Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where Greek modernist poetry, frontier fiction, and poems about desire share the same digital neighborhood — which is either a very ambitious curatorial vision or the world's most eclectic bookshelf.

Mara: vequinox has been posting across all of that territory this week — translations of major Greek poets, a wide range of fiction excerpts, and poetry collections that sit somewhere between the surreal and the visceral. Let's start with the Greek poetry translations.

Greek Poets, Translated and Alive

Pip: The question underneath all these translations is whether a poem can survive the crossing — from modern Greek into English, from one cultural world into another, without losing whatever made it matter in the first place.

Mara: The Tasos Livaditis volume, long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, gives you a direct answer in the verse itself: "and it's strange how untrue the most real things look sometimes — ah mother when you gave birth to me you should had given birth to a rock."

Pip: That line does something interesting — it frames grief as a structural flaw in the person, not a wound from outside. The rock wouldn't feel any of this. The human does, and that's the problem.

Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume IV and Volume V — push into similar territory from different angles. The Volume IV poem "Method of Optimism" describes a man whose face stays sunlit even as everything around him is almost black, furniture, faces, time, windows. Volume V is starker: "Come on, let's finish it, he said, continuance is boring."

Pip: Ritsos apparently had no patience for the long goodbye.

Mara: Titos Patrikios takes a different approach in his Selected Poems — the poem "Monument" builds an image of everyday inertia, "without a bang, without pleasure, with inert touch deep in your viscera," which is a very specific kind of monument to build.

Pip: The Nikos Engonopoulos collection moves through myth and desire, tracing a line from ancient phallic dances to "these black eyes that look at me." And the George Seferis Collected Poems lands somewhere more desolate — "High mountains, you can't hear us! Help! Help!" — a cry that expects no answer.

Mara: What holds all of these together is the translation work itself, carrying voices across decades and languages. That same labor of rendering inner life legible shows up differently in the fiction excerpts.

Fiction's Pressures: Family, Land, and Conflict

Pip: The fiction this week keeps returning to one question — what happens when the world outside a family is in crisis and the world inside it is already broken?

Mara: The excerpt from He Rode Tall sets the frame clearly: seventeen-year-old Joel is riding the high ridges on July 20, 1969, and the narration notes that "the Circle H was not a healthy place for this seventeen-year-old boy to be; and really, not a healthy place for anyone, and certainly not a place with a future."

Pip: That date is doing quiet work. The moon landing is happening on a radio somewhere while this kid is counting cattle and absorbing his father's cruelty. History as backdrop to a family that has no room for it.

Mara: Jazz with Ella moves the coordinates entirely — Moscow, a young woman named Jennifer discovering she has family in the Soviet Union, and a conversation that keeps circling a family accident nobody names directly. She says, "Everything about my family is to do with the accident." And then she decides to send a telegram rather than call, because withholding, as the narrator puts it, ran in the family.

Pip: Withholding as inheritance. That is a very compact way to describe a very large problem.

Mara: In Turbulent Times and The Unquiet Land both place their characters inside Irish political fractures — the latter featuring a long pub argument about partition, two nations, two parliaments, and a Council of Ireland that one character calls "two sham parliaments and a Council that can't raise a single tax." The tension is constitutional, but it's also personal.

Pip: Wellspring of Love and Water in the Wilderness share a quieter register — a nurse named Tyne appears in both, at a patient's bedside in one, tending her aunt in the other, prayer and practicality running side by side.

Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men takes the widest historical lens — a traveling company of Norse, Irish, and Indigenous characters crossing a continent, with a Mandan chief named Fire Maker telling stories by campfire, and a monk determined to make converts.

Pip: Poodie James and Straits and Turns close out the range — one a tense small-town confrontation between a reporter and a sweating councilman who would very much like the past to stay in the past, the other a Greek-diaspora social scene where desire and social performance are basically the same activity.

Mara: Across all of it, characters are navigating what they've inherited — land, silence, conflict, family damage. The poetry collections make that inheritance lyric rather than narrative.

Desire, Dread, and the Surreal Interior

Pip: The poetry here isn't interested in resolved emotion — it's interested in the moment before resolution, or the moment when resolution turns out to be impossible.

Mara: The Gospel of Silence opens this territory with a prose-poem voice that is unusually direct: "For a long time, I believed one stays alive by understanding everything. Now I know there are things one must simply endure, survive."

Pip: That's a significant revision to make about your own operating assumptions. And the childhood scenes that follow — ice cracking underfoot, wading into black marsh water, counting leeches as proof of having gone somewhere forbidden — all enact it physically.

Mara: Medusa frames desire as interruption — grand mythic language about "an apocalyptic prophecy" and "the parabolic myth of my oppressed life" cut through by italicized domestic voices: "Get up and help me do the dishes." The sublime and the mundane are arguing in the same stanza.

Pip: The mundane wins on points, as it usually does.

Mara: Nuances and Impulses work in shorter, more compressed registers — whispered desire in the first, dancers and an old man lost in reverie in the second. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy gives the speaker a different kind of motion: "I was a river passer, a mule rider, an engraving on the rock — mule and man, the same flesh."

Pip: Entropy, Troglodytes, and Ugga push toward something more abstract — cells dying without noticing, troglodytes dividing the first earthly ownership while fireflies drift through cave air, and a sequence of compressed philosophical fragments about thought, logos, and the concept of the infinite reduced to "tiny concept for first-grade school."

Mara: What runs through all of it is a refusal to separate the body from the idea — desire is always also dread, survival is always also endurance, and the inner life keeps finding the outer world waiting for it.

Pip: Greek modernism, frontier families, diaspora parties, ice cracking under children's feet — it's a wide map.

Mara: What connects it is the pressure of inheritance — what gets passed down, what gets translated, what gets endured. More of that territory next time.