A Salute to Ritsos

18 januari 2006 In February 1949, on the page of the French Authors Committee that the Lettres Françaises used to publish at the time, Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos was presented to our readers with a long poem of his under the title ‘A Letter to France’, translated by Neoklis Koutouzis.

[…]

Since then we heard nothing else of this poet – that is until a small book of his appeared bringing us his news. This book is none other but the Moonlight Sonata, which we received in a translation by Alekos Karatzas and which are publishing today. The poet is in Athens now, living as a free man.* He is forty-nine years old, and in this literary text we can now bear witness to his natural grandeur. We must salute him as he rightfully deserves and shout it from the rooftops: he is one of the greatest, one of the most remarkable poets of our time. As far as I am concerned, at least, it has been a long time since I was last moved by the violent shock of genius. I am fully aware that this word must never be uttered, let alone written, but I cannot help it. I will not retract it.

With regard to the poem in question, published in December 1956, the translator has written to me that “it expresses the tragic stalemate which individualism and the entire bourgeois civilisation have fallen in.”

I imagine that, after putting in so much hard work and love into translating it, he is telling me that in order to conciliate me as a reader, such as I am, with the poem. After all, I know that on those occasions when I read this poem to friends who perhaps needed some such introductory remark before they could begin to allow themselves to admire it but I omitted to pass on this piece of information – I noticed a look of bewilderment in their eyes, the kind of perturbation that people experience when they do not know where they are being led. They told me that the poem is dark and difficult and that actually it would probably suit a different type of review than the Lettres. I did not let these remarks stop me. Perhaps I am wrong in showing so much faith in the readers of the Lettres Françaises, but I do not consider them as being capable of reading only certain types of poetry, or at least, poetry that is accompanied by explicit recommendations that would legitimate their enthusiasm about it.

Was it really Ritsos’ intention to reveal the stalemate of individualism and bourgeois civilisation? I have no idea. I would imagine that it is possible to understand the Sonata in the moonlight of such an assertion, for it can be easily founded. It reminds me of the way Michelet interpreted Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), when he observed that what Gericault showed in the painting is France on the night of the Restoration; it also brings to mind Proudon’s interpretation of Courbet’s Retour de foire (Return from the Fair), in which he sees the entire history of society under Louis-Philippe’s reign. Therefore, it is not only today that those who are impassioned with politics seek a deeper relationship between that which they admire and their beliefs, often with unequal success.

Justify, justify . . . Who would dare say that such an attitude does not spring from a laudable feeling? I would add that, sometimes, this kind of interpreting actually helps the work of art, be it a painting, a poem or a washbowl; we must understand, that it functions thanks to the touching intention of the theoretician to build a bridge between the work of art and those that may just pass it distractedly by. And it is exactly mostly for that reason that such interpretations are of some worth and sometimes even prevail. We must see them as poetic images, but nevertheless not take their translations too seriously; after all, for Michelet it was impossible not to recognise France in the Radeau, and his image is the image of a poet, and I salute that poet in him. But to take the interpretation in earnest, to believe that Gericault’s painting depicts France under the Restoration would be nonsensical. That way we would be succumbing yet again to what is justly called vulgar sociologism.

And now I would simply like to put the Sonata on the turntable and create around you the appropriate silence whence the song will emerge, whence the light of the moon will diffuse – a light that is neither the calm and pretty moonlight of Verlaine, the kind of lighting fit for water-fountains or masks, nor the geometric black-and-white game of modern music, the German lunar Pierrot. (Pierrot Lunaire, by Arnold Scheinberg)

On this spring night, when an “old woman, dressed in black speaks to a young man”, is that the bourgeois class? Is that individualism? What fascinates me personally is that what streams in along with the night glow through the two windows is not the faces of Fêtes Galantes*, nor the ghosts haunting Macbeth, nor the unreal world of fairies and elves, but “the cemented aerial city, whitewashed in moonlight”.

At this point, the dual meaning of the image is not achieved through the use of “poetic words”, by resorting to the tested stock of all things noble. It is the disembowelled armchair in the room, or the shoes with the worn heels which are taken to the cobbler on the corner once a month, or again the pots hanging on the wall in the kitchen “shining like big round eyes of impossible fish . . .”

. . . and when I pick up the cup from the table,
a hole of silence remains underneath, and at once I cover it with my palm,
so as not to peer inside – and I put the cup back in its place . . .

Where does this poetry come from? And this frisson, where does it stem from? A place where things, such as they are, enact the roles of ghosts, where a Greek Hamlet finds himself face to face not with dead kings anymore, nor a new Oedipus with the Sphinx anymore, but with deceptively familiar objects and the “hat of the dead man that falls from its peg in the darkened corridor”.

There is in this poetry the Mediterranean noise of a tideless sea. I ride this poetry like any other Mr de Marcellus* and journey in Greece, which is no longer Byron or Delacroix’ Greece, but a Greece in sisterhood with Pirandello and De Chirico’s Sicily, where beauty is not that of the mutilated marbles but the beauty of a sundered humanity – and the young man, upon leaving the old woman, says that it is true, unbuttoning his shirt over his strong chest: “the decadence of an era . . .” I needed those words, those words were enough for me in order to see him come alive (at this point, the translator’s commentary seems to be justified, if, of course, there is any truth in the belief that the moral of a story explains the folly of the story-teller who put a fox and a stork side by side).

We strive to comprehend things by analogy. Perhaps that is why I needed to talk about Sicily, although Greece should have been enough, because another night like this, in a country where I have never set my foot, would reassure me of the all too realistic nature of this night tonight, as well as because my ignorance of Greece is no less complete than my ignorance of Sicily . . .

Therefore, given that the mystery of poetry lies within the poets themselves, and because even here I need to compare, always compare and do nothing but compare, I find that in Ritsos, more than in Shakespeare or Aeschylus, there is a strange inspiration that I know well, an echo of a mystical poet whose intonation rings in my ears. And Lautréamont’s name comes to round up these far too long prolegomena. It is with a quote by Lautréamont that I now welcome Ritsos, and I bid him take a seat next to Lautréamont, together with his Sonata, and it will be “a beautiful meeting, like that of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, amongst the poets who enjoy the right to laugh in the moonlight at night – with a laughter that is “boisterous and irrepressible” like life itself.

Notes
* A paragraph with biographical information about the poet and his time in exile has been omitted for the sake of brevity.

* Fêtes Galantes is a genre of painting depicting elaborately costumed ladies and gentlemen at play in fanciful outdoor settings (vd. Watteau’s paintings). Fêtes Galantes is also the title of a poetry collection by Verlaine, which includes the poem ‘Clair de Lune’ that Aragon is referring to here.

* Comte de Marcellus (1795 - 1865), a diplomat and man of letters, who wrote his travel accounts when touring Greece.

This article, together with the entire text of the Moonlight Sonata, was published in the French literary review Lettres Françaises (French Letters), edited by Louis Aragon (No 660, February 28, 1957).