The Greek communist poet Yiannis Ritsos (1909-1990) was one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century. He wrote more than 100 books — poems, plays, fiction, translations and essays. His work has been translated into over 40 different languages.

He won the Lenin Peace Prize and was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pablo Picasso drew his picture. Louis Aragon called Ritsos “the greatest poet of our age.”

Twenty-five years after his death, Ritsos’s poetry remains largely unavailable in Britain. Following the publication earlier this year of Romiosini, a book-length poem about the Greek communist partisans in the second world war, Smokestack Books has now published another epic poem by Ritsos, Epitaphios (£8.95).

This is the first time the poem has been published in book form in English. First published in May 1936 in the Communist Party newspaper Rizospastis, it is dedicated “to the heroic workers of Thessaloniki” and inspired by the photograph of a mother weeping over the body of her son who died when Greek police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of striking tobacco workers, killing 30 people and wounding 300 more.

“My son, the child from my womb, dear heart of my own heart,/The nestling in my humble yard, my desert’s only bloom./How can your eyes be shut so tight and you not see me sob? / Why don’t you stir, why don’t you hear the bitter words I cry?/Here in the middle of the street I let my white hair down/And shroud the wilted lily of your fair and comely face.”

As translator Rick Newton explains in a brilliant introduction to the book, Ritsos was consciously drawing on the 6th-century Greek Orthodox Epitaphios Thrinos, combining Mary’s lament at Christ’s tomb with popular Greek folk traditions of resurrection and spring.

With its echoes of Homer, Euripides, Sophocles and Thucydides, the bereaved mother is also Hecuba, Andromache and Antigone. The result is an extraordinarily painful poem, a universal lament sung by every bereaved mother who ever knelt and wept “on the bloodstained street with her heart flayed, her wing broken.” Epitaphios is one of the great elegies of European literature, comparable to anything by Milosz, Rilke or Celan, a heartbreaking lament for all the injustice and cruelty of the world.

A few weeks after the publication of Epitaphios, Ioannis Metaxas seized power in Athens. His proto-fascist government dissolved parliament, prohibited strikes and banned the Communist Party.

A book-burning ceremony in front of the temple of Zeus included books by Goethe, Freud, Plato and — of course — Epitaphios. Ritsos’s books were banned in Greece until 1954.

In 1958 musician and composer Mikis Theodorakis set parts of Epitaphios to music. It was recorded by many singers including Nana Mouskouri, Grigorios Buithkotsis and Yiannis Thomopoulos. In 1963 when Grigorios Lambrakis was assaulted by right-wing assassins — the subject of the Costa-Gavras movie — the crowd gathered outside the hospital in Thessalonika where he lay dying sang the words of the bereaved woman in Epitaphios.

“You are not gone, my dear. You are right here inside my veins./Go deep inside the veins, my boy, of everyone and live./The marching crowds are passing by, on horseback and on foot./Just look at them: they’re tall and strong, as beautiful as you./And in their midst, I see you resurrected, my dear son,/Your face painted a thousand times on each and every one./And I, the poor and frail one, the oldest of them all,/Stoop down and, with my nails, tear the soil into clods/And throw them straight into the face of all those monstrous wolves/Who took your fragile beauty, son, and shattered it to bits./I’m heading for your brothers as I add my rage to theirs./I’ve taken up your rifle, dear. You, go to sleep, my bird.”