LITTLE LONELINESSIn the open corner of the courtyard, in soapy water,some roses drooped with the burden of their fragrance.Nobody smelled these roses.No loneliness is small.ΜΙΚΡΗ ΜΟΝΑΞΙΑΣτὴ γωνιὰ τῆς αὐλῆς, μέσα στὰ σαπουνόνερα,κάτι τριαντάφυλλα καμπούριασαν ἀπ’ τὸ ϐάρος τῆς εὐωδιᾶς τους.Κανένας δὲ μύρισε αὐτά τὰ τριαντάφυλλα.Καμιὰ μοναξιὰ δὲν εἶναι μικρή.SHORT STORYA soggy sailor’s capbobbed on the waveslike black bread thrown awaywhile people starved.It was war.ΣΥΝΤΟΜΗ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑἝνα μουσκεμένο ναυτικὸ κασκέτοτραμπαλιζόταν πάνω στὰ κύματασὰ μαῦρο ψωμὶ πεταμένοτὴν ὥρα ποὺ πεινοῦσαν οἱ ἄνθρωποι.Εἶταν ὁ πόλεμος.
Two Poems
Yannis Ritsos
Translated from the Greek by Spring Ulmer
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Exercises 1950-1960 by Yannis Ritsos, translation © Spring Ulmer (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025)
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.
Spring Ulmer, a 2020 NEA Translation Fellow and a 2016 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize winner, is also the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles (selected by Sonia Sanchez for Kore Press’s 2007 First Book Award), The Age of Virtual Reproduction, Bestiality of the Involved, and Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of Tupelo Press’s 2022 Dorset Prize).
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.
"the work of a poet who stared into the abyss and faithfully recorded what he found there"
— Christopher Merrill
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