Translations

Friendships I have three friends—he says; — you don’t know them.The one washed my horse in the sea.The next carved me a tortoise in wood.The third kissed me in the hour when I slept.Now that I tell you, I have a fourth friend.At night I wash my socks alone.The right time happens only in the …

The Double Journey From one train to the other: years and years. He sakes a seatnear the window. He sees fleeing backward:trees, hotels, chimneys, monuments. He discerns,right behind the things that flee, what remains:what he would call entirely his own, if it were not also ours—as behind the window is the curtain, behind the curtainis …

Inversion In the evening the rooms fill with the withered furof an invisible aged animal moulting. The little coffeehouseacross the way lights its lamps, and so with its chairsand its five tables passes into the dream. A dogsleeps under one table—somewhere it trustsand so it sleeps. And so, in the lithograph on the wall,the courteous …

Surfaces Great light in abrupt lines.The mountains are black at midday.The smoke between two statues.They’re unloading the truck at the harbor.The fish come there from far away; they stareat the restaurants’ placards. The chairsline up along the wall. The womansits in the third chair alone,waits her turn. The barbed wireis in the springs of the …

Inside the Well Don’t, in any case, forget the word. Hold itfurther in, deeper than fear, inside the stablewith the two red horses and the one white worked to death,with the dogs’ leashes hung on the wall,the knife behind the door, the lantern inside the paillet down into the covered well, barely gleamingon the wet …

Yannis Ritsos (Γιάννης Ρίτσος, 1909-1990) was one of the most important Greek poets of the twentieth century. Unlike George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, he never won the Nobel Prize, a fact bemoaned by Pablo Neruda among others. For his leftist writings and associations, he was imprisoned in 1967 by the regime of the Colonels, as …