The World Could Have Been Beautiful 

When a rightwing military junta overthrew the Greek government on April 21, 1967, a poet’s name was at the top of their enemies list: Yannis Ritsos, one of the country’s most esteemed writers. A special unit arrested him that very morning, rounding him up alongside eventually more than 10,000 other “enemies of the state,” including ordinary citizens, civil servants, journalists, and politicians. Thus began the Regime of the Colonels, which brutalized Greece from 1967 to 1974. It wasn’t the first time Ritsos had been arrested by a dictatorship—his first exile occurred almost 20 years earlier—but this time the Colonels had learned from their predecessors. They dispatched Ritsos to a series of concentration camps on small, uninhabited islands in the Greek archipelago, including the notorious Gyaros.

From above, Gyaros looks like a red snail crawling along the enormity of the Mediterranean. After a long, thin neck comes a shell-shaped, flat-topped mountain, with a small trail of ooze in its wake. Nothing but scrub grows on the island, a treeless lump of rock. For at least two thousand years, it has stood as a metaphor for loneliness, so inhospitable to life—except for a colony of monk seals—that the Roman Emperor Tiberius sent an enemy to a nearby island instead, deeming imprisonment on Gyaros too uncivilized a sentence. Yet, during the nearly 40-year period (1936–1974) when Greece alternated between brutal dictatorships and unstable semi-democratic governments, Gyaros was known as a “Devil’s Island,” where repressive regimes would disappear their enemies. Greek dictators ultimately incarcerated over twenty thousand people there.

Today, the ruins of one of many “Institutes for National Re-Education” are still visible on Gyaros. Citizens were arrested and sentenced without due process, and forced at gunpoint to build their own prisons, while enduring physical and psychological torture—in an attempt to transform the Colonel’s enemies into “good Greeks.” Ritsos, who wrote more than 100 books, produced poems ranging from short personal lyrics to long ideological monologues. In the vastness of his work, his prison poems, written in secret, best embody his greatness.

Ritsos recited these poems to his fellow inmates at night before slipping them into glass bottles that he then buried to avoid detection, digging them back up whenever he was transferred to another prison. All we know of one untitled poem is the date of composition: “Nov 12, 1948,” one of Ritsos’s earliest days on Makronisos, the island in the Aegean where he was first imprisoned—and it is a good introduction to these lyrics. The poem begins by addressing Ritsos’s comrades in chains, recounting their day’s labors: “we carried rocks. Fast work / from hand to hand.” Then, as the sun sets and the prisoners assemble for their evening meal, the dishes remain “unwashed,” while the “rats climb on the table” and “the moon places its chin on the rail,” until time itself comes to a standstill:

Warmth is postponed. Postponed are speech and silence. 
Only the lighting of the cigarette around midnight 
places an untimely period to all that remained undone.

Immediately, I’m compelled by the moral intimacy of the speaker’s voice. I stay with the poem through the political statements and surrealist flourishes, impressed by the human airiness Ritsos injects into the concrete cruelty of his surroundings, perhaps implying that what can be built by human hands can also be unbuilt by them. As Minas Savvas, one of Ritsos’s many translators, puts it, this is poetry that “structures itself on emotive associations . . . while creating a spontaneous synthesis of emotion and thought.”

Despite his circumstances, or precisely because of them, Ritsos never fails to see the humanity in everyone. That includes his jailers, as evidenced by another poem, “May 30, 1950”:

The soldiers, unshaven, 
on the stone wall 
have a sadness yawning in their eyes 
they listen to the loud-speakers, the sea, 
they hear nothing – 
perhaps they wanted to forget. 
At dusk 
they go slowly to the ravine for their physical needs. 
When they button their trousers 
their eyes catch a glimpse of the new moon. 
The world could have been beautiful.

The final line’s devastating vision of the world that might have been—one devoid of these very hellscapes—redeems the soldiers, who, like many before them, are just following orders, but who find themselves nearly as confined as their prisoners. On the horizon, they can see the white specks of houses in Laurium, an Athenian suburb, where life goes on without them. All they want to do is forget their own alienation, until their raw urges, conducted in the light of the moon, suddenly electrify them back to life, if only for a moment, like werewolves.

Following his release from Makronisos, Ritsos wrote many collections of poetry. One of them, Exercises: 1950–1960 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025), has just been published for the first time in English in bright, fluent translations by Spring Ulmer. Given that Ritsos wrote these poems in the immediate wake of his most brutal incarceration, it is striking that they “are filled not with bitterness but with amazement—at a solitary leaf, a rope ladder, rose and grey light,” Ulmer notes in her introduction. The poem “Autumn” neatly encapsulates that amazement in astonishingly few lines:

Evening. Humid. We should take the wool sweaters out of the mothballs. 
A star stirs your soul, slowly, sadly, 
like an absent-minded woman’s hand stirs a cup of hot tea 
with a teaspoon, dissolving 
a little cube of sugar.

In Exercises, Ulmer continues, Ritsos’s voice “is at once sodden and airy. Rocks are pensive, agency limited, a distrusting star looks a man in the eye, and one must get used to having to justify everything. The poems are monstrously beautiful, almost hopeful.”

This hope allowed Ritsos to endure the many traumas placed in his path. He was born in Monemvasia in 1909, into a wealthy family that fell into poverty when he was very young. Most of his relatives died early of tuberculosis, a disease that also afflicted him in his early adulthood and led him to drop out of university. By 25, he was already on his way to becoming one of Greece’s national treasures when the Ioannis Metaxas dictatorship publicly burned his poem “Epitaphios” at the foot of the Acropolis. One of his most enduring poems, it was inspired by the police killings of striking Thessalonian tobacco workers. Above all, Ritsos’s poetry was so widely beloved owing to his ability to speak about the country in plain language—not as a way to retreat into a pastoral world filled with vines, olives, and sun-broken rocks, but as a means to explore what the Greeks call ρωμιοσύνη (or “Romiosini,” meaning “Romanness” and/or “Greekness”). This is a term for which no two Greeks appear to have the same definition, but which largely views the Greek national consciousness as the inheritor of both the fatalistic world of the old pagan gods and the socially revolutionary promise of Christianity. In his poetry, Ritsos navigated these complex investigations by talking about his daily life and simple physical objects.

“I hide behind simple things so that you’ll find me,” Ritsos writes in “The Meaning of Simplicity.” “If you don’t find me, you’ll find the things, you’ll touch what my hand has touched, our handprints will merge.” This merging of handprints becomes the crux of all great Ritsos poems: the desire to establish a bond and grounding that bond in our shared hope for a better future. He infuses physical objects with an innately Greek sense of history, often with a quiet yet transgressive eroticism. We see this in “Stones,” where pebbles he brought home after a walk on the beach magically transform into ancient statuettes when spilled across his kitchen table. Pebbles become “a small Nike or Artemis’s dog, / and this one, on which a young man stood with wet feet at noon, / is a Patroclus with shady shut eyelashes.” Shattering the dictatorship’s sexual conformism and censorship, the surreal transformation of an ordinary pebble into the beautiful Patroclus of the Iliad is sexually re-energized in the present when Ritsos watches a young man stand on top of that pebble on the beach. It’s no coincidence that this is a poem Constantine P. Cavafy might have written on one of his happier days. Cavafy was Ritsos’s only real rival to the title of Greece’s greatest 20th century poet, and Ritsos was deeply engaged with his work, publishing Twelve Poems for Cavafy in 1963. While scholars have typically understood Ritsos as heterosexual, some of his poems, including “Stones,” have consistently been read as homoerotic, although there is virtually no evidence that he had same-sex encounters or desires.

Aside from Exercises, Ritsos penned around 25 collections during this rare, stable period of his life, earning him widespread acclaim in Greece and abroad. In 1956, his “Moonlight Sonata” was awarded the inaugural National Prize for Poetry. He toured his work internationally, especially in the socialist world, traveling to the Soviet Union, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. In 1958, “Epitaphios” was set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, who also composed the score for the international hit Zorba the Greek (1964). To this day, poems such as “Epitaphios” and “Peace” are still used as rallying cries by political movements across Europe.

In 1968, after a year imprisoned on Gyaros, Ritsos’s health completely broke down, and he was diagnosed with cancer. Following an international campaign calling for his release, the Colonels transferred him to the island of Samos, where his wife ran a medical practice. He remained there under house arrest until late 1970, when he was allowed to return to Athens. He lived in the capital, far longer than he originally thought he would, until his death in 1990.

Nonetheless, the 15-year period preceding his sentence on Gyaros was arguably the happiest in Ritsos’s life. Between his release from Makronisos in 1952 and his re-arrest in 1967, he had married Falitsa Georgiadis, a physician, and in 1955 they welcomed a daughter, Eri. One of his earliest poems written after his return, “Peace,” retains much of the demotic simplicity of his prison years: “Peace is the smell of food in the evening, / when the halting of a car in the street is not fear, / when a knock on the door means a friend.”

Key to Exercises, and to Ritsos’s work overall, is αντίσταση, or “resistance,” in all its manifestations: defiance against authoritarianism, the battle to defend free speech, or Ritsos’s unshakeable faith in a more equitable future. In his case, that meant a lifelong adherence to communist ideals and the redemptive power of revolution. This revolutionary fervor is expressed not just in the grim realities of life as a political prisoner, or in his exploration of the Greek classics. It’s also expressed through Christianity, the faith his beloved Greece is so deeply rooted in. Ritsos plainly says as much in “Not Political,” one of the more striking poems in Exercises.

“In the middle of so many nights, so many rocks, so many killings,” he writes, in this rare interlude between Greek dictatorships, the ghostly promise of “Revolution” still hovers over the horrors of the 20th century, widening “our avenues / for a human encounter.” The poet listens quietly for footsteps, until he hears the distant drumming of approaching soldiers thinking “about the road along which they’ve come / and the road ahead.” Then, the vision of a holy war between fascism and communism, where the soldiers drink from eucharist-shaped canteens, brings about the final apparition of “he”—none other than Jesus Christ himself. He, whose earthly attempt to expel the thieves from the temple has failed, just like revolutionary politics, but who promises us we’ll meet again in the afterlife. A just heaven as a final reward for enduring the wickedness of the world:

If we’ve won nothing else—he said— we’ve learned at least 
that we’ll meet again tomorrow. We teach this, 
we preach this by way of not preaching at all, 
because whoever says he loves what he loves doesn’t preach, 
he only says what he can’t help but say.

Spring Ulmer’s contribution to Yannis Ritsos’s work in English is a critical step toward a more accurate portrait of this essential European poet, whose relevance remains understated, especially in the Anglophone world.