“Anyway, Michael, Danny would be a good man for you. He’s a hill farmer to his toe nails. It’s in his blood. Like yourself. The family worked that land up there for generations.” “Sounds like the very man I’m looking for,” said Michael. “You’d be bringing another Fenian rebel into the village,” Jim cautioned. “He’ll turn your place into a Republican arsenal. And watch out if John Hackett discovers it.” “Aw no, Jim,” said Peter. “Young Danny has no truck with that kind of thing. He’s no rebel, believe me. He knew what his father was up to, but what could he do? The fact that Hackett left him alone tells you he’s all right. I know him well. I’ve been pulling or filling the teeth of three generations of Boylans. I’ll get word to him to come and see you, Michael.” “Sounds good, Peter.” “I hope you don’t live to regret it, Michael,” said Jim Patterson. ҂ He strode resolutely eastwards along the main road in the direction of Carraghlin. He stopped on the bridge over the Shannagh River, lit a cigarette, leaned his elbows on the granite slabs that capped the wall, and stared down into the turbulent water. His mind had taken a tight hold on Flynn Casey and wouldn’t let go. Now Flynn Casey was coming back from his latest visit to Dublin. Bastard, Jim thought. We Protestants are not going to live in an Ireland ruled by the Roman Catholic Church. Never. Jim Patterson was brought up in fear of Home Rule for Ireland, afraid, like most Protestants, that success for Home Rule would establish a Roman Catholic domination over the whole country. Members of the Orange Order in particular, which included every man in the Patterson family, remained deeply distrustful of Popery and of Home Rule as an alliance that threatened both their Order and the militant Puritanism of their ancestors. Jim turned and looked across the road at the Big House of the Hamilton family, dark and brooding in the shadow of the trees on the other side of the river. You should be standing with us, Clifford Hamilton, not against us, he thought spitefully. You Fenian-loving, heathen-loving bastard. You’re no better than Flynn Casey. Don’t you know the IRA are burning down big houses like yours. Just wait, Clifford Hamilton. And you, Flynn Casey. You’re both going to get yours.
Writing What a disgraceful gesture I do as I grab the pen while something stirs in the air: the skin of my nature. Like when late in the day he raised his arm and embraced me with a humble glory as his gurgling voice resembled a child’s who recited a heroic poem before execution. His hand with the chewed nails was inserted inside me so that I’d become my own movement of internment; I finished each poem by staying in touch with it. I bring my desk and my papers to the new erogenous landscape. I start writing. I start the small engine. In the third verse the new inspiration has overwhelmed me. I suppose he’s alive and that exhausts me. I start imaging more than what I do. my hands get sweaty. I put down the pen I wipe the three fingers that held it between my fat thighs. Creation is in full blast.
Black emotion inconspicuous in the restful emptiness of the void
Thick shade I shall become said the thicket— the little bass aimlessly wandering in the water’s gleam I shall hide and let the young toad hop from leaf to branch and from branch to underbelly of the twig’s song when each afternoon declares the retreat of colors the benediction of my darkness turning long before all creatures run for cover just to spend their night in harmony
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where the archive is essentially a library — except the library is on fire, in the best possible way.
Mara: vequinox has been publishing across a wide range of work here: modern Greek poetry in translation, philosophical prose on myth and imagination, and narrative fiction set against some of history's uglier political backdrops. Let's start with the poetry.
Voices Across the Greek Tradition
Pip: The through-line across these poetry collections is that they're not decorative — they're doing something urgent, whether that's Tasos Livaditis processing alienation and survival, or the broader Greek canon being made available in English translation.
Mara: Livaditis sets the tone immediately. The post for Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II was long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, and the excerpt earns that recognition. Here is the poem speaking for itself: "the deadliest sin is not to love oneself, and one day, I couldn't take it anymore, 'Do you know me?' I asked them, 'No,' they told me; thus, I took my revenge, and I was never deprived of the distant sounds."
Pip: So the revenge isn't violence — it's continued existence. Staying present, staying strange, staying in earshot of the world that rejected him. That's a quietly devastating pivot.
Mara: And the poem sustains it. Later it lands on: "I prefer to hang a watch on my vest than to hang myself; it would be as if I were trying to explain too many things." Survival as understatement.
Pip: The Tasos Livaditis – Selected Poems post shows a different register — grief observed through objects and bystanders, a child bloodied by a car, curtains standing at attention. Livaditis keeps finding the peripheral witness.
Mara: Titos Patrikios – Selected Poems takes a more stoic angle. The poem "Change of Times" counsels neither self-justification nor self-condemnation — "You'll come out of this a little wiser, if you only learn to face all human things a bit more serenely." It reads almost like a letter to someone mid-crisis.
Pip: Miltos Sachtouris – Collected Poems goes somewhere darker. The "Night of the Forgotten" is a fragmented, incantatory thing — someone being called back by a voice while they lose pieces of themselves, arm, breast, eyes, until the poem turns on a single word: dawn.
Mara: Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume III pulls from the exile diaries — brief, dated entries, a swollen moon like a drowned body, broken arms in flashlight, two people sharing a broken leg under a wall. Compression as witness.
Pip: Several of the collections move between myth and the personal. Second Advent of Zeus brings Aphrodite into something almost confessional, while Neo-Hellene Poets: An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry reaches further back — an orphic hymn climbing toward Apollonian light while darkness still holds the valley below.
Mara: Kariotakis-Polydouri: The Tragic Love Story is the outlier in tone — elegiac, addressed to a brother, full of scattered dreams and the image of a sun-flooded city from childhood. Antony Fostieris – Selected Poems is leaner: a tree that could be a man, or the devil, shaking branches over wild bodies at night.
Pip: Übermensch, Hours of the Stars, Vespers, The Long Road, Nostos and Algos, and Entropy round out the range — from the compressed image of a colt and dolphin parading in a field of blue flags, to a morning commute where the economic index drops and the beggar count rises and you start wondering if progress is real or if we're just coasting downhill without brakes.
Mara: Entropy puts it plainly: "The river has many homelands / it flows, it doesn't think / it flows loaded with seasons and people." Movement without destination — that's the collection's argument in three lines.
Pip: Which is also, quietly, a decent description of a translation project this large.
Mara: The philosophical work here asks a related question — not where we're going, but what makes existence possible in the first place.
Myth, Being, and the Structure of Imagination
Pip: The Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative is doing something different from the poetry — it's prose philosophy working through Greek cosmogony to ask what imagination actually is and where it comes from.
Mara: It opens with ontology and moves fast into myth. The excerpt reads: "That which makes it possible for something to be is Being (ta oũsia). Thus, from the various possibilities of Being, through a process of union, the universe comes into existence, together with the natural phenomena and the elemental forces of nature embodied in the image of the Cyclopes — terrifying beings outside the ordinary order of existence."
Pip: So the Cyclopes aren't monsters in a story — they're a way of thinking about what lies outside normal categories of existence. The framework uses myth as philosophical vocabulary.
Mara: Exactly. Cronus, Nyx, Nemesis, Thanatos — each deity in the succession myth maps onto a force: Discord, Deceit, Destruction. The essay notes that "the first part of this myth makes no mention whatsoever of a creation of an anthropomorphic kind," which is its hinge — imagination precedes the human.
Pip: That's the kind of argument that makes the poetry collections feel less like a separate shelf and more like the same inquiry running in a different register. Speaking of registers — the fiction here is working in a much grittier one.
Conflict, Desire, and the Weight of History
Pip: The narrative excerpts span Irish political violence, wartime Romania, and a Greek coming-of-age story — all of them placing ordinary people inside systems that are either collapsing or crushing them.
Mara: The Unquiet Land anchors the segment. A letter read aloud describes Ireland in the early 1920s, and it doesn't soften anything: "people going about their business as if living in a bad dream and not knowing if it's going to get worse or better before they wake up. All they seem to be able to talk about is Sinn Fein, Eamon de Valera and the possibility of civil war, together with the latest outrage."
Pip: And then a man named O'Rourke leaves a party and is found shot on the road. No explanation. The letter writer just says she couldn't get over it the next day. That's the texture of political violence — it happens next to dinner parties.
Mara: In Turbulent Times is set in Belfast and Glasgow, following characters negotiating business, family pressure, and escape — someone who fled his overbearing family for Belfast, which says something about how bad Glasgow felt. The Gospel of Silence is the most harrowing: soldiers forbidden to speak at funerals, families forbidden to ask questions, coffins sealed shut.
Pip: The essay on the Transfăgărășan road — built over five years, six thousand tons of dynamite, dozens of soldiers' deaths — lands on this: "in that country even your death did not belong to you, but to the state."
Mara: Straits and Turns and Red in Black close the range — one a Greek youth story with a quick, charged encounter and the social geometry of a classroom exam, the other a poem about two triggers pulled simultaneously, a poacher and a buck, Thanatos delivered to two hearts at once.
Pip: History and desire, both arriving faster than anyone planned.
Mara: What holds all of this together is a persistent question about what survives — a poem, a myth, a letter, a sealed coffin.
Pip: Or a watch on a vest instead of a noose. Livaditis had a point. Next time, more from this archive.
Double Condemnation So, is that it? Just that? Will our pride, he asked, depend on the errors of others? Which pride? Which justification? And not on our own virtues? Teacher, teacher we’ve seen through your mimics well enough: justice, freedom and that smile of yours, (we called heavenly) when the doors opened and the crowds ran. They ran behind you yelling, leaving their homes wide open to the sun, the winds, the thieves. And when the following night the thirteen man raised his glass, we knew now: everything took place already. The dead are laid in the beds, and under the beds your cardboard shoes, red and imperial, with small mirrors all around.
II The neglected one opens the window she opens her eyes down there, trucks pass loaded with black-dressed women who expose their naked gender with blind drivers who curse the Christa and Virgin Mary of the neglected the black-attired women hate her even as they throw their bloody carnations at her and in the heat of their garden of lust and from the evaporation of fuel in the cloud of smoke the drivers rip the cloud apart and call her whore yet she’s a saddened Virgin Mary with her loved one in the icons as time has preserved him with the candles of the betrayed who walked to their death among the daisies and chamomiles with palm leaves and stars of the mountain with swords that severed heads and palm trees.
Wipe I pass my finger over your tear wiping sorrow from your sigh, hold on to me and care for buttercups wild crocuses and mustard yellows, look at the expanse of land, this is where a new day will find us right by hillsides where we’ll plant our children, here we’ll set their feet on a slope so they can have the longest view forever when we meet again
That which makes it possible for something to be is Being (ta oũsia, τὰ οὐσία). Thus, from the various possibilities of Being, through a process of union, the universe comes into existence, together with the natural phenomena and the elemental forces of nature embodied in the image of the Cyclopes–terrifying beings outside the ordinary order of existence, possessing a single eye and immense strength. In keeping with what was almost a universal characteristic of ancient religious creations, the Greek pantheon was likewise consumed by internal struggles for supreme power. Thus, according to the Greek myth, Uranus, angered and made jealous by the great power of his children, the Titans, imprisoned them in the depths of the Earth, depriving them of the possibility of ever again beholding the light of day. Their mother, Gaia, suffered terribly beneath the burden she carried. She urged her children to rebel against their father, yet fear prevented them from obeying, save for her youngest son, Cronus. By cunning he usurped his father’s throne. To punish Cronus10, Nyx conceived an entire host of dreadful deities: Thanatos, Death; Eris, Discord; Apate, Deceit; Ker, Destruction; Hypnos, Sleep, together with dreams and dark apparitions; and Nemesis, the inexorable goddess who avenges transgressions. These deities spread terror, discord, deception, conflict, and misfortune throughout the world over which Cronus reigned. It is evident that the first part of this myth makes no mention whatsoever of a creation of an anthropomorphic kind…
8 Therefore, when I kneeled so innocently, they all thought I was imploring, although I kneeled because it was autumn or how else can I say it: the deadliest sin is not to love oneself, and one day, I couldn’t take it anymore, “Do you know me?” I asked them, “No,” they told me; thus, I took my revenge, and I was never deprived of the distant sounds but don’t ask me what may be happening to the crazy people: what else but that they entertain a child who didn’t want to grow up and since the dream books are old-fashioned, I emigrate to the other edge of my umbrella, being an alcoholic, and since it started raining back in the long-ago days the smell of cypresses started coming in through the windows like music that you guess its end while the old woman was explaining the Resurrection to me “He was afraid they could otherwise forget him,” she said, though for me, I prefer to hang a watch on my vest than to hang myself; it would be as if I were trying to explain too many things exactly like a man could perhaps play a violin with one hand, when he must save his life with the other one and I was so exhausted that when I observed myself, passing in front of mirrors, I could only see the unspoken word and having nothing better to do, I sat and grew rich (In their absence, of course, since they had all turned their backs on me) However, I don’t spend much, and I feel content hearing the distant whistle of the train that makes the dog rise like a man who places something in the tray of the beggar and yes, I know I waste my time and energy and the pages I write get fogged up from room to room and they’ll have a different meaning under the lamp at night and in the morning, you will have to get dressed again, only to feel pain again. Goodbye, then, my good fortitude, I’m going to get busy with my crazy men or talking about their shoes, so uncared as if a hand that knew a lot more put them on to them and perhaps if I started whistling, everything would turn out better or if I wasn’t so prone to these things like the stupid station master who’s paid not to let me travel or like the poet who becomes innocent again after a little sleep.
Routine Same path every morning from the train station to the office two blocks of a walk, three newspaper stands and halfway two beggars dark sky-lobe drenching them as they strangely multiply along with the days going by and the index down for another day, gold off the mark, the price of oil dropping what to do with the need for exhausts and fumes for statistics that make you wonder are we truly making progress or careening brakeless down off-ramps to Hell?
