Monument of a lonely afternoon when the wind blows reflections of young vendors onto the wise and irreplaceable words monument of everyday chatter without conviction, overseeing the unmatched bodies, mixed limbs, legs that grow in the asphalt sweat, monument without a bang, without pleasure with inert touch deep in your viscera like dead polypus in an empty sternum and voila, from the depths of falls and risings horrible angels appear, ready to claim darkness to gain belief and take advantage of your metal. I, motionless in front of you, don’t beg for my death nor do I get lured by withering immortality.
The predictable phrases came and went, and the warmth of the wine, combined with the body heat of the people in the room, made the atmosphere cozy. Even the conversation grew softer and fluffier as the wine flowed. When Paula got up to visit the powder room, one of the guests, Kostas, found the courage to lean in and ask, “Hey, Costa, is she hot?” Costa flashed his widest smile at the poor man, but before he could reply, Vangelis butted in. “Don’t worry about Costa. He’s got it right. He can pick and choose.” Costa could almost see the man salivating at the concept. He laughed out loud, but now the doorbell interrupted them, and as their host went to greet the new arrivals, Costa saw Anna, the airy, sexy, pretty, and ethereal Anna, enter the foyer, her husband close behind. Anna was always perfectly dressed, always trendy and sexy. She walked gracefully, elegantly, through the living room, and Costa’s expert nose picked up her light lilac perfume. He fixated his eyes on her, and he sensed that Anna knew he had been watching her as soon as their eyes met. Somewhere between her sexy walk and her faint, provocative smile, Costa saw the prettiest female of the evening. How do women always know when a man is looking at them? Costa had often wondered about this but had never found an answer that satisfied him. But they always know. And they almost always smile back. It must be the same knowledge Costa always had when, in a gathering of women, one, that special one, would be looking at him with desire amid others who didn’t give a damn. It was knowledge acquired from experience, and a womanizer like Costa had plenty of that. Anna surely must have heard all the stories of Costa’s escapades and misadventures. After all, the whole Greek community had heard of them. As Anna joined the other women, Costa watched all the hugs and kisses coming and going, each woman hugging and loudly saying, “Hi, how are you?” while murmuring to herself, “bitch,” a word every woman used when a prettier one entered the room and the eyes of all the men glued themselves to her like limpets on a rock.
…those comments, the meeting blew up. Joel could understand that all Mr. Johansson was trying to do was help, but if there were two things you wouldn’t want to be telling Edward Hooper, it would be suggesting government help and calling his child underprivileged. There was no doubt that the Hoopers could sure use some help to finance Joel’s education, but the last thing that was going to happen in the hills that night was for Edward to admit it to any fancy dressed school teacher. Later, the school year came to an end. Joel graduated from high school, and Mr. Johansson, after once again encouraging Joel to consider the possibility of going further with his education, left town for wherever he went every summer. Joel spent the next few weeks working for his father, riding the high ridges, checking the cattle, counting cows and calves, and making sure that all was well in the pasture. Back then, on July 20, 1969, as seventeen-year-old Joel rode along, he thought of the hurt that he had experienced at home, especially during the last few weeks of high school, the brutal treatment of his mother by his drunken father, and the hard way that his dad treated him. Back then, 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. That hot summer day back in July of 1969, Joel found himself a long way from home at the end of the afternoon. Feeling mighty hungry and needing to water both himself and his horse, Joel dropped down out of the hills to the Ladners’ place. Larry Ladner and his wife Erica were a dirt-poor young couple trying to eek out a living for themselves and their four children on a small patch of rented land. Their dream was to one day be able to put a down-payment on a place of their own, but the way things were going it looked like it wouldn’t be long before the Ladners would be forced off of the land. Larry had been coming in from a day of fieldwork on the tractor when he welcomed Joel. He knew the Hoopers were good neighbors. As Joel sat with the Ladners and ate his evening meal, he heard some exciting news on the radio.
Here Among the Bones Among the bones some music goes by the sand goes over the sea. Among the bones sound of a flute sound of a distant drum and a light ringing, goes over the dry plains over the sea with the dolphins. High mountains, you can’t hear us! Help! Help! High mountains, we’ll dissolve, dead with the dead!
Cells Like the cells of each body that die and in darkness they float and talk cells of an undefined wholeness, we die without noticing or understanding while wholeness lives in our death moves and breathes eternal youth of an odyssey.
Stout reached for the sugar. “You don’t want to mess with this son. I’m a powerful man around here.” “Yes,” Pease said, “So is the mayor. This thing is no longer a secret, Mr. Stout.” Stout breathed as if stirring his coffee was a workout. He plied the spoon with concentration, looking into the cup. “Why should I believe you?” he said, working more sugar into his coffee, lifting his eyes toward Pease without raising his head. Pease thought he had the aspect of a dog deciding whether to bite a stranger or submit to him. “How do I know Torgerson talked about this?” “What did Pearson tell you?” “Pearson’s scared.” “It must be an uncomfortable feeling.” “Look, Ned, I was born in this town, lived here all my life. I’ve been on the council for nine years, done good work in the community. I’m not saying anything one way or the other, but don’t you think all this stuff from the past, whatever it is, just oughta stay in the past?” Pease watched the big man wipe his spoon with a paper napkin and take a tentative sip from his cup. Perspiration was forming just below Stout’s hairline. Pease said nothing. The silence lasted nine or ten seconds. “You can do a story without using names,” Stout said. “Not this one, councilman. I have the names.” “And names make news, right? Maybe that’s the trouble with news.” “Could be.” “Where’s all this going to lead, anyway? What does it matter?” Stout said. “It matters, councilman.” “Does Winifred Stone know about this? I know the Stones, know them very well.” The dog is growling, Pease thought.
…as if all gestures existed in a different world and the distant memory of them reached here 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 as now that I have grown please count all my struggles and her voice resembled the night, when one walks alone and only the frost of the unstoppable winter comes to meet him and the lights mark the length of an unknown road. And no one waits for you. And you wait for no one. For a moment the man stood on the first step before he climbed up; he resembled a deserted mausoleum of a hero who was once loved, believed in, praised with song and frightened until what ripens the wheat ears and wilts Eros and crowns patience and as a guide of the universe leads each of us to our proper place, time, the just time suddenly undressed him of all his glory and grace, songs and fright and threw him in the middle of contempt, all alone and crashed and miserable and totally humane.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has assembled a catalog that moves from ancient Greek shores to Canadian prairie schools to a Moscow hotel hallway — and somehow it all holds together.
Mara: vequinox brings it together across poetry translations, novels, and short fiction — territory we'll cover through modern Greek verse, prose excerpts, and the themes of love, memory, and identity that run underneath all of it.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Voices Across the Greek Tradition
Mara: This segment is about what it means to translate a literary tradition — to carry voices like Cavafy, Ritsos, Engonopoulos, and others across languages without losing what makes them cut.
Pip: And Cavafy cuts immediately. The setup in "The City" is a man planning his escape — new land, new sea, fresh start — and then the poem turns on him completely.
Mara: The turn is the whole poem. "New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas. The city will follow you. You will return to the same streets. You will age in the same neighbourhoods, and in these same houses, you will turn gray."
Pip: So the upshot is that geography is not the problem. The self is the problem — and it travels with you, luggage you cannot check.
Mara: Engonopoulos makes a different kind of claim in "Nikos Engonopoulos – Poems." His "Angry Poem About the Occupation" turns elegy into defiance — workers dropping their tools, fists raised, a martyred figure walking the earth pale-lipped but beloved.
Mara: Ritsos appears across multiple volumes here. "Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume II" gives us a boatman striding into a harbor at dawn, the sun rising like a woman's wet hair curled around cranes — sensory and grounded. "Volume V" and "Volume VI" are quieter, more unsettled.
Pip: "Kariotakis-Polydouri, The Tragic Love Story" brings the biographical weight — two poets whose lives ended badly, rendered here in verse about a woman at a piano, butterflies leaving through a window.
Mara: "Tasos Livaditis – Selected Poems," "Katerina Anghelaki Rooke – Selected Poems," "Hours of the Stars," and "Troglodytes" fill out the range — from Livaditis's compressed night imagery to Anghelaki Rooke's half-words and olive tree shapes. "Neo-Hellene Poets" and "Orange" and "Mythography" sit alongside them as further evidence of how wide this tradition runs.
Pip: From classical echoes to prairie roads — the fiction covers different ground entirely.
Prose Across Borders and Generations
Mara: The fiction here spans continents and registers — from a child's first bus ride in wartime Canada to a Moscow reunion to a painter's Arctic trek — and the question running through all of it is how people find their footing in unfamiliar places.
Pip: "Water in the Wilderness" opens that question gently. A woman named Tyne has been living on hospital food, and her friend Moe has kept a phone call from her on purpose.
Mara: The reason matters: "Moe smiled. 'Morley is awake and asking for you.' Tyne let her breath out on a deep sigh, sat back and covered her face with her hands. 'Thank you, God, thank you,' she whispered, then shot out of her chair and ran to get her coat."
Pip: Relief as a physical event — breath, hands, running. The excerpt earns it without explaining it.
Mara: "The Qliphoth" operates in a completely different register — adult, raw, interior. "In Turbulent Times" follows Ian, a man trailing a woman named Nora through a coastal Irish hotel, his knees literally trembling at the bar. "Redemption" gives us a young man leaving home for Vancouver, his father crying openly at the table.
Pip: "Wellspring of Love" brings back Rachael, older now, stuck on a dusty highway while her cousin heads west — and "Water in the Wilderness" shows us Rachael younger, boarding that bus for the first time, shuddering at its size.
Mara: "Jazz with Ella" lands its protagonist in a Moscow hotel corridor and delivers the line "We are your family" to a woman who was certain she had no family there. "Ken Kirkby: A Painter's Quest for Canada" documents a real exhibition at Parliament — a painting one hundred and fifty-two feet long, twenty years in the making.
Pip: "Small Change" puts a boy in a Pennsylvania classroom trying to locate his immortal soul while Sister Assunta slaps a pointer against her palm. "Prairie Roots" is lunch-hour softball and girls comparing notes in the willows. "Wheat Ears" and "Cloe and Alexandra" round out the set — one a memory of Cretan youth, the other a poem built around a denial: it wasn't me in that yellow cab, it wasn't snowing, I have no hair.
Mara: What ties them together is the texture of ordinary life under pressure — the meals, the car keys, the Scotch ordered twice.
Pip: And underneath the prose, there's a question the poetry keeps asking too — about where you belong and what you carry.
The Self That Cannot Escape Itself
Mara: Love, memory, and identity keep circling the same problem across these works: the past is not behind you, it is inside you, and it shapes every attempt to move forward.
Pip: Cavafy says it flat out. "As you have wasted your life here, in this small corner, you wasted it in the whole world." There is no smaller indictment.
Mara: Ritsos in "Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume V" reaches for the same idea differently — a man who keeps a small mirror in his pocket because it's the one fixed point when everything else shifts without warning.
Mara: "Kariotakis-Polydouri" holds memory as tenderness — butterflies always flying out through the window. "Mythography" turns inward to still water and a fir tree asking the night for wisdom. "Introspection" names it directly: practicing a religion on the longing for the past.
Pip: "Orange" answers that longing with the wind's reply — your sunshine hides in your heart. "Hours of the Stars" writes love onto the mountain tops of memory. "Katerina Anghelaki Rooke" and "Troglodytes" close the circle — half-words left behind, and a young poet begging the Muses to free him from his own imposed fears.
Mara: The pattern holds: escape is not the remedy. The work is staying present to what you carry.
Pip: A city that follows you, a mirror in your pocket, a bus you board for the first time — it's all the same question dressed differently.
Mara: Where you are, and what you brought with you. More from this site next time.
Privilege I don’t get it, he says, this up and down. To forget I look in the small mirror. I see the immobile window; I see the wall. Nothing changes in or out of the mirror. I place a flower on the chair (if it lasts). I live here, at this number, on this street. Suddenly they lift me (with the chair and the flower) they take me down, carry me up, I don’t know. Luckily, I managed to put this mirror in my pocket.
Angry Poem About the Occupation Don’t tell me the Kouroi that adorned the Hellenic shores have abandoned this forsaken place. This land, this black land, thousand times embittered never stopped to give birth to brave men. Even if we shed tears, we mourn their loss and are joyous for having them as our brothers. Who shall cry for the death of so many brave men? I shall cry and narrate their glory, but now I sing for Mitsos Asteriou, the eagle of Roumeli Tower of Atalanta, the brave, the manly, is among the first brave men of justice and freedom. His heart was as big as the mountains and his mind as high as the cypresses. Workers, let go of the tools let go of the hammers and with both hands show your contempt for the fascists, the lawless perverts who swore to the night that surrounds them, to enslave the World and spread darkness. And now tighten your fists, raise them high let us all together sing the song of the workers’ victory: and behold, Mitsos is walking on earth. His face is pale, his lips embittered although benevolence always shines in his eyes. He’s the one who believed, who was full of love look at how he extended his bloodied hands to us to hold us tightly onto his ripped chest. To the wall they brought him blindfolded to be killed to the place they leaned his kind body the stones shed tears and wail like ghosts and an eagle, Hellenic eagle, flies over there and shades the black place with his wings and constantly groans, exhumes bitterness and curses.
Manolis Aligizakis 