after night.

A number of the fragments operate as though collapsed poems, leaving only a few nouns for imagery:
   -2-
   The lamppost, the statue, the flagpole.

   -175-
   Mountain, bell tower, cypresses, travelers.

Recalling “The Ninth Elegy” by Rilke,
‘Perhaps we are only here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower…But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.’*

Then there are some glimpses of Greek daily life:
   -45-
   When I have forgotten you, the garden will remind me.

   -270-
   Mounted on hazardous scaffolding, we are cleaning our temples’ pediments.

Here the image stands as an arrested moment in time:
   -13-
   Just when the swimmer jumped in. I missed it.

Or as Ritsos says in a later entry:
   -286
   How gently time collapses into poetry.

Twice in his life, Ritsos was a political prisoner of his country. He refers at times to his resistance:
   -78-
   Later comes the strip search of the corpses.

   -334-
   Now they’ve taken off his muzzle how can he speak?

There are some traditionally rendered aphorisms, that are both wry and knowing:
   -24-
   He shouted loudly so we’d forget how for years he’d said nothing.

   -37-
   From a long way down he assesses the height.

Being foremost a poet, Ritsos shares some elemental aspects of his ars poetica:
   -74-
   Hard for the word to travel from blood to poem.

   -320-
   The old woman came from Myli with a basket of tomatoes so she could enter my poem.

And in this one that recalls Mallarmé’s admonishment to Degas, that ‘poems are made not of ideas but of words’:
   -107-
   You capture a nightingale not idea by idea, but word by word.

The Greek is printed en face and those who know Greek may contradict me, but I feel that Paul Merchant’s translations wonderfully capture the mind and spirit of the man, and the poet, from what I know of Ritsos’ biography.

*Ahead of All Parting, Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Modern Library, 1995.