II This mountain is so close to me I extend my hand and uproot the trees and their shrubs the electrical company’s poles the hurting teeth of a desperately lonely life Crafty sheep run on it are sheep ever crafty? Yet these have hurt a lot and have learned inhumane bleats Here, the people became one with the stones they strike the stones and rip their viscera they surprise themselves; they don’t know how to cry Today look carefully at this mountain look carefully at this tear of the Lord because it will dry up by tomorrow Tomorrow you won’t be able to see anything.
The car, a 1953 Cadillac convertible, stood in front of the Tournquists’ house. Red and shiny, it had gleaming white wall tires. Tyne had not seen it there on any of her previous visits. As Cam drew his Buick alongside, she said, “Your parents must have visitors.” “I don’t think so, honey. There’s no car here except what belongs to the family.” “Oh, did they get a new ….” She stopped, realization dawning. “Oh no, Cam, it can’t be … not mine.” Stunned, she remained seated until he came around to open her door. “I’ll let them tell you.” Cam helped her out, and led her up the front steps. At the top, she put her hand on the wrought iron rail and turned to look back. “Oh, my goodness,” she murmured. The car was indeed hers, Arthur Tournquist informed her a few minutes later. “But, I can’t let you … really, it’s too much ….” “Tyne, will you please stop mumbling and accept our gift graciously?” Arthur smiled at her, but Tyne sensed his impatience. What did one do in a situation like this? She didn’t want to refuse a gift. On the other hand, this gift was much too extravagant, the most she had hoped for being a second-hand older model something. She had no idea what she had expected, because she knew little about cars. But this … even if she was to be their daughter-in-law, she could not accept a gift like this. And that’s just the point, she thought. If Cam and I were already married, it might be a different matter. They could have waited … they should have waited. She thought about Moe and the humble little television set from her future in-laws. She would give anything to be able to trade places with Moe right now, or at least be able to trade gifts. Since that was impossible, she craved the next best thing – to call Aunt Millie and ask her advice.
YOUR LETTERS I kept your letters, my first love, in the priceless box of my heart your letters smell of youth making my senior joy bloom your letters talk to me a lot with their crooked lines and mistakes they shiver, cry and laugh; they narrate games of jealousy and coldness you sprayed perfume and your letters won’t be erased by the passing time wish our first dreams weren’t erased by your heartlessness oh my only love, your letters white boats carry my thoughts down where the word of Death can’t be wiped out from your letters-graves.
(If this poem spoke to you, you may find more about this translation volume in the following links)
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has assembled a site where Greek modernism, prairie crime fiction, and erotic lyric poetry share the same address — which is either an act of radical curation or a very ambitious filing system.
Mara: vequinox is behind all of it — translations, original poems, fiction excerpts, and critical reviews — and today we're moving through Greek poetry and myth, literary fiction and crime, and the territory of love, loss, and desire. Let's start with the poetry.
Greek Poetry, Myth, and the Weight of Small Images
Pip: The question this cluster of work keeps pressing is what a short poem can actually hold — whether compression is a limitation or its own kind of argument.
Mara: The AI review of Yannis Ritsos, Poems, Volume I, sets this up directly. Looking at the poem "Doxology," it finds that "the compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury."
Pip: So the short poem isn't a reduced version of something larger — it's a form that keeps meaning genuinely open rather than resolving it into comfort.
Mara: That's exactly the review's claim. The man resembling a dusty, leafless tree, the sun that has burned him remaining beyond burning — the review argues the restraint lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and solar power stay visible rather than collapse into consolation. "Memory" and "Winter is Approaching" work the same way, using domestic objects — a father's silence, a repurposed hat, a stored collar — to carry psychological weight without fixing their meaning.
Pip: Objects that survive their original use and acquire something stranger. That's also what Yannis Ritsos, Poems, Volume VI does with "Transmutation" — chairs rearranged after a funeral, a lit match that suddenly reflects back at you.
Mara: The Katerina Anghelaki Rooke selection gives Penelope a voice that does something similar — holding absence as a discipline. The Kariotakis-Polydouri tragic love story frames escape as transformation into "golden dust in the air." Cavafy's "Ithaca" makes the journey itself the point, not the destination.
Pip: And George Seferis folds political urgency right into elegy — "Sensual Elpinor" cuts between a grieving woman and a radio bulletin about war, with cyclamens and pine needles running through both.
Mara: Miltos Sachtouris in the Collected Poems takes that further — beauty sprinkled over ugliness, a voice stolen, a severed head floating downstream with closed eyelids. Nikos Engonopoulos frames the poet-figure Belisarius as someone called upon in crisis and then forgotten. Nostos and Algos, Introspection, Second Advent of Zeus, Entropy, and Ugga all extend this — myth as a structure for thinking about origin, exile, and what gets inherited.
Pip: And then An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative steps back to ask what the faculty behind all this image-making actually is — Aristotle couldn't define it, Kant got close but missed it.
Mara: The Nuances review ties it together: the collection's most persuasive poems are those where "a particular object or scene" carries the argument — a doll with a missing arm, a rusted bicycle, a coffee cup. The Qliphoth takes a different angle, using letters and occult ritual to approach the same threshold between perception and the inexplicable.
Pip: From poems about what objects remember, let's move to fiction about what people do when their world falls apart.
Literary Fiction and the Pressure of Ordinary Lives
Pip: The fiction here keeps returning to a specific kind of crisis — the moment when an ordered life suddenly has no floor under it.
Mara: Jazz with Ella sets up a different register first: a group of travelers on a cultural tour, conversation about Cold War exchanges, Russian language lessons, the texture of being young and curious in a politically charged world. One character explains, "Learning by talking is the best way. That's why I didn't pack my Ozhegov."
Pip: Easy and social on the surface — but the other fiction excerpts don't stay there.
Mara: Straits and Turns goes somewhere much darker. A man's marriage ends in a single morning, and the excerpt traces exactly how a structured identity — a CIA agent's code, his protocol — becomes the mechanism of his destruction rather than his rescue. Poodie James works at a quieter pitch: a police lieutenant weighing whether to run for mayor after a death reshapes a small town's politics. Fury of the Wind grounds itself in the Canadian prairies, in schoolhouse registers and farming families and the slow inheritance of values across generations. The Unquiet Land puts economic pressure at the center — fishermen who can't sell their catch, fishmongers charging prices the catch can't justify. Ken Kirkby, Warrior Painter brings in a nonfiction register: a painter who discovers his missing work displayed in a stranger's home, sold by a gallery that never paid him.
Pip: Which is, in its way, the same structural collapse — an arrangement that was supposed to hold, and didn't. Now for the work that lives closest to the body.
Love, Loss, and What the Body Carries Forward
Mara: This segment's question is what desire and loss actually do to a person — whether they diminish or, strangely, clarify.
Pip: Straits and Turns makes the stakes immediate. The collapse of a marriage doesn't just unsettle a man — it dismantles the entire system of meaning he'd built around himself. Loss here isn't elegiac; it's structural failure.
Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Penelope offers something harder to categorize. She says of forgetting: "my only reward is that I finally understand what's human presence what's absence or how the ego functions in such desolation." That's not consolation — it's knowledge purchased at cost.
Pip: And then Triptych and Second Advent of Zeus come at desire from the body outward — touch and arousal as their own form of location, a way of knowing where you are.
Mara: Kariotakis-Polydouri frames escape from grief as dissolution — becoming golden dust, entering an unfamiliar land where darkness doesn't exist. Miltos Sachtouris in the Collected Poems shows the cost of that dissolution: beauty sprinkled over ugliness, a voice stolen, silence where song used to be. George Seferis holds the elegiac and the erotic together — a woman who has lost her light, the blind man still singing.
Pip: What stays with me is how consistently the site treats compression as a form of honesty — the short poem, the telling object, the moment of collapse that says more than the explanation would.
Mara: And how the same pressure shows up across every register — lyric, fiction, elegy. Next time, we'll see what else is accumulating on the site.
“She is a real renaissance mistress.” Then the sirens blew for an air raid warning, bringing me back to monstrous cramps and headache. Can you explain this apparition? Is it a pure elemental? A form from naid or dryad realms? Am I alone in encountering such phenomena ? I feel exhausted and confused by experiences like these but I know I must persist. My growing sense of isolation is compounded by my social situation. As a Scholarship boy from a Cardiff grammar school I find it hard to fit into this genial squirearchy of rugby players and would-be lawyers, whose rituals revolve around sconces of beer and Bump Suppers. The few apologists for the Left have a totally sentimental notion of ‘working-class life’ in industrial areas. I have refused to be their mascot. My tutors change constantly. I am anxious to serve my country but I’m told my medical history (TB and a childhood head injury that sometimes affects my vision) may well have grounded my dreams of flying; although I expect call-up papers at any time. In the meantime, it seems more important to raise one’s whole Being to the Gods than to tinker away with essays about the Scottish Chaucerians or the influence of Trollope. Your Brazen Head society sounds most attractive and it would be a great privilege to attend the next meeting. I could volunteer a paper on the Enochian Magic of Dr. John Dee, but feel I am indeed ready to go beyond academic research into collective working of rites. I think you would find me an eager pupil. Yours most sincerely in the fellowship of The Gods, Richard Firestone. (There are gaps, lacunae, broken spaces, and now the God of the Gaps is laughing at me, and I forget how many letters there were at this stage. I have a confused vision of a huge alcoved reception room, black walls, indigo recesses, old women in ratty furs natter coldly, a spider crawls down the chandelier, but it’s going too fast, I can’t get it down, I keep missing it, have to go on, on, into the summer of ’43 . . . )
In Notes on the Margins of Time, the short poem does not merely reduce the scale of the longer lyric. It changes the reader’s experience of implication. “Doxology” concentrates its action into the relation between a damaged human figure and the sun he praises (93). The man resembles a dusty, leafless tree; the sun that has burned him remains beyond burning. The compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury. The English is strongest in its refusal to explain which response should dominate.
The repeated tree establishes the man’s exposure before the final contrast arrives. The poem’s restraint matters more than any single ornamental effect. Its language lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and the sun’s power remain visible. A more elaborately lyrical translation could easily turn that asymmetry into consolation. Here, the starkness permits a harder reading: praise does not prove that suffering has been reconciled with justice. It shows a human response whose dignity and difficulty cannot be separated.
“Hour of Song,” printed on the same page, similarly finds expression at a moment of deprivation rather than abundance. Wine and fruit are present when singing is forgotten; separation supplies the occasion on which song becomes necessary. The poem reverses the expectation that fullness generates art and loss merely silences it. Its short lines make that reversal almost ceremonially plain. Manolis’s uncluttered diction allows the relation between the two moments to remain the main event. The poem needs no explanation of why people sing; its arrangement of circumstances performs the explanation.
Elsewhere, the domestic image carries a more troubling psychological charge. In “Memory,” a father returns without greeting his family, while the others remain absorbed in their own relations (98). The child’s perception is organized by the father’s silence, the window, the storm, and the cross-shaped mark disclosed by lightning. What might have remained a minor household omission becomes a retrospective scene of separation. The poem is not simply remembering an event. It is showing how an event acquires meaning when remembered, and how the child’s image persists beyond the occasion that produced it.
This is an important test of English syntax. The delayed and repeated references to the father create a hesitation appropriate to recollection, yet some constructions are cumbersome enough to slow comprehension unnecessarily. The reader can distinguish that grammatical friction from the productive uncertainty of the image itself. What the window-cross signifies may remain open; who has failed to notice a greeting should be clear. The distinction matters because the poem’s emotional force depends on ordinary actions being apprehensible before their meanings become strange.
“Winter is Approaching” offers another powerful transformation of the domestic (97). A former hat becomes a place for chickens’ eggs, while a father’s stored collar helps define the coming cold. These objects have survived their original occasions of use, acquiring new functions or retaining an unsettling remnant of an old one. The trees’ association with mothballs brings seasonal change into the atmosphere of storage and inheritance. Such images demonstrate why Ritsos’s objects should not be reduced to emblems with fixed meanings. Their force comes from displaced use, touch, and memory.
The English miniatures are often successful precisely because they preserve this practical identity of things. A hat remains a hat even while it becomes a nest; a collar remains a piece of clothing even while it carries paternal distance. The material object is not discarded once the metaphor has been understood. Manolis’s plain nouns help maintain the double attention that these poems require. The reader must see both what an object is and what a particular history has made it capable of suggesting.
(If you like poetry of this kind, you may find more about this great poet in the following links)
Of course, there is here a certain approximation of the concept of the Imaginative, a concept that Aristotle was unable to define in all its complexity. For this reason, the Stagirite appeals to a Prime Mover of divine origin. Time and space, as conceived in Hellenic philosophy and throughout the philosophical tradition up to Kant, were understood as factual, material elements. This made it impossible to comprehend the purely subjective re-creation of the world and the a priori forms of pure sensibility–namely, time and space as they are presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. The Imaginative, as the essential human faculty through which man re-creates the world out of pure transcendentality, could not be defined in that age, and Kant himself, together with those who followed him, failed to grasp this meaning. Within the Imaginative are encompassed both the human being and the world, together with everything that has been, is, or will be produced, both in the spiritual sense–which is primary–and in the material sense, which follows as a consequence of this Imaginative creation. Jules Verne’s submarines, computers, and smartphones are all fruits of this rational capacity of the Imaginative, which becomes reality and creates out of nothing. Nothingness–not as an object, but as an essential attribute of pure subjectivity–creates reality. This creation is rational, because the human intellect is capable of thinking only in terms of categories and reason. Kant’s philosophy merely raises the question of the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments. Yet the connection established by the possibility of synthesizing judgments that are independent of experience is attributed to a synthetic capacity of the inner sense residing within self-consciousness. Here lies the key to Kant’s philosophy, which maintains that thought is a concrete a priori…
Dangle An erect nipple dangles over my lips a game like tease or please, now you touch me now you don’t an unspoiled breast flashes the night sky playing with my flesh as a star loosens its footing now you see me now you don’t My descent is revealed
Even for a funeral, Pete Torgerson’s service was a glum affair, Spanger thought. Everyone who could be expected to attend a mayor’s funeral was there. The lieutenant governor, looking preoccupied, represented the state administration. The minister read the 23rd Psalm, the choir sang “In The Garden,” people paid the widow their respects at the reception, and all went home with a sense of relief. The hobo measure slipped off the council’s agenda. Not even Frank Stout mentioned it again. The council set a special election for November to fill the final year of Torgerson’s term and appointed Ken Spear to serve as acting mayor in the interim. Spanger knew Spear would run.A group of businessmen was trying to convince Spanger to be a candidate. Without Torgerson to contend with, he had the opportunity to mould the police department into the organization he wanted. Still, he liked the idea of leading the town. His family could not live on the salary of a part-time mayor, but his share in the orchard produced a fair income, and the prospect of spending more time on the ranch appealed to him. Politics wasn’t what he had educated himself for, but it could be what he was meant to do. When he asked Phyllis about it, she said, “Is that what you want?” Up here at the top of the valley, he thought it was.
…your splendid heart, splendid since I chose it, will always be somewhere else and with the words I’ll sever the threads that tie me to a particular man for who I long until Odysseus becomes symbol of nostalgia and sails the seas in everybody’s mind. I forget you daily, passionately that you’ll cleanse yourself of the sins of sweetness and smell and completely clean you’ll enter the realm of immortality. This job is hard and joyless. my only reward is that I finally understand what’s human presence what’s absence or how the ego functions in such desolation, in such long time that nothing stops the tomorrow the body always renews itself gets up and goes to bed as if someone chops it sometimes sick, sometimes in love hoping that what of the touch it loses it gains in substance.
(If this poem spoke to you, you may find more about this translation book in the following links)
