Exercises 1950–1960 by Yannis Ritsos

Yannis Ritsos wrote Exercises after being tortured and detained during the Greek Civil War. Incredibly, the poems are filled not with bitterness but with amazement—at a solitary leaf, a rope ladder, rose and grey light. Alongside such tenderness, of course, the nation state stretches out in the sun, teeth bared. What to say about the human condition? Not long after completing these poems, Ritsos was again imprisoned.

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) was a prolific Greek poet and communist. Throughout his life, he was imprisoned multiple times for his support of the Greek Left and his resistance to the rotating fascist powers which had gripped Greece through the middle of the twentieth century. He was a winner of the Lenin Peace Prize and was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.