Yannis Ritsos was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, like Neruda, his poems are saturated with a majestic political vision blended with great lyric sensitivity. His short poems are intensely meditative and introspective while his longer poems encompass the grand sweep of history. His poetry is deeply grounded in the Greek landscape and in life of its people. He was deeply influenced by his mother’s and his brother’s early deaths, by the misfortune of his early life, his own uprootedness and the severe poverty which afflicted Greece. The poetry is driven by a transcendent sensuousness and muted anger. It ranges from the sublime to the ordinary, from the mythic to the modern, from the overtly political to the deeply personal. Presented with the Greek en face, the poems affirm Ritsos’s reputation as one of the truly important poets in the modern literature of Greece. This bilingual edition offers a sweeping assessment of his enduring achievement.

The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age." He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as the Stalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared "this prize it's more important for me than the Nobel". His poetry was banned at times in Greece for its left wing content. Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953). Ritsos mainly wrote poems with political content, "serving communism with his art" as modern philologists describe.

Yannis Ritsos' profile page

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) was born in the small village Kolibari west of Chania on the Greek island of Crete in 1947. At a young age his family moved first to Thessaloniki and then to Athens where he was educated, achieving a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences at the Panteion University of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years, and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked in several different jobs over the years. He attended Simon Fraser University for a year, taking English Literature in a non-degree program. He has written three novels and a large number of collections of poetry, which are slowly appearing as published works. Various articles, poems and short stories in Greek as well as in English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Australia and Greece. After working as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver and stock broker, he now lives in White Rock where he spends his time writing, gardening and traveling. In 2006 he founded Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company in Surrey, BC with the goal of publishing literary books.

Manolis Aligizakis' profile page