Yannis Ritsos
Diaries of Exile
INTRODUCTION
Just days after the last entry in Diary of Exile II, Yannis Ritsos — future recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, a few months shy of his fortieth birthday and already the author of several of the dozens of volumes of poetry, drama and prose he would eventually produce — wrote this letter:
February 3, 1949 — My dear sweet little Kaitoula — three letters from you all at once (from January 13, 14 and 15) — what joy, what joy — what celebrations — that’s how you should write to me — my loneliness fills — I’m close to you — we chat. Today there’s cold and wind — what wind — you can’t take even a single step outside — an endless hum — the snow swirls — it doesn’t stop — an awful vitality and power — you’re in the heart of “eternal nature,” and your own heart calls out in response — hum meeting hum — we have to create something big — very big — I’m sure, my life, that you feel it too — “we must silence the lightning — speak our name there where the roads listen to no other words” — I wrote that somewhere. Your first poem came, too. There are good elements — but it doesn’t begin and it doesn’t end. The beginning is the most important. Listen, Kaitoula — the image is always a means and not an end in itself — we’ve said this before — you know it — you should avoid mere decoration — Don’t cover up your heart — when there’s no heart, there’s nothing at all — of course heart alone isn’t enough — but it shouldn’t be missing, either. Guard against the allure of the word, which always leads to verbosity — but don’t ever neglect that allure in the name of an emotion or of spontaneity. Palamas wrote to me in a letter: “art doesn’t divide — it unites.” Yes, yes. Art and technique, then — heart and mind — and something more — how can I put it? — I need time and space — and where are they? Words measured with an eyedropper. I expect more poems from you, I want to see them, correct them, send them back. Write, don’t stop. For all your mistakes — there’s no disguising talent. And you have it, yes. My golden Kaitoula — if I were by your side how much I would have to say to you. And those big lovely eyes of yours with their childlike expression would chase my words thirstily in the air. I can picture you. I received Tasoulis’s three letters, too. I wrote back. His worry preoccupies me so. Why did you tell him I’d lost weight? Mirandoula heard and is out of her mind with worry. She thinks I’m sick. But I’m just fine. A thousand thousand kisses
Yannis*
Ritsos was writing from a detention center for political prisoners in the village of Kontopouli on the island of Limnos. The Kontopouli camp, where Ritsos had been held since the fall of 1948, was small, just a few buildings which the Germans had used as warehouses during the Axis occupation of Greece. Those buildings now housed about 150 men, many of whom, including Ritsos, would later be transferred to larger camps such as Makronisos and Yaros, where life for the exiles was far harsher.
The letter’s recipient was the young Kaiti Drosou, a poet herself, married at the time to the “Tasoulis” to whom Ritsos refers, but later to the writer Aris Alexandrou, another close friend of Ritsos’s. At the time of this letter’s writing, Alexandrou was also incarcerated on Limnos, at the detention center in the village of Moudros to which the poet refers near the end of Diary of Exile I. Nearly twenty years later, in 1967, when a coup plunged Greece into the seven- year darkness of a military dictatorship, Alexandrou and Drosou would flee to Paris, while Ritsos would be arrested almost immediately and sent to the prison camps of Yaros and then Leros; after 1970 he was confined to house arrest on Samos. During both periods of Ritsos’s imprisonment, Drosou was one of his most frequent correspondents.
The letters Ritsos sent from his island exile often resemble the one above: thoughts piled on thoughts, strings of sentence fragments linked (or divided) by dashes, a text that might seem slapdash were it not for the beauty of Ritsos’s famous calligraphic hand. Certain themes and motifs recur, too: his concern less for his own cruel fate than for his loved ones and their anxieties; his earnest desire for more letters, more words; his constant use of diminutives — Kaitoula, Tasoulis, Mirandoula; and above all his commitment to the grand project of poetry itself, a project ultimately as collaborative as the correspondence he struggled to maintain with family and friends during those trying years. Even in the darkest times, with the wind and cold and solitude, Ritsos keeps his thoughts trained on the “something big” that an emphatically plural “we” must create, on the joint venture of literature and art as activities capable — as the great literary figure Kostis Palamas had written to Ritsos — of bringing people together across distance and time.
In his letters from exile, Ritsos rarely succumbs to despair. Unlike the increasingly terse, clipped tone of the Diaries, the letters are painfully upbeat and encouraging, with a feverish emphasis on the need to write, to work, to produce — an indication, it would seem, of the emotional and intellectual isolation that characterized his life as a political prisoner. Ritsos’s repeated invocation of the work of words as perhaps the only saving grace in his present circumstances becomes, in fact, almost a mantra. As Ritsos would write under house arrest in Samos in 1971 to Alexandrou in his Parisian exile, urging his friend to plow ahead with his novel Mission: Box, “The only thing I always urged upon myself and my friends was (and is) as much a principle as a method, a form of therapy or salvation: work.”
These three Diaries of Exile are fruits of that unremitting labor. They are not the only poems Ritsos wrote while in exile: even under the harshest conditions on Makronisos, Ritsos was constantly writing, on whatever scraps of paper he could find, including the linings of cigarette packs, which he hid or buried in bottles in the ground. The Diaries of Exile, though, are something different, situated in a space between genres: part poem, part diary, part letter to the world. Actual letters from the camps, even if written by a singular I to a singular you, were never wholly private correspondences, since they inevitably passed through the censor’s hands. In contrast, Ritsos could write these poetic diaries as freely as he pleased, but couldn’t be sure whether they would ever make it off the island. And while a diary usually records the daily experiences of a single individual, these long poetic sequences often address a you who is elsewhere; they are written, too, in a first person that shifts between singular and plural, the poet’s identity often subsumed within the collective identity of the exiles at large.
Not only do Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile straddle generic boundaries, but material itself sometimes migrates from one (kind of) text to another. The phrase “WRITE ONLY TEN LINES” in the November 8 entry of Diary of Exile I, for instance, is a direct quotation of the instruction censors stamped on prisoners’ outgoing, government-issued postcards. Drosou also quoted the closing line from Ritsos’s New Year’s letter of 1950 in a poem she dedicated to him and included in her first volume of poetry, which reached Ritsos on Makronisos just four months after he first wrote the line: “I kiss the top of your head in the sun.” Shortly after receiving the volume, Ritsos engaged in a reciprocal gesture. Another letter to Drosou, dated May 6, 1950, begins, “Kaitoula — my Kaitoula — your letter brought our garden to me — so many roses and yellow daisies — and here I was afraid they’d withered” — and a May 31 entry in Diary of Exile III incorporates part of Drosou’s letter, responding with a promise that seems as much to himself as to her: