Penelope’s Despair

During his long career, Yannis Ritsos suffered exile, imprisonment, and the banning or burning of his works by successive Greek governments for his political activism. Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, Ritsos drew the great tradition of Greek myth and history into the modern political struggle over the future of his homeland. And yet, John Simon has also described Ritsos as “a great bard of loneliness, but of loneliness ennobled and overcome.”