FOREWORD
After releasing two translation volumes of poems by this most prolific poet, Yannis Ritsos, and upon embarking on the quest of working on this third volume I surely felt an acute sense of de ja vu and certain familiarity with the mood of his poems and way of their development. I had a strong affinity for his deepest thoughts and emotions while he wrote them, a sense of him being close to me, an indisputable emotional connection with the man who came and sat next to me and spontaneously opened his heart and revealed his innermost secrets to this translator. Indeed my work this time is overwhelmed by that acute connection with this amazing poet, the one and only in the world, the man who was born to a big and affluent family, who grew up and followed his heart’s desire, poetry, the man who spent many years of his life in exile, yet the man who never stopped writing, who never stopped believing in man, the man with his endless pursuit for excellence which resulted in the amazing number of poetry and prose books he wrote along with his innumerable translations.
Undoubtedly I felt a connection so alive and profane, so strong and clearly defined that I never stopped asking him, in my mind, about his way of perception, his way of understanding humanity, his way of seeing forward and truly his voice echoed inside of me so adamantly and eloquently describing his views about the human condition, human behaviour, his sense of the senseless his acceptance of the unacceptable. Thus, closing my eyes, time transcends, and I find myself next to him in the island of his exile, Makronisos; we sit on a hillside, right on the moist morning soil, and we gaze at the expanse of summer dryness, the treeless landscape, the thorny bulrushes, the thyme slowly swaying at the light breeze, the odd oleander bush, the brightness of the morning sun, the endlessness of the horizon and of our thoughts.
Turning a bit towards him I asked could you have ever believed that there could be so much cruelty in the human soul, that a man could be so amazingly antithetic and cruel to another human being and all that because of fanaticism and narrowmindedness?
He looked at the soil, incised a line into it with the twig he held in his hand and looking at the furrow, as if gazing at the abysmal depth of human soul he uttered, fear, comrade, fear and fanaticism, the fear of what we represent, the fear we infuse in their hearts pushes them to become inhumane, to try and turn us into non-humans in two weeks of whipping and cursing, in two days of slandering and kicking; fear, their fear which you see in their glances when they curse us, their fear of what we can create which they can’t understand, that’s what fosters their actions.
Truly he left nothing unsaid with those few sentences, and I sensed my face gleamed at the echo of the word he used to address me: comrade.
However, he continued, the graciousness and spirituality of one always appears when one escapes the talons of fear and finds oneself. And even these guards who spit on us, curse us, kick us, whip us will one day discover themselves and that will be their moment of reckoning when they’ll recall all their actions here in Makronisos and tears will flow down their eyes, when their moment of escaping the animal and reaching their true self will arrive; because everyone on earth has that written on their tablet: that one day their time of reckoning will arrive, as if it will spring up from within and it will shake them off their comfort zone into which they’ve been all their lives and at that moment they’ll transcend the fleshy and reach the fleshless. Truly we’re victorious, comrade, now at this moment here in Makronisos and at that moment of the guard’s reckoning we’ll be victorious because we have sung for the better side of man, we have written about it, we have prayed for it, we have believed in it and will always believe in it. Comrade we shall be victorious on the pages of history, always remember of me.
The sun was up the length of a flag’s mast, the thorny bulrushes were still dripping dew and bees suddenly appeared among the thyme branches and flowers: time for foraging and like the bees we too had to get busy since we were on duty to clean the cookhouse before breakfast was served. A few minutes later we were wiping the counter, we had started the fire for the cook to boil our daily chai, we had cleaned all necessary utensils and took a deep breath of relief. The guards couldn’t find any reason to spit on us, nor to curse us, nor to unintentionally kick our butts. My eyes met his and deep in his irises I so ever clearly saw one single word: duty.
I opened my eyes. His stature was still standing in front of me. His eyes with the word duty in them. My duty to myself and to him, my duty to Yannis Ritsos. My task, on which I’ve been working for the last few years with these translations, still gleams in front of me. My duty to translate as much of his poetry as I can master. My duty. I’ve been explained, comrade.
~Manolis Aligizakis, Cretan, author, poet, translator
Libros Libertad 