In Secret: Versions of Yiannis Ritsos<\/em><\/strong> by David Harsent (Enitharmon Press)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A Broken Man in Flower: Versions of Yiannis Ritsos<\/em><\/strong> by David Harsent (Bloodaxe Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yiannis Ritsos Among His Contemporaries<\/em><\/strong>, ed. Marjorie Chambers (Colenso Books)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Monochords<\/em><\/strong> by Yiannis Ritsos, tr. Paul Merchant, linocuts by Chiara Ambrosio (Prototype Publishing)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 92 Acharnon Street<\/em>, his account of living in Greece in the 1980s, the poet and critic John Lucas describes being in a theatre in central Athens:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA few minutes before curtain up, and with most of the audience in their seats, there was a sudden stir, followed by a clapping that quickly turned into a storm of applause. A man stood framed in the entry to the stalls… Who was he? My companion replied: the poet, Yiannis Ritsos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lucas presents this as part of a discussion on the tendency to hero-worship in Greek culture, but even so, it’s hard to imagine a British poet getting that kind of reaction or being so central to the culture as Ritsos was to his. Ritsos became internationally famous at the age of twenty-seven through his poem \u2018Epitaphios\u2019, about the killing of a tobacco worker by police during a strike in 1936. The poem was published in the left-wing newspaper Rizospastis, then in book form; it was printed in an edition of ten thousand, an enormous number for the time, and almost sold out within a few days, before remaining copies were seized by the Metaxas dictatorship and publicly burned in central Athens. Ritsos was a communist in a country deeply, and violently divided, but by the time Lucas saw him in 1984 his poetry, set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, had become important to all Greeks, and after years of confinement in various camps and detention centres, the man himself had become a representative of the sufferings of the Greek people during the dictatorships and violent conflicts of the twentieth century. The musical settings by Theodorakis of the poetry of Seferis and Elytis is credited with helping those poets to their respective Nobel prizes, but Ritsos was the trailblazer in this respect. As historian Roderick Beaton puts it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTexts that had been written to be intellectually challenging on the page acquired new life, and sometimes quite new meanings, transported into a musical idiom that was at once new and felt to be deeply rooted in traditions that were uniquely Greek: rebetika and the even older rhythms and melodies of the mountains and islands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ritsos was an extremely prolific poet, especially given the hardships of his life, and his work can be crudely divided into short and long poems. The long poems are themselves varied and wide-ranging, from works of political protest, such as \u2018Epitaphios\u2019 and \u2018Romiosini\u2019 (the poem in praise of the Greek resistance fighters of World War II) to meditative monologues spoken by figures from classical Greece to lyrical, almost-spiritual poems such as \u2018Spring Symphony\u2019 and \u2018The March of the Ocean\u2019. The short poems engage more with modernism and surrealism and tend to be cryptic and complex. This was partly to evade censorship during periods of dictatorship, although Ritsos continued in this mode even after censorship was lifted, suggesting that one part of his poetic project required complexity and nuance, perhaps as a balance to his strident political works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the shorter poems that are featured in In Secret<\/em> by David Harsent. The immediately striking impression – jarring, in fact – is that Harsent gets top billing over Ritsos, at least on the cover. The poems are presented as \u201cversions\u201d which begs the question: what is the difference between a version and a translation? These versions are certainly not literal translations. In the poem \u2018Women\u2019, written in the 1940s, about the suffering of Greek women in the country’s conflicts, Harsent opens with \u201cOur women are distant\u201d. This is not what the Greek says; in the original, we have \u201cE\u00ednai pol\u00fd makrin\u00e9s oi gyna\u00edkes\u201d which literally translates as \u201cThey are very distant, women\u201d. Not \u201cour women\u201d, which has a very different tone. Is Harsent commenting on the patriarchal nature of Greek society? Maybe, but it certainly changes the poem from the original. Here are Harsent’s opening two lines:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our women are distant, their sheets smell of goodnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They put bread on the table as a token of themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here’s Edmund Keeley’s more literally accurate version:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Women are very distant. Their sheets smell of \u201cgood night\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They set bread down on the table so that we don’t feel they’re absent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the introduction to his bi-lingual edition, Keeley describes how the pronouns take us from the distancing \u201cwe\u201d to the more personal \u201cyou\u201d then back to the more general again as the speaker sees why women may indeed be \u201cdistant\u201d, with good reason, as the speaker in the poem hears \u201cthe train that’s taking the soldiers to the front\u201d. This elegant and telling movement through the poem is lost in Harsent’s version; it’s a different poem, and, I think, a less effective one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although there are extracts from some longer poems, including some of the major mythological monologues which were collected in the volume \u2018The Fourth Dimension\u2019, this selection focusses on the short, often enigmatic pieces, and they range from the 1940s, when the poem \u2018Women\u2019 was written, to \u2018The Black Boat\u2019, written just before the poet’s death in 1990. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ritsos was imprisoned for four years during the anti-communist purges after the Greek civil war in the 1940s. Then followed a period of reconciliation during which Ritsos became established as one of the major Greek poets of his era; he remained a committed communist, and when the military seized power in 1967, he was advised by friends to escape the country. He refused and was quickly arrested. He spent the next four years in prison camps often under brutal conditions, and later under house arrest. The poems in A Broken Man in Flower<\/em> were all written in this period, during which Ritsos produced an astonishing volume of work, both short poems and long, and dramatic pieces, almost all of it of great quality. The book is beautifully produced, as always by Bloodaxe. Again, Harsent takes precedence over Ritsos on the cover. The back-cover blurb tells us: \u201cRitsos … has at last found a companion translator\u201d. This claim is surprising. The Selected Poems of Yiannis Ritsos<\/em>, published in 1990 by BOA Editions, boasts seventeen translators, many of them native speakers, and including perhaps the greatest of them all, the Greek-American Kimon Friar who is credited with making modern Greek poetry available to the English-speaking world. There is a superb version of \u2018Epitaphios\u2019 by Rick M Newton, and very good translations by Edmund Keeley and Marjorie Chambers (discussed below). None of these people were waiting for Harsent to come along to show them how it\u2019s done. But I\u2019m in danger of judging a book by its cover, and in fact this edition has a lot in its favour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The book opens with an illuminating introduction by John Kittmer, former ambassador to Greece and a Ritsos scholar, the first part of which is the text of a letter Ritsos wrote to his publisher while under house arrest. This remarkable document gives a real insight into Ritsos\u2019 character. He lists the daily humiliations and harassment by the authorities. At the time the poet was suffering from bladder cancer and believed he had only a short time to live. Yet the letter seems overflowing with things to say, with concern for others and for translations of his own work, and what appears to be a natural optimism asserts itself. He describes how he had taken heart from the anti-government broadcast recently made by fellow poet George Seferis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ritsos produced an amazing amount of work during this period, yet we learn from Kittmer that during his house arrest, fearing he had only a short time to live, he burned \u201chundreds of pages of unpublished manuscripts\u201d. We also learn that in 1944 he entrusted his extensive archive to a friend, who, fearing for his life, burned it. Given these losses, his subsequent vast body of work seems even more remarkable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later in the introduction, Kittmer describes Harsent\u2019s working method: he worked from \u201calready published English translations and from literal cribs that I prepared specially for him\u201d. One wonders why, given his decades-long fascination with Yiannis Ritsos, Harsent never learned Greek. Can someone really have an insight, as a translator, into the work of a poet when they don\u2019t know the poetry in the original? But it\u2019s good to know how these versions were produced, and some of them are high-quality English-language poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This edition is almost two hundred pages long, yet on almost every page there is a striking poem. These works express the alienation and strangeness of modern life and the strains of living under dictatorship. In Kittmer’s words \u201csurrounded and oppressed by the inexplicable, the impossible and the pointless, the subject fears a loss of his own identity\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two of him, one inside the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How could you ever know<\/p>\n\n\n\n since the hidden one <\/p>\n\n\n\n is too clever to speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [from \u2018Double\u2019]<\/p>\n\n\n\n The poems are taken from eight of the nine collections that Ritsos produced during his four years of confinement. The work is very consistent in its quality, and also in its themes, expressing the alienation of – again in Kittmer’s words – life under \u201can absurd and reactionary, but menacing dictatorship\u201d. But, as often with Ritsos, there is hope and light, however fragile; there is also a sense of how the world could be better place and also, perhaps, that the poet\u2019s job is to make it so:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ah, but the long-stemmed water-glass: clear,<\/p>\n\n\n\n clean, fragile, holds its sad arabesque.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My contract with the glass is not to break it. –<\/p>\n\n\n\n [from \u2018Convalescence\u2019]<\/p>\n\n\n\n The central sequence in this book is the eighteen songs Ritsos wrote for Theodorakis when the latter requested some poetry to be set to music in 1968. Ritsos quickly wrote these famous pieces, which became widely popular. These short hymns to freedom and the Greek people are each four lines long and are based on the traditional fifteen-syllable verse of Greek demotic songs. Accordingly, they are regarded as difficult to translate. Harsent has risen to the challenge and these versions are the most impressive pieces in this collection:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The People<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Fighting for bread, fighting for life and song: fighting<\/p>\n\n\n\n to bring bread and light and song to everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No swords, no guns, but under their tongues the war-cry of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stones will shatter when they hear that song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rest of the sequence is up to this standard and gives a good impression of how it must have felt to read these poems when they appeared (or hear them, as Ritsos at first refused to allow them to be published, wanting them to be experienced as songs). But why did Harsent change the title of the sequence, which is rendered by every other translator of these poems as \u2018Eighteen Short Songs of the Bitter Motherland\u2019? Harsent has it as \u2018Homeland: Eighteen Bitter Songs\u2019. The term \u201chomeland\u201d smacks of the USA (the Department of Homeland Security), a country whose interference in his country\u2019s affairs was bitterly opposed by Ritsos and his comrades on the left. And it isn\u2019t the songs that are bitter \u2013 they\u2019re full of hope, even optimism – it\u2019s the motherland, which at the time these poems were written had killed and imprisoned thousands of its citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two books discussed so far focus on short poems and in the case of A Broken Man in Flower<\/em> on a specific period of Ritsos\u2019 career. It is good therefore to have Yiannis Ritsos Among his Contemporaries<\/em> which features mostly long poems and dramatic poetry. With editor and translator Marjorie Chambers we are on safer ground as regards her faithfulness to the original Greek; Chambers, who died in 2019, was a lecturer in modern Greek at Queen\u2019s University, Belfast, and a life-long Ritsos scholar. This book features the long poems, \u2018My Sister\u2019s Song\u2019 and \u2018The March of the Ocean\u2019, both of which display something not often associated with Ritsos, namely spirituality and religious sentiment. Ritsos was raised in the Orthodox tradition and seemed to transfer his early religious allegiance to his communism, giving the latter an almost mystical air. This perhaps explains why he never renounced his support for the Soviet Union; he lived until 1990, long enough to see, and bitterly regret, the collapse of the USSR. \u2018My Sister\u2019s Song\u2019 (1937) is full of religious imagery:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ah! the retinue that awaited<\/p>\n\n\n\n my entry to Jerusalem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like a silent Christ<\/p>\n\n\n\n I heard the trumpets of the heavens<\/p>\n\n\n\n foretold the streets<\/p>\n\n\n\n strewn with palms<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, these poems are, as Chambers points out, \u201cfused with historical awareness\u201d, and they express \u201cthe spirit of resistance against the Metaxas dictatorship in Greece and the rise of fascism in Europe\u201d. This combination is skilfully managed by the poet and is seen again in his famous poem \u2018Moonlight Sonata\u2019 for which he was awarded the Greek Literary Award for Best Poetry in 1956 (granting him a measure of official acceptance after his imprisonment in the 1940s). The poem is the first of Ritsos\u2019 great dramatic monologues and is spoken by an elderly woman to a young man. The woman seems trapped in her ancient house, wanting to leave but unable to, and there is the repeated refrain to the young man, who is about to leave: \u201clet me come with you\u201d. The imagery in the poem is drawn from Ritsos\u2019 own life; he was born into a land-owning family which, during his childhood was ruined by a series of personal and societal disasters. Ritsos saw first-hand the decay of a household and his elderly aunts living in loneliness and isolation, aloof from society. The poem is a moving meditation on age and the passage of time. But like \u2018My Sister\u2019s Song\u2019 the poem addresses broader socio-political concerns. There is an image in the poem of a dancing bear which at one level is a metaphor for the woman, suffering in her aging body, who is \u201cheavy now, and can no longer dance on her hind legs to amuse the children… submitting to her strap, her rings, her hunger\u201d. But as Chambers points out in her introduction, the dancing bear also \u201csymbolizes a Greece exhausted by the sufferings of her recent past, and having neither the strength nor the will to emerge from the humiliating neo-colonial condition in which she found herself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ritsos Among His Contemporaries<\/em> includes three essays by Chambers, one of which is entitled \u2018Ritsos in Belfast\u2019. This describes how, in 1990, shortly after Ritsos\u2019 death and while The Troubles were still ongoing in Northern Ireland, Chambers helped to organise a public reading in Belfast of \u2018Moonlight Sonata\u2019. She relates how the poem struck a chord with the audience and many people commented afterwards about how it expressed \u201cthe recurring temptation to turn in on oneself, the longing to escape from a seemingly intractable situation\u201d in which they themselves felt trapped by inter-community violence. It is a reminder that great poetry can transcend its time and place and speak to people in extreme situations. There is also a long, informative essay on the mythological monologue \u2018Ajax\u2019 (included in this selection) and a shorter, somewhat lightweight essay, \u2018Ritsos in Dublin\u2019. There is the only English version of \u2018My Sister\u2019s Song\u2019 (at least as far as I’m aware) and we also have the poem \u2018Farewell\u2019, a dramatic monologue spoken in the persona of the Cypriot freedom fighter Grigoris Afxendiou, killed by the British in 1957; again, this is the only English version of this poem that I’m aware of. The book is also valuable for the translations of some of Ritsos\u2019 contemporaries which take up half the page count and feature most notably Nikos Gatsos. All of the poets are men, which reflects the patriarchal nature of the Greek literary world in this period before the arrival of ground-breaking women poets such as Kiki Dimoula and Katerina Angelhaki-Rooke. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ritsos\u2019 oeuvre is so vast that no selection could encompass his range and versatility. Chambers herself – a lifelong reader of the poet – says that two of the long poems she featured \u201ccame into my hands almost by chance\u201d. So, a reader new to his work needs both Chambers\u2019 book and those of Harsent to get an appreciation of the range of the poet. I would however say that the four-hundred-page Selected Poems<\/em> published by BOA Editions in 1990 (and mentioned above) would be my recommended starting-place for a reader new to Ritsos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ritsos was a visual artist as well as a poet. In her introduction to Diaries of Exile<\/em> \u2013 Ritsos\u2019 notebook poems from his imprisonment in the 1940s – Karen Emmerich tells us how it was during this period of incarceration that Ritsos began his well-known artworks on found materials, mainly stones and roots. The results are justly celebrated, and an example adorns the cover of the Bloodaxe volume. It seems fitting therefore that his poetry be presented alongside visual art in Monochords<\/em>, in which each poem is accompanied by a linocut by Chiara Ambrosio. The book includes an introduction by David Harsent in which he explains that a \u201cmonochord\u201d is \u201cused as an adjective (\u2018possessing a single string\u2019) and as a noun (a musical instrument with a single string: a \u2018monochord\u2019)\u201d. The sequence consists of 336 single-line poems written, incredibly, in a single month in 1979.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The poems are translated by long-time Ritsos translator Paul Merchant, who knew the poet and has lived with his work over a lifetime. Merchant\u2019s translations of Ritsos, in his Greek issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (1968) and read by Ted Hughes on BBC radio in 1970, were among the first published in Britain. As well as the introduction by Harsent, there is an interesting \u2018Afterword\u2019 by Gareth Evans and two short \u2018preludes\u2019 by the translator and artist which give an insight into their creative processes. The book is finely produced, saddle-stitched, on good quality paper and with a striking design by Matthew Stuart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her \u2018prelude\u2019, Ambrosio says that Ritsos thought of Monochords<\/em> as \u201cthe distilled essence of his poetic legacy\u201d. As this legacy contains such a wide range of work, including the long dramatic monologues of \u2018The Fourth Dimension\u2019, it seems more plausible that these single-line poems are the essence of one type of his work, namely the short, compressed poems represented by A Broken Man in Flower<\/em>. The poems at times seem to comment on Ritsos\u2019 own experience as a poet under authoritarian regimes (they were written by him as a free man on the island of Samos, where he had previously been imprisoned) and the paradox that freedom of speech can render the poet less vital:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now they’ve taken off his muzzle how can he speak?<\/p>\n\n\n\n While many of these poems make statements, others simply present us with images or symbols encapsulated in single words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mountain, bell tower, cypress, travellers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A poem like this, which suggests a vast hinterland beyond the poem itself, depends on the poet\u2019s ability to choose the right word, as every word counts in such a short piece, and Ritsos unfailingly displays that ability throughout the sequence. And, of course, the translator has to be up to the job; Paul Merchant certainly is, and the fruits of his life-long engagement with Ritsos\u2019 poetry and with these pieces in particular (through their various revisions) are on display in these luminous English versions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The motif of the statue, found throughout Ritsos\u2019 work, continues here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The headless statue is perhaps waiting for my head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n and he is able to conjure up a whole social and historical commentary in just a few words, here about Greek rural life and the depopulation of villages as the young leave to seek work elsewhere:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A sad little village with two chairs in the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s tempting to liken these one-line poems to Zen koans, but in fact they\u2019re very different; they make little use of paradox, but instead give us a poetic logic in same way as the poems in the Bloodaxe volume, but here a whole poem is compressed to a single line: \u201cHe speaks about the poor. His hand becomes a river\u201d and \u201cThey weren’t slaps: they were applause. They left marks on you\u201d. Sometimes, the ghost of earlier poems can be seen in these single-line works. Here\u2019s an extract from the poem \u2018Maybe Someday\u2019 written in 1946:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to show you these rose clouds in the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But you don\u2019t see. It\u2019s night -what can one see?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026 But I\u2019m going to insist on seeing and showing you, he said,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because if you too don\u2019t see, it will be as if I hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here\u2019s monochord number 150, written over thirty years later:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I can\u2019t make you see it as well, it\u2019s as if I don\u2019t have it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We come back again to that phrase of Ambrosio\u2019s, \u201cthe distilled essence of his poetic legacy\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each poem is accompanied by one of Ambrosio\u2019s linocuts, which, we are told by Ambrosio, were created in 2020, during the pandemic, one per day in response to each of the poems. The images are intense and concentrated, like the poems. The dark background gives them a sense of mystery as well as an impression that there is more to them than is seen by the eye, and in this sense also, they echo the poems. They don\u2019t try to illustrate the poems or to explain them, but they complement them by attempting visually what the poet is attempting in words. The book has a monochrome cover to match the linocuts and is a very fine object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his \u2018Afterword\u2019 to Monochords,<\/em> Gareth Evans discusses the relative neglect of Ritsos by \u2018mainstream\u2019 poetry publishers in comparison to the other major Greek poets of the era. Evans rightly points out that the majority of Ritsos collections have appeared with \u201cdedicated and respected poetry presses\u201d. It all depends on what is meant by \u2018mainstream\u2019 of course, and Bloodaxe, at least in poetry terms, are a major press. But the point is well made; independent presses are the lifeblood of contemporary poetry, and the publishers of the books discussed in this review are doing exemplary work in making this vitally important poet available to Anglophone readers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 92 Acharnon Street: A Year in Athens<\/em>, John Lucas. pub. Eland Publishing<\/p>\n\n\n\n Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation<\/em>, Roderick Beaton. pub. Penguin<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Charioteer, An Annual Review of Modern Greek Culture. NUMBERS 29\/30 1987-88 Special Issue: Yiannis Ritsos<\/p>\n\n\n\n Journal of Hellenic Diaspora, Vol. XIII, Spring-Summer 1986. Ritsos’ Epitaphios, Rick M. Newton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938-1988<\/em>, edited by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades. pub. BOA editions<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ritsos in Parentheses<\/em>: Yiannis Ritsos translated by Edmund Keeley, bi-lingual edition. pub. Princeton Legacy Library<\/p>\n\n\n\n Diaries of Exile<\/em>, Yiannis Ritsos, Introduction by Karen Emmerich. pub. Archipelago Books<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alan Baker<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" REVIEW: Recent Translations of Yiannis Ritsos Alan Baker In Secret: Versions of Yiannis Ritsos by David Harsent (Enitharmon Press) A Broken Man in Flower: Versions of Yiannis Ritsos by David Harsent (Bloodaxe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,21],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","category-reviews","tag-may-issue"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/MAY25.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbook.org.uk\/NLR\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}