Why Greek, old or new, shouldn't be all Greek to us

YANNIS RITSOS was one of the most prolific contemporary poets in Greece, with over 100 volumes of poems, dramatic works, essays, fiction and translations to his name. He was nominated 10 times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and according to Professor Edmund Keeley of Princeton he ranks with the two Nobel winning poets Odysseus Elyitis and George Seferis as one of the most important poets in Greece this century.

According to Professor Peter Bien of Dartmouth, the translator of Kazantzakis, the English speaking literary world has appreciated the Irish literary revival almost since its inception, but has been slow to "recognise an equally extraordinary florescence in Greece because modern Greek is not only a foreign language, but a minor one too.

Although Cavafy, Seferis and Kazantzakis are widely known, the two Nobel poets, Seferis and Elytis, have received less attention, and Yannis Ritsos - who for decades has been acknowledged in Greece as one of the major figures of the literary revival - is still a new figure in the English speaking world.

Ritsos was part of the generation in the 1930s which brought profound changes in Greek poetry with the publication of Mythistorema by Seferis, the debut of Elytis, and the inauguration of Greek surrealism with Andreas Embeirikos. Against this background Ritsos struggled to find a distinctive poetic voice, which he did with his Epitaphios.

In his poems, Ritsos evokes everyday life in contemporary Greece, but at the same time draws on the rich store of Greek history and myth - the Peloponnesian War, Theseus and Ariadne, and the waiting Penelope.

The Dead House was influenced by the terrible tragedy of the Greek defeat in Asia Minor in 1922, and by an adolescence spent in the decaying family mansion in an atmosphere of sickness and death. But the narrator is both the aged Electra reciting the horrendous event of her father's return to Mycenae, and an aged recluse of modern times recalling the piano and silver ware of her once elegant home, as well as the return of soldiers from a 20th century war.

THE Epitaphios was deeply influenced by the Good Friday liturgy of the Greek Orthodox Church, but also shows influences of the funeral speeches of Thucydides and Lysias.

Ritsos and other Greek poets of the 20th century are integral parts of a tradition that spans thousands of years. "Poetry written in Greek constitutes the longest uninterrupted tradition in the Western world," according to Professor Constantine Trypannis in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Greek Verse. "From Homer to the present day, not a single generation of Greeks has lived without expressing its joys and sorrows in verse.

The works of Ritsos and Cavafy, Seferis and Elytis are part of a tradition that dates back to Homer and Hesiod. The tragedy today is that Classical Greek is being taught in very few schools, few theology students get more than a cursory introduction to Biblical Greek, and few classes are available in Modern Greek, despite the fact that it is an official EU language.

Churchill once said: "I would have them all learn English; and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour and Greek as a treat."

Modern Greek is a treat to learn; without it we can have only second hand access to writers like Kazantzakis and Ritsos. And without any Greek we have only second hand access to the foundations of European culture: architecture, medicine, philosophy, and the very foundational works on democracy, the works of Aristotle and Plato.

The English poet Shelley once wrote: "We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece. But for Greece," he wrote in Hellas, "we might still have been savages and idolators."