Ritsos himself has written about his urge since early childhood in Laconia to write laconic poems, recognizing that this is no simple play on words but a temperamental necessity. Corridor and Stairs is such a book of short poems—which since 1963 have gone under the general title of Testimonies—and is of particular interest because they were written during the years of the dictatorship and because all of them deal, either specifically or indirectly, with the tragedies and traumas of that period. Basically, all of Ritsos's short poems are testimonies and witnesses to fleeting moments of life to which he may respond with lightning speed by pinning them down under his microscope to examine them minutely and thus magnify them into life's awareness. They are compact and concrete, lacking abstraction, crammed with objects and things. Even persons are seen objectively, unsentimentally, with an almost cruel detachment, as though...