Perhaps Greece’s most important poet, Yannis Ritsos follows such eminent predecessors as Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis in the dramatic and symbolic expression of a tragic sense of life. The three volumes of Ritsos’s poetry translated here–Parentheses, 1946-47, Parentheses, 1950-61, and The Distant, 1975–represent a thirty year poetic journey an