Bashō's Road

to the small poem and the quiet voice within

1. jean 08.08.12 / 10pm

   The Ritsos painting… I am reminded of Andrew Wyeth’s girl in the meadow.
2. norbert blei 08.09.12 / 12am

   Yannis Ritsos is the author of the poem, “Morning.” He was a famous poet (very political—leftist) among the modern Greek writers, who died in 1990. The first painting is signed “Dali.” The second, a famous work of a woman looking into a mirror by Picasso.
3. Hatto Fischer 08.09.12 / 9am

   Freedom ( in memory of Ritsos)
   by Hatto Fischer

   When no money is earned
   and only emptiness brought home,
   then freedom is the ability to live
   the craziness of the pottery man
   Ritsos described as seeking
   shelter from his nagging wife
   by staying in his shack
   to make out of clay naked women
   whose breasts he would bite
   before going happily to bed…

   …but also a lawyer became a fanatic
   about repairing cars like homo faber
   for he too could not take the shouts
   of his wife dressing him down
   over and again as if a small boy
   dreaming of a fast car with a special engine
   purring like a cat when traveling along a road
   leading past the moon to the stars.

   Athens 26.5.2012

   Note: when I arrived in Athens in 1988 I had some phone calls with Ritsos. We made a promise to meet, but then it was too late. That year he died. A puzzle was that he had accepted a prize from East Germany as if he could not anticipate what was to come in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or what the political system of East Germany represented. This poet who had experienced himself prison during the Military Dictatorship, and who had written about soldiers although killed in battle but refusing to die since they would lie in their graves, their hands clutching the ropes for the church bells, hence waiting till freedom was gained and they could ring the bells, this poet whom Pablo Neruda called his brother when reading his poems at the Round House in London 1969, he is a reminder of the paradox of freedom and political ideology.
4. Hatto Fischer 08.09.12 / 9am

   In the poem by Ritsos, should it not be ‘and she hung the sheets out the window’, for right now the ‘t’ is missing and only ‘he’ can confuse the reader.
5. norbert blei 08.10.12 / 9pm

   Hatto,

   Thank you as always for your insightful comments…not to mention your own poetry and view of world culture from the setting of Athens, which you so inhabit physically, morally and spiritually. To have once been in touch with Yannis Ritsos…I envy you.

   Except for a missing period after the word “shutters” in the first line, the translation of the poem, “Morning” was done by Nikos Stangos and reads as it appears here. Given the nature of all translations…we go with what we are given.

   Norbert Blei

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