Greek poet Yannis Ritsos

From British daily The Morning Star:

Ritsos: ‘The greatest poet of our age’

Friday 04 December 2009

Having recently attended a celebration of the life and work of Greek poet Yannis Ritsos in Athens, ANDY CROFT reflects on his legacy.

The taxi-driver who drove me across Athens, a big fan of West Ham’s Scott Parker, wanted to buttonhole me about English football.

But he also wanted to talk about poetry, particularly the work of the Greek communist poet Yannis Ritsos.

Not for the first time, I was struck by Ritsos’s extraordinary role in modern Greek life – the government here recently declared 2009 the Year of Yiannis Ritsos.

There were several hundred, mostly young, people gathered at the Greek Communist Party (KKE) headquarters in Peressos for the two-day international conference on Ritsos.

Speakers included teachers, academics, musicians, historians, actors and old comrades imprisoned with Ritsos on the prison island of Macronissos.

KKE general secretary Aleka Papariga spoke, as did Ritsos’s daughter Eri, along with Yannis Tasoulas, general secretary of the construction workers’ union.

Ritsos may not be very well known in Britain and only one selection of his work is currently published here, Anvil Press’s The Fourth Dimension.

But he was a major 20th century poet, part of the extraordinary generation of communist poets such as Neruda, Eluard, Brecht, Hikmet and Aragon, who once called him “the greatest poet of our age.”

A prolific poet, novelist, playwright and translator, Ritsos wrote more than 80 books of poetry and works such as Epitaphios, Romiossini, The Lady of the Vineyards and 18 Little Songs of the Bitter Homeland were notably set to music by Mikis Theodorakis.

He translated Nazim Hikmet and Paul Eluard into Greek, won the Lenin Peace Prize and was nominated on nine separate occasions for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Picasso drew his picture.

But Ritsos’s life was not an easy one. In 1936, soon after the publication of Epitaphios, his first major work, the Metaxas dictatorship burned all copies of the books at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. He was imprisoned for four years after the civil war and then again by the military junta between 1967 and 1971.

War, fascism, civil war, illegality, prison and exile may seem unlikely ingredients in the creation of great art.

But it was these terrible conditions that helped to make Ritsos a great poet, because the times urgently required a new relationship between the intelligentsia and society, between writers and readers, between poetry and politics.

Ritsos made poetry out of politics and took politics into the worlds of poetry. His writings were shaped first by his involvement in the early modernist movements, and then by a rejection of modernism, articulating more democratic ways of responding to the challenges it posed.

He was able to write about the private and the public, the lyrical and the satirical, the utopian and the historical, combining documentary record, formal experimental and traditional forms.

He insisted on the poetry of ordinary language, demotic, colloquial speech which celebrated the poetry of everyday life, of everyday objects – “the celestial side by side/with the every day”, as Ritsos described it.

Above all, he found ways of synthesising the struggles for personal, political and national liberation as a single narrative.

These ranged from the heroic Romiossin and the great works of his middle years – Moonlight Sonata, The Old Women and the Sea, The Dead House – to his later meditations on Greek history – Orestes, Philoctetes, Persephone, Agamemnon, Ajax, Phaedra – and the poems written shortly before his death in 1990.

In these, the defeat of Soviet communism seemed of a piece with premonitions of mortality:

The old man sits in his doorway. It’s night-time,

He’s alone. In his hand, an apple. The others

Left their lives to the stars’ jurisdiction.

What can he tell them? Night is night.

We don’t even know what comes next.

The moon

Amuses itself half-heartedly,

endlessly

Shimmering on the sea. But in the heart

Of all that brightness, there is no

mistaking

The black boat with its shadowy

oarsman

Slowly drawing away from shore.

Apart from The Fourth Dimension (Anvil Press), there are several selections of Ritsos’s work published in the US, notably Selected Poems: 1938-88 (BOA Editions), Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses (Princeton University Press) and Late into the Night; the Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos (Oberlin College Press).

Report on racism in Israel

From the daily Haaretz in Israel:

06/12/2009

Civil rights report details racism in Israel in all its many shades

By Dana Weiler-Polak

Basic rights in Israel are increasingly conditioned on the identity and gender of those who seek to realize them, according to the annual report which the Association for Civil Rights in Israel is releasing Sunday. The report describes a reality in which Arabs receive education, work and maybe citizenship only if they serve in the army or perform national service.

Similarly, those who seek to live in some communities will be allowed their right to housing only if they fit a description which excludes Arabs, Sephardim, Russians, Ethiopians, religious or disabled people, as well as single-sex and single-parent families, according to the report.

In referring to what it called discrimination of Arabs, the association listed bills and ministerial proposals such as the so-called Nakba bill, which proposes to cut public funding for institutions that allow the commemoration of the Nakba – the day of mourning observed by some Arab Israelis to mark the creation of the State of Israel.

Another initiative noted in this context was that of Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, who proposed changing Arabic-language signs to use Arabic transliterations of Hebrew names of places.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s decision that anyone who doesn’t perform army or national service would not be admitted into the ministry‘s cadet course was also listed under this category.

Crackdowns on protest against Operation Cast Lead earlier this year was described in the report as “a trend of infringement on the freedom of speech of individuals and organizations which passed criticism on the government and the authorities.” The report says that during Operation Cast Lead, the police “limited freedom of expression with the backing of the attorney general, dispersed many legal demonstrations and withheld permits from others for illegitimate reasons that pertain to the political content of the demonstrations.”

The clause on anti-war protests also said that hundreds of demonstrators were arrested and called to be investigated. In some instances, attorneys from the State Prosecutor’s Office warned in requests for arrest extensions that if defendants are released, they “might continue to express their opinions and demoralize the public.”

In addressing treatment of foreign workers and asylum-seekers, the report listed what it defined as “racist” statements by Interior Ministry workers in connection with the activity of the Oz immigration unit. This included Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s warning that foreign workers will “bring a multitude of diseases with them,” and statements by a senior ministry officials who, in wishing the Oz officers good luck, quoted a saying which urges for the “eradication of evil from our midst.”

The ultra-Orthodox community also suffered racist treatment in 2009, according to the report. This occurred, among other places, in Ramat Aviv, Kfar Yona and Jerusalem. The report noted acrimonious internet responses to the shooting attack at a gay community center in Tel Aviv in August in which two people were killed.

Over the past two years, government offices have increasingly been ignoring court rulings which concerned their operation, according to the report. The state was found guilty of contempt of the court when it ignored a ruling which overturned a regulation preventing foreign workers from switching employers.

Similarly and among other examples, a ruling by the High Court of Justice that orders the reinforcement of all classrooms in the northern Negev against rockets has not been implemented.

Another issue discussed at some length in the report is what the report defined as “racist policies in the education system,” mainly toward Ethiopians. This assertion was made in relation to three semi-private schools in Petah Tikva which refused to admit children of families that immigrated from Ethiopia. The schools receive up to 75 percent public funding.

The creeping increase in the self-participation fees that health maintenance organizations charge patients is resulting in poor people not getting treatment for serious and basic medical needs, according to the report, which cites a report on the matter by Physicians for Human Rights.

The Physicians for Human Rights’ report also says that most of the people who seek medical treatment by the HMOs and other medical services are poor. Earlier this year the Health Ministry appointed a panel of experts to examine this problem. The panel was supposed to hand in its report by March, but no report has been released so far.

Justice Minister Ya’akov Ne’eman on Monday said he believes Jewish law (Halakha) should be the binding law in Israel, Army Radio reported: here.

A Paris-based group founded to protect the Jewish community has warned that anti-semitic acts in France soared 75 per cent last year, emphasising that many were mounted as the Israeli government carried out its bloody invasion of Gaza: here.

Sprague’s pipit decline in the USA

From the Argus Leader in the USA:

Prairie bird’s plight could affect farmers

Peter Harriman • pharrima@argusleader.com

December 6, 2009

A prairie song bird resembling a lanky sparrow is in the early stages of being considered a threatened or endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

If the Sprague’s pipit is given that protection, it might affect the conversion of grasslands to row crops.

Carol Aron, the Fish and Wildlife biologist heading the inquiry into listing the bird, says its numbers have gone into significant decline because of habitat losses both in its summer range on the Northern Plains and Canada’s prairie provinces, and on its winter range in the Southwest and northern Mexico. Encroaching mesquite is the problem on the winter range, she says, and plowing up native grass to grow crops is the major source of habitat destruction on the summer range.

A species of grassland songbird, the Sprague’s Pipit, has declined in number by about 80 percent in the last 40 years. In the United States it lives in Minnesota, Montana, and the Dakotas: here.