Lamentation and the Mourner’s “Homecoming” in the Modernist Poetics of Yannis Ritsos

MODERN GREEK STUDIES

SPEAKER: Andrew Ntapalis, PhD candidate in Modern Greek, Department of the Classics, Harvard University

This talk outlines ways in which the Greek modernist poet, Yannis Ritsos, uses the symbolic language of traditional lament culture and mortuary ritual to aestheticize his views on the role of social poetry. Although the psychological transformations of Ritsos’ mourning mothers recall those of Gorky and Brecht’s maternal protagonists, Ritsos frames her lament as a ritualized journey of reincorporation that parallels the death and symbolic resurrection of the deceased proletariat hero. In doing so, Ritsos’ mourner can be identified as the poet persona through whose “lament” he emphasizes social poetry’s restorative potential, echoing as it were the poetic philosophies of Paul Éluard and Ilia Ehrenburg. This talk therefore offers a much-needed discussion of modern Greek appropriations of lament, while more broadly showing how Greek modernism’s handling of its indigenous culture is less “conservative” or “national” than is often conceived.