The New Oresteia of Yannis Ritsos (review)

Reviews 171 proceeded to send the letter to others, while misfortune has destroyed those who faUed to do so. It's up to you now. Yorgos Chouharas New York City Yannis Ritsos, The New Oresteia of YannL· Ritsos. Translated with Notes and Commentary by George Pilitsis and Philip Pastras. Introduction by Kostas Myrsiades. New York: Pella. 1991. Pp. xxxii + 168. $12.00. The ancient myth of the House of Atreus, particularly as dramatized by Aeschylus, has been one of the most popular and inspiring in European literature, as evidenced by the numerous times the story has been retold. One of those indebted to Aeschylus was the amazingly prolific poet Yannis Ritsos. Much like George Seferis and other Greek authors before him, he saw in the ancient myth's tragicality a parallel to the tragicality of contemporary Greek experience. Yet, unlike most of the later versions, which remain more or less faithful to the Aeschylean prototype, Ritsos's version is highly original and unorthodox. He experimented with drama quite early in his career. Valuing his lyricism more than the realism required by the stage, however, he concluded that he was essentially a lyrical poet; what he desired supremely was the presence of what he called "the poetic vapor" in all he wrote. On the other hand, he did not wish to abandon the dramatic medium altogether. Hence, from the late 1940s onward, he produced a series of choral poems—dramatic monologues in the first person plural—modeled on the choral odes of ancient drama. Then, from 1959 to 1978, he produced thirteen "mythological" poems in free verse—dramatic monologues once again, but now employing the first person singular except for the prologue and epilogue, which use the third person. In each case, the speaker of the monologue proper is a mythological figure who is never identified by name yet whose identity becomes evident owing to what is said and done, and to the presence of other figures from the relevant myth. Of these 13 mythological monologues, 6 are spoken by members of the House of Atreus. These are the poems included in The New Oresteia of Yannis Ritsos. They were not composed as a group according to a pre-set plan, but were written at different times and in between other poems. Therefore, as Kostas Myrsiades remarks in his Introduction, they do not form "a coherent continguously related work . . . holistically conceived or even an integrally related work with a uniquely identifiable vision" (xxii). Instead, they present "shifts of perspective, forcing a totally new view of the ancient Oresteia. ... [I]f this restatement does not deny the validity or contemporaneity of the classical tragedies, it clearly reevaluates their function as an intertext for post- 172 Reviews modernist works. . . . Taken together, the poems provide shifting angles of vision, allowing family members, save Clytemnestra, to present themselves from their own point of view, and all but Orestes from vantage points at the end of their lives" (xxiv). All six monologues intermingle the ancient myth with the tragedy of the poet's own life and also the tragedy of his immediate family and of contemporary Greece in general. Thus past and present are fused. The mythical figures become the poet's masks expressing his reactions to the Asia Minor disaster, the second World War, the Axis occupation, the resistance, the civil war, and finally the military junta of 1967-1974. The ancient myth's crime and suffering find their equivalents in the civil strife, usurpation, fratricide, and continuous political and social turmoil of modern Greek history. The contemporary elements are insinuated by means of apparently insignificant events that are crucially significant, in ways that mix the conscious with the subconscious, the external with the internal. In searching for the essence of these monologues, one must not overlook Ritsos's well-known commitment to the Communist cause. What is remarkable here, as Pandelis Prevelakis states in his book O ποιητής Γιάννης Ρίτσος: συνολική Θεώϕηση του Î-ϕγου του (Athens: Kedros, 1981), is that Ritsos eventually revealed his reservations regarding the certainty of his comrades, and that he himself gave way "as a man of his time, to existential agony" (269 et passim). The monologues manifest this change by expressing "the multiple meanings and vanity of...