Fellow Diners by Yannis Ritsos
"Fellow Diners" by Yannis Ritsos is a short, eight-line lyric poem written in free verse that explores themes of existential frustration and the surreal intersection of the ordinary and the extraordinary. The title alludes to the Last Supper, where thirteen places are set for Christ and his disciples, framing the poem's meditation on communal meals and the complexities of human connection. The opening lines convey the modern commuter's struggle with public transportation, marked by "endless transfers" and delays that transform a logistical inconvenience into a profound metaphysical pause. This delay evokes a sense of absence, where the living feel disconnected from the dead, complicating the nature of presence and absence.
As the traveler arrives at the destination, they find a table set for a meal, accompanied by the unsettling invitation to enter. The poem's atmosphere shifts with a warning about the absence of a floor, suggesting a disorienting reality that bends the boundaries of the familiar. The closing lines introduce the paradox of comfort linked to self-sufficiency, as those who are truly comfortable are described as having "eaten both of their wings and are no longer hungry." Ritsos employs a muted tone that intertwines the mundane with the surreal, prompting readers to reflect on the nature of existence, assurance, and the often uncomfortable truths that lie beneath the surface of everyday life.
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Subject Terms
Fellow Diners by Yannis Ritsos
First published: 1972, in Muted Poems; English translation collected in Exile and Return: Selected Poems, 1967-1974, 1985
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“Fellow Diners” is a short lyric of eight lines in free verse. The title refers to the thirteen places set for Christ and his disciples at the Last Supper.
The poem begins on a bracingly contemporary note of the modern commuter’s frustration with public transit. “Endless transfers” suggests that the journey to the communal meal, which seems to have been taken by train or bus, has been arduous, fraught with delays and detours. These transfers were “unwanted,” at least by the traveler, but perhaps both wanted and “willed” by those running the system.
In the face of so much systematic frustration, “suddenly” time itself “delays, holds back.” The merely logistical inconvenience of transit delays has now become a metaphysical delay, halting all forward progress. The oppressive authority behind the “willed” transfers is echoed in the will that “holds back” the traveler’s advance.
During this hiatus, “the dead disappear,” and those still present, the living, are actually “absent.” This phenomenon is expressed with almost telegraphic economy: “those present: absent.” The colon acts as an equal sign, showing that there is no difference between the present and the absent, the living and the dead—or what difference there is, is minimal.
In a way, then, the traveler has crossed over a boundary, from the everyday world of buses, transfers, and time schedules, into a world where these systems of order do not prevail. When he arrives at his destination, he notes that “the table is set.” Everything seems to be in order. A voice invites him in, with a troubling note of superfluous reassurance: “Nothing’s wrong. Come in.” Yet it is this very assurance that signals that something may be very wrong indeed.
There are twelve glasses on the table. “And one more,” presumably for the guest who has just entered. (The unlucky number thirteen is tactfully not mentioned.) The identity of the voice, like that of the guest, is unknown. Again the voice interrupts, this time in a tone of warning: “Still, be careful.”
The reason for the warning becomes apparent in the next line: “don’t step on the floor—there is no floor. Here. . . .” The line break suggests that there may be a floor elsewhere. Yet what sort of place is this, without a floor? The warning seems almost like a joke, and yet there is a surreal ring of truth to the warning. In a world of “Endless transfers” where “time delays, hold back,” and “the dead disappear,” anything may happen. Yet if there is no floor, what of the voice’s assurance that nothing is wrong?
The next line is tautological in its structure: “those who can sit comfortably are only those.” Taken by itself, this equation is a self-evident truth: Those who sit comfortably are those who sit comfortably. Like the scene itself, however, this assertion cannot be taken at face value, for what appears to be true here is not necessarily true. The final line completes the sentence by qualifying the second term of the equation. Those who sit comfortably are only those “who have eaten both of their wings and are no longer hungry.” What this means exactly is left for the traveler, and the reader, to decide.
Forms and Devices
“Fellow Diners” appears in a volume entitled Muted Poems (1972), the tone of which, as Edmund Keeley writes in Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Vision (1983), is “muted in its terror.” The dramatic situation, a Last Supper, is that of imminent betrayal. The false note of reassurance—“Nothing’s wrong”—in the center of the poem arouses one’s suspicion, which is heightened by the disembodied voice of the host informing the guest, quite calmly, that there is no floor. That suspicion is confirmed when he just as calmly instructs the guest about what one must do to dine comfortably there. His matter-of-factness is the source of the poem’s muted terror.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of “Fellow Diners” is the effortless juxtaposition of the miraculous with the everyday. Transfers and table settings give way to a room without a floor and diners who eat their own wings. Yannis Ritsos is a master of this surrealist technique. What distinguishes him from other more strident surrealists is the quiet way he goes about his work. His language is simple and direct. He dispenses with metaphor, simile, and other devices of poetic embellishment, opting instead for poetic economy. The clipped, fragmented sentences of the first six lines—expressing the hurried chaos of transfers and delays, as well as the fragmented society the poem addresses—finally roll out in the fluid, if perplexing, image in the last lines.
The perplexing image of the diners eating their own wings is stated as factually as the number of glasses on the table. This tone is appropriate, since in the surrealist view there is no clear distinction between the rational and the irrational or between reality as one commonly thinks of it and that super-reality that is grasped through imaginative apperception.