Exercises 1950–1960

Yannis Ritsos

Translated by Spring Ulmer

POETRY, TRANSLATION  |  $20

May 2025
Read an excerpt

STEAMROLLER

 

A steamroller was left in the middle of the road,

to be eaten by the sun and the rust—all alone

among the poppies, the nettles, the weeds.

 

But they had walked with flags and drums.

Peasants with pickaxes dug the road.

This steamroller that was supposed to open the road

now blocks the way. No crickets can be heard.

 

Or maybe it was left here as a barricade? 

 

                                                        1953-1954

 

ΟΔΟΣΤΡΩΤΗΡΑΣ

 

Ἕνας ὁδοστρωτήρας ἔμεινε καταμεσὶς τοῦ δρόμου,
νὰ τὸν τρώει ὁ ἥλιος κ’ ἡ σκουριὰ – καταμόναχος
ἀνάμεσα στὶς παπαροῦνες, τὶς τσουκνίδες, τ’ ἀγριόχορτα.

 

Κι ὅμως ἐδῶ εἶχαν περπατήσει μὲ σημαῖες καὶ τύμπανα.

Οἱ χωρικοὶ μὲ τὶς αξίνες σκάϐαν τὸ δρόμο.
Τοῦτος ὁ ὁδοστρωτήρας ποὺ εἴτανε ν’ ἀνοίξει τὸ δρόμο,
φράζει τώρα τὸ πέρασμα. Δὲν ἀκούγονται μήτε τὰ τζιτζίκια.

 

Ἢ μήπως ἔμεινε ἐδῶ πέρα γιὰ ὁδόφραγμα;

Yannis Ritsos wrote Exercises 1950–1960 after being tortured and detained during the Greek Civil War. Incredibly, the poems are filled not with bitterness but with amazement—at a solitary leaf, a rope ladder, rose and grey light. Alongside such tenderness, of course, the nation state stretches out in the sun, teeth bared. What to say about the human condition? Not long after completing these poems, Ritsos was again imprisoned.

About the Author

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) was a prolific Greek poet and communist. Throughout his life, he was imprisoned multiple times for his support of the Greek Left and his resistance to the rotating fascist powers which had gripped Greece through the middle of the twentieth century. He was a winner of the Lenin Peace Prize and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Praise

What Yannis Ritsos wrote in the aftermath of his detention and torture during the Greek Civil War is exactly what we need to navigate our own fraught moment in history. Spring Ulmer’s lucid translation of Exercises: 1950–1960 offers the work of a poet who stared into the abyss and faithfully recorded what he found there, in an astonishing range of hues and tones. After every fire, Ritsos knew, there may be 'a big silence among the smoky ruins,' in which we may hear the music of the ages. 'No loneliness is small,' he discovers. And that is why he is such a good companion for whatever trials and difficulties are heading our way.

Christopher Merrill, author of Flares

About the Translator

Spring Ulmer was awarded a 2020 NEA Translation Grant for her translations of Yannis Ritsos’s Exercises 1950–1960. Her translation of Ritsos’s “Autumn” won the 2016 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. She is also the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles (selected by Sonia Sanchez for the 2007 Kore Press First Book Award); The Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay Press); Bestiality of the Involved (Etruscan Press), and Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (selected by Diane Seuss for the 2022 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize).

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946604-42-2
Trade Paperback
204 pp, 4.875 x 8.5 in
Publication Date: May 01 2025