…topping up the water in the buckets, and distributing some oats, and from the reaction of the horses, the oats were especially appreciated. Taking advantage of the momentary lull in conversation, Joel knew he had to care for the gelding he had ridden that morning. The horse had been patiently standing in the center of the alley. First, Joel loosened the cinch strap and lifted the saddle and blankets from the back of the horse; even after all of those years, Joel could still recognize an Eamor saddle when he saw one. His family never had much when he was a kid, but his dad always made sure that they always rode Eamors. He placed the saddle and the blankets on separate railings of what seemed to serve as the official tack stall in the barn. Then he led the gelding into the stall that Joel had found him in that morning and removed his bridle. In his absence, Harry had cleaned out the gelding’s stall and replaced the soiled bedding with fresh straw. Joel re-hung the bridle on a nail high on a post, and he approached the gelding to brush him down. As he groomed the sorrel gelding and waited to see what the old hand had to say, he was reminded of two of his favorite smells. Sweaty horses and leather. It had been a lot of years since he had smelled that unique combination of aromas, but there was no doubt about the rich smell. He had smelled a lot of good things in his life. The smell of the sea. The smell of pot. The smell of peppermint. The smell of fresh fruit. The smell of a fine cigar. The smell of a rich port. But none of these compared to that of sweaty horses and leather. It seemed as if the old hand was just about finished feeding the horses when he muttered, “Too bad about your dad.” “Sure is,” confirmed Joel. “I wish I was here for the funeral, just got word the other day.” “Don’t matter,” grunted the old native as he busied himself about the barn. “Doesn’t make much difference once they are gone, does it?” Joel was feeling good after hearing this.
Athens Beautiful hour when Athens gives itself to April like a lover fragrance in the air, lustful enticement nothing more the soul could wish as evening leans over the houses its heavy silver eyelid and at the far end the Acropolis wears the purple dusk like a gown. A kiss of light when the first star appears by the Illissos River, breeze falls in love with the bridal dress shivering oleanders. Beautiful hour of joy and love when birds chase each other around the Olympian Zeus air-struck stelae.
…was that the cigarette smoke overpowered any other bodily foul smell expected in such cases. They arrived in front of the store they were headed to at eight forty-five, so they had an hour and a quarter to wait outside until the famous store opened its doors. The driver calculated quickly that this meant about twenty-some dollars of waiting time; however, he turned the engine off and stretched his legs in front of his seat, trying not to pay attention to the click of the taxi meter, which clicked ten cents every few seconds, a sound so loud you’d think the whole neighbourhood could hear it. Right at that time, the driver counted it as about seven in the evening in his homeland. He wondered what his parents could be doing at this time while he waited outside the government-run Liquor Store, where his customers wanted to buy something. Perhaps his parents were having their supper at this time, or they had gone to a local taverna to have their meal along with friends. His eyes fell on the customers in the back seat who were almost asleep in their drunken stupor, and he lowered the window of his door a little to let some fresh air come into the space and freshen it up. Without any unforeseen things, the doors of the Government- run Liquor Store opened at exactly ten o’clock when he woke up his customers, who helped each other get out of the car and staggered into the store. Minutes later, they got out, joyous and smiling like kids who got a good mark for their schoolwork, each holding a Mickey of whisky. They got into the taxi again, and the driver started taking them back to their place, which they reached in fifteen minutes. The fare was eighteen dollars and some cents. The white guy took out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to the driver. The customer didn’t ask for his change. The driver didn’t rush to hand it over to him. The thing was, they went and bought two Mickeys, which cost them around four dollars each, while they paid twenty bucks to the taxi driver. Yes, as strange as it might sound, the earth kept on going around its axis with no thought about the two drunk customers who had collected the Government cheque a couple of days ago…
The naked statue, out in the garden, always fought against the clouds, the rain, the winds, not from spite but in a courageous natural way. At this exact moment it took a small halo, made peace with time and the garden and it looked like a Magus, the fourth one; it could lift a lamb on its shoulders, in such a way that it wouldn’t make Uncle John angry. Then, suddenly the sun disappeared again. The statue rediscovered its lonely, unadjusted nakedness. Six glasses suddenly fell off the windows of the Tower all the way down to immeasurable depth; No sound was heard nor did we find out whether they broke or landed somewhere softly and were reused. The rain started falling again, covering almost indifferently that depth. Uncle John, wearing his velvet slippers, sauntered endlessly, always angry at the weather, the rain, the mud and even more so when the sun shone as if he was losing his arguments. The first woe, he’d say, and the second and third one. And alas, what can one understand? His glasses sat on his eyebrows like two pieces of ice on top of two precipitous mountains drawn in microscale in the first page of a thick book that we never read to the end. But then how can one reach the end? And what would the end mean? The potters would gather in the basement in a secret convention undisturbed rats passed over their feet; their hands were thick like two five-footed bears;
There were times when he sat silently, imagining that he had finished his schooling, that he had received his diploma, and that he would soon be on his way home. His dream carried him to the happiest moments of seeing his family again at the airport after such a long time. He clung to the dream as if his life depended on it. During this period, he also found the time to gather the information requested by the dean from the school back home. He put together a small report about the ins and outs of the Vancouver Stock Exchange for the dean and mailed it to him. The dean wrote back to him and expressed his appreciation, and from then on, they kept in regular contact. The dean didn’t hesitate to mention to him that his job was waiting for him when he came back and that things were slowly improving back home. Time never stayed still, and his examination time finally came. Hermes did his best to prepare for the battle. He felt like a soldier marching off to war, just like those he saw in films, though he knew he was more prepared than ever and was quite certain of his results. He had tremendous decisiveness and optimism, just as he had shown in all other exams up to now. The first exam day came, and he got up early, bathed, shaved, dressed, and went to his classroom as early as possible. He believed that if the first day of exams went well, all others to follow would be just as successful. Then the supervisors arrived and distributed the exams. Hermes started to work with patience. The supervisors walked around; one of them passed by Hermes and stood for a while to look at the work he had finished so far. Then, without any comment, the supervisor continued, but not before Hermes had distinguished, with his observant eye, a faint smile of satisfaction on the man’s face. When done, he handed his paper to the professor at the desk, who said, “Thank you, Hermes. Have a good day.” “Good day to you, too, Professor,” he said and walked outside. The rest of Hermes’ exams passed in the same manner. All he had to do now was to wait for the results. He knew how to judge his work objectively, no different from the way his teachers did…
In The Name of the Goddess I Summon You Oil on limbs. Perhaps a rancid smell like here on the oil-press of the small church on the rough pores of the stopped stone. Oil on the hair crowned with rope, and perhaps other perfumes that we did not know poor and rich and statuettes offering small breasts to the fingers. Oil in the sun the leaves shivered when the foreigner stopped and silence got heavy between the knees. The coins fell; ‘In the name of the Goddess, I summon you…’ Oil on the shoulders and the flexing waist gray legs on the grass, and this wound in the sun as the bell chimed for vespers as I spoke in the courtyard with a crippled man.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis — poet, translator, publisher, and apparently the kind of person who simply does not stop. vequinox has been busy.
Mara: Very busy. This episode covers Modern Greek poetry and translation, prose fiction across several novels, and a stretch into art, science, and biography. There is a lot of ground here.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Modern Greek Poetry: Voices Across the Tradition
Mara: This segment is about what it means to carry a poetic tradition forward — through original work, through translation, and through the anthology form that holds multiple voices at once.
Pip: The poem "Rendition" opens with an image that is hard to shake. Here is the line: "Your spirit dances in the yards of the pious white men and in school orphans where you disposed your last smile reflex vomiting brain unwired from spit or swallow no light no wind."
Mara: That sequence — the orphan yard, the unwired brain, the total absence of light or wind — maps a kind of spiritual dispossession. The body and the institution are at war, and the body is losing.
Pip: "Second Advent of Zeus" goes the other direction: spring, oleanders, the vernal equinox, Eros. The same tradition, but breathing.
Mara: And the Yannis Ritsos translations — both Volume VI and Volume VII — show what that tradition looks like across decades of one poet's work. Volume VII gives us the "Hour of the Shepherds," with children suddenly feeling grown because they can look into a water well or climb to the attic. Volume VI's "Before and After Drowning" is stranger: objects fall into a well, dark water rises, and a woman floats the next day without her ankle ring.
Pip: Ritsos makes the domestic uncanny in about forty words flat. That is a skill.
Mara: "Red in Black" brings it back to the sensory — August heat, sweat, a sparrow chasing a cicada mid-air, two people taking hands to help the insect survive. "Wheat Ears" turns the confessional booth into a small comedy: the speaker's greatest sins are loving hyacinths, swallows, children's laughter, and beggars. The priest sends him straight to purgatory.
Pip: Loving beggars: straight to purgatory. The Church has always had a complicated relationship with the Beatitudes.
Mara: "Chthonian Bodies" reaches toward the mythic — coastal red cedars, sequoias as hyperboles of nature, and Hyperion addressed directly. The anthology "Neo-Hellene Poets" frames the whole tradition around isolation: "Hideously alone, with the chiton of your dream permanently ripped, you marched to a famous country that vanished in the deep heart of infinity."
Pip: Then there is Constantine Cavafy's Orofernhis — a man who was briefly a king, dedicated himself entirely to pleasure and gold, governed nothing, was quickly removed, and whose end history did not bother to record.
Mara: Cavafy's point is that the coin outlasts the man. The translated selections from Katerina Anghelaki Rooke and Antony Fostieris round out the range — Rooke on love's distortion of time, Fostieris on wind that strips people bare and leaves crows to finish the work.
Pip: From spring oleanders to crows on a naked body. The tradition contains multitudes.
Mara: The fiction pulls in a different direction — toward prose, toward narrative, toward the question of what happens when history enters a room uninvited.
Fiction in Excerpt: History, Intimacy, and the Open Road
Pip: The fiction here keeps returning to one question: what does an institution — military, religious, social — do to the people inside it?
Mara: "The Gospel of Silence" answers that directly. The setup is theology students ordered into military service for the first time in their country's history. The excerpt reads: "walls built out of a peculiar indifference, a world in which suffering was not punishment, but a natural condition."
Pip: Suffering as ambient condition rather than imposed penalty — that is a colder observation than outright cruelty, and the novel seems to know it.
Mara: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" works at the other end of the emotional register — a car club draw, a beauty queen, a garage eventually collapsed by termites. Ed applies to the military because he does not know what else to do. The institution absorbs him the same way.
Pip: "The Unquiet Land" stays domestic: a wedding night, a pregnancy just discovered, and a husband who cannot make love to his wife because, as he puts it, there is a live human being in there with eyes and hands and heart and brain.
Mara: Caitlin's response — "it's protected like a seed in an apple" — is practical and warm. His paralysis is not. The scene is very quiet and very tense.
Pip: "Swamped" goes outdoors entirely — a hunting morning, a dog named Irma, a rabbit flushed from an osier bush. "Jazz with Ella" goes to Moscow: utilitarian architecture, a student murmuring "Leningrad" to herself on a bus, waiting for contrast. "Still Waters" closes on a woman jumping out of a moving car rather than agree to move in with her fiance's parents. "The Long Road" frames all of it as a crossroads pointing nowhere — "your glance is a mirror, your gray hair reminds you of bygone days when you had choices."
Mara: The fiction and the poetry are asking the same question from different angles. The art and science writing asks it differently still.
Art, Science, and the Corruption of Words
Pip: "Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter" takes a detour into quantum mechanics that turns out to be about language. The excerpt makes the point plainly: a quantum leap in common usage means a very large jump, but in physics it is the tiniest possible shift — "the absolute opposite of popular understanding."
Mara: The book uses Einstein's Nobel Prize as its entry point — awarded for photoelectric effect, not relativity, because relativity was deemed too controversial. And the Big Bang, the excerpt notes, could not have been a bang at all: no atmosphere, no sound. "Logically, it must have started with a Big Nothing."
Pip: Science named the origin of everything after a sound that could not have existed. That is either poetry or a press release.
Mara: "Introspection" works the same territory from inside — the speaker evaluates modern morals, sees bank accounts of the few growing while others' earnings shrink, and concludes that ego and greed have changed the planet's route toward destruction. The third post in this group, a piece on Michalis Grammatas, extends the biographical reach further into the Greek cultural world.
Pip: Words get corrupted. Institutions absorb people. Poems survive.
Mara: Next episode, we'll see what else survives.
Pip: The thread running through all of it is what outlasts the person — the coin, the logbook, the poem, the dog returning with the rabbit.
Mara: And the question of what institutions do to the people inside them, which the poetry and the fiction keep circling from different angles.
…where are we going to live? Have you even thought about it?” “Of course I have.” He sounded surprised that she would ask. “Until I’ve finished my residency, we can live with Mother and Dad. Goodness knows, the house is big enough. We won’t be able to afford a home of our own until I have my own practice, and then maybe not for some time.” “But we don’t need anything elaborate at first, just as long as we have our own place. We could get an apartment – like this one that Moe and I are renting.” He turned his head to look out of the car window at the houses along the street, many of which were probably as old as the city itself. “I don’t think so, Tyne,” he said quietly. “There are other areas,” she said stiffly, “if you dislike this one so much.” He turned to look at her. His tone soft and pleading, he said, “Please, darling, let’s not argue about it tonight. We’ll talk some other time. In the meantime, give some serious thought to moving in with my parents soon.” Tyne had her hand on the door handle. “I don’t think so,” she said coldly, echoing his words of a moment before. Before he could move, she opened the door and jumped out of the car, then fled across the street to the apartment she gladly shared with Moe.
Orofernis He who is handsome, and his delicate face is smiling on the four-drachma coin, is Orofernis, son of Ariarathis. As a child, they ousted him from Cappadocia, out of his father’s magnificent palace and sent him to grow up in Ionia, to be forgotten among strangers. Oh, those beautiful Ionian nights when fearlessly, and clearly in a Hellenic way, he got to know the fullness of carnal pleasure. In his heart, always an Asian. But in his manners and in his speech, Greek, dressed up in turquoise, in a Greek chiton his body fragrant with jasmine, among the handsome Ionian youths, the most handsome, the most ideal. Later, when the Syrians entered Cappadocia, and made him a king, he dedicated himself and his monarchy to enjoy a new pleasure every day, to greedily gather gold and silver, and to delight, and to boast, watching his riches piling and shining. As for the care of the place, and governing, he had no idea what was happening around him. The Cappadocians quickly removed him. And he ended up in Syria, in the palace of Demetrios, where he lazed around partying. One day, though, his great idleness was interrupted by unusual thoughts. He remembered that from his mother, Antiochida and from the old Stratoniki, he was connected to the crown of Syria, almost a Seleucid. For a while, he got out of the lust and drunkenness, and ineptly, and half dazed he felt a longing to scheme something, to do something, to plan something, but he failed miserably and got worn out. His end was written somewhere, but got lost, or perhaps history passed it by, and rightfully so, not bothering to record such a paltry event. He who on the four-drachma coin left the charm of his beautiful youth, the light of his youthful beauty, an aesthetic memory of that Ionian boy, is Orofernis, son of Ariarathis.
Hyperion Coastal red cedars and heightened sequoias hyperboles of nature scholastic and ambiguous in their format, antithetic and polysyllabic in their need to procreate seeds and buds growing rhythm in the sea’s glaucous reflection, lean on it sweet redwood by the shore these lands where the sun basks in aloneness Hyperion one day you will become
