Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has been quietly building one of the more unusual literary archives on the internet — translations, original poetry, fiction spanning centuries and continents, all landing on the same site like it's nothing.

Mara: vequinox is behind all of it, and today we're covering the range: modern Greek poetry in translation, a wide stretch of literary fiction and drama, and poems that sit at the intersection of love and loss.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Voices From Modern Greek Poetry

Mara: The question this cluster of posts raises is what modern Greek poetry is actually doing — what it reaches for, and what it refuses to let go of. The anchor here is Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's "Unexpected Development."

Pip: She sets it up plainly: "It was when words overflowed / images flew like wild birds / that refused to feed on words / even if they were hungry for them."

Mara: That tension — images that won't submit to language even when they need it — runs through the whole collection. Anghelaki Rooke is mapping a kind of loss that precedes grief.

Pip: Antony Fostieris takes a harder geometric line in his selected poems: a snake eating its tail, beginning collapsing into end, the body always absent. Tasos Livaditis, longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, closes his poem "Coincidences" on the line "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth" — which is either profound or a very elegant shrug.

Mara: Nikos Engonopoulos writes about Georg Trakl — a poet who "never agreed with them" and whose only longing, once he understood what it meant to be alive, was to escape. Yannis Ritsos, the Neo-Hellene Poets anthology, Hours of the Stars, Orange, Ugga, and Troglodytes all appear here too, each finding a different pressure point between the lyric and the world pressing in on it.

Pip: Fiction carries some of that same weight — let's go there.

Literary Fiction And Drama Across Time And Place

Mara: What this range of fiction shares is an interest in pressure — the moment a situation tips, when a character can no longer hold the ordinary shape of their life. Straits and Turns is the anchor, and it earns it.

Pip: The excerpt follows a couple and their dog Elvis through a cancer diagnosis and a slow, careful goodbye. The prose doesn't reach for drama; it just watches. "Two days went by. The situation worsened. They called the vet, who suggested that perhaps the cancer metastasized from his bladder to his bones, as it was statistically the case in most of these dogs."

Mara: What that sentence does is hold clinical language right next to love, and the gap between them is where the whole excerpt lives. The decision not to pursue chemotherapy, the daily medication ritual, the final day when Elvis doesn't touch his food — it's a portrait of grief that arrives before the loss does.

Pip: Jazz with Ella moves in a completely different register — Cold War tension, a border crossing, a woman watching a man she's trying to protect navigate an interrogation line. The stakes are geopolitical, but the writing keeps its eye on the human pulse of the scene.

Mara: Fury of the Wind is quieter — a community fair, a husband and wife negotiating small social obligations, the ordinary friction of a marriage visible in a single exchange about who covers the preserves booth.

Pip: Redemption takes a young man named Hermes Dragakis back to his village with a diploma and a scholarship to Canada, and the scene where the mayor tries to understand what an economist actually does is somehow both funny and genuinely moving.

Mara: In Turbulent Times goes somewhere more intimate — an Irish drama of paternity, secrecy, and a woman who tells a man quietly, "You let me down, but I forgive you."

Pip: Wellspring of Love watches a woman named Tyne move through her sleeping children at night — each child rendered in a sentence, the accumulated tenderness of a parent who has already known loss. Blood, Feathers and Holy Men puts a monk named Rordan in early medieval Ireland, furious that the Church buries medical knowledge while people die of infected throats. He's not wrong, which makes it worse.

Mara: Arrows delivers its moment in a single blackout — a priest counting the dead, touching foreheads, finding one name missing. Savages and Beasts opens on a murder inside a residential institution and the slow, formal way the news spreads through the building. In the Quiet After Slaughter follows a bush pilot whose final chapter is written in retrospect, quietly. The Unquiet Land gives us Caitlin and Michael on a clifftop after something has broken, and Caitlin describing a dream of the sea gone still and black "the way the world will look when it's ended and we've all gone."

Pip: Poodie James puts a police chief in a room full of political pressure, defending a hobo from a sabotage charge with nothing but logic and a flat refusal to perform certainty he doesn't have. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy and Marginal round out the theme — the first a lyric sequence of departure and transformation, the second a short, still poem about absence that ends on silence mimicking footsteps. And Ubermensch contributes a poem called "Funeral" — a poet buried while the hawk watches and the wine flows and someone begs for two bits at the edge of the scene.

Mara: The emotional through-line from fiction into poetry is loss — anticipated, survived, or simply witnessed. That's where the next segment lives.

Poems Of Love And Loss

Mara: The question here is what poetry does with grief that prose can't — how it compresses the experience until the image does the work the argument refuses to do. Yannis Ritsos anchors it.

Pip: The poem is called "The Dead House," and Ritsos doesn't soften it: "Soon the marbles sweated out blood again. The cleaners left too. They deserted us; so, we forgot about everything too: sweeping, mopping, dusting and the marble kept on sweating out more and more blood."

Mara: What that gets the reader is abandonment rendered as a physical law — the house bleeds no matter who tries to clean it, and eventually everyone stops trying, including the people who live there.

Pip: Antony Fostieris in his selected poems makes the same point through pure geometry — the circular trap where every beginning joins the end. Tasos Livaditis, the Griffin longlisted volume, closes on "music in the beyond / that seeks what poetry silences on earth." And Troglodytes frames the young poet standing against bigotry, recording grace — which is its own kind of elegy for what keeps getting buried.

Mara: Grief and witness, across every form the site carries.

Pip: What stays with me is how much of this — the poetry, the fiction, the elegies — is about things that refuse to be cleaned up. Blood in the marble. A dog that won't eat. A monk who can't make the Church listen.

Mara: Persistence against forgetting. That's the thread. More of it next time.