| book details |

Monochords

By (author) Yannis Ritsos, With Chiara Ambrosio, Translated by Paul Merchant, Introduction by David Harsent, Afterword by Gareth Evans

| on special |

normal price: R 539.95

Price: R 485.95

| add to trolley |

| book description |

Returning to the island of Samos during the summer of 1979, where he had spent long periods of exile throughout his life, Greek poet Yannis Ritsos composed a remarkable collection of 336 single-line poems, written at a rate of about 10 a day: the Monochords, each line an essential observation of a moment; a personal archive of time past, present and future. In London in 2020, during a period of Covid confinement, artist and filmmaker Chiara Ambrosio began responding to Ritsosâ€™ words through linocut images: an experiment in entering the space opened by each poem, rendering it in line and shape; a daily ritual that accompanied her along a strange year of exile from life. 'Yannis Ritsos composed monochorda, single-line poems, as antidotes to the concocted complexities silencing truth. Chiara Ambrosioâ€™s linocuts, beautifully intermingled with Ritsos' words, add their own ascetic harmony to his monochorda thus boosting their pertinence to our dissonant age.' â€“ Yanis Varoufakis 'This meditative book is an inspiring act of repair twice over, for ordeals of seclusion, threat, and tedium past and present.' â€“ Marina Warner 'A major poem by one of the greatest European poets of the past 100 years, in an exemplary translation & with a further superb expansion into a year's journey of linocuts make this book a vessel that holds urgently needed communal life-force.' - Stephen Watts