The Nimkus Fall Fair proved a huge success. Even some of the town matrons relented at the last minute, or at least before it was too late to enter their exhibits. Most of them grew flowers and vegetable gardens, and they could not pass up the chance to compete against the farm women. But this year, not only the town matrons participated. Miss Carrington entered her crocheted doilies and embroidered pillow case as well as a couple of jars of Saskatoon preserves. She also agreed to be a judge for some of the exhibits, a prestigious job that had always been reserved for two or more of the business men’s wives, or town women from Bradshaw. Millie Osborne was not to be outdone, either. She had worked all through the previous winter and most of the spring, knitting socks and sweaters. Her grown sons had laughed at her, asking if she was trying to get in with the high mucky-mucks around town. But Millie would not be discouraged. “After all,” she told her boys, “Mr. Carson says I have to support the Association now that I’m an Ag member.” “Aw, Maw,” they chided, “you can’t compete with the biddies who live in this town. They’ve been doing this stuff for years.” “You mind your own business, you louts,” Millie said. “My things will look just as nice and tidy as any others on display.” And they did, as her boys were forced to admit when they saw them next to other exhibits on the day of the fair. Pong, the laundryman, did not have anything to exhibit but he worked tirelessly all day, as well as the evening before the fair, helping to set up booths, carrying and fetching, happy just to be of service to Will and Missy Ben. Holding the clipboard that had once been Will’s responsibility, Sarah looked around her at the people gathered on the fair grounds. Many greeted her with a nod or a cheery, “Good day, Mrs. Fielding,” or, from the less reserved ones, “Hi there, Sarah, how’s it going?” Was it her imagination or were there actually more people than there had been last year? She saw Mrs. Thompson leading little David McNeill by the hand, and walked over to them. “I see you have your hands full for the day,” Sarah said, bending to give David a hug.
Under the icy archipelago krill dance en masse to the chorus of arctic current like a curtain pleat searching for direction they mingle and grow enough to be retained in the baleen of leviathan with teary eyes and big heart that keeps ahead of the undulating ocean’s breath and inhospitable depth harsh temperature of winter interlocks with short summer and perfect balance of sunlight
Scriber Hours have turned pale, and he’s found stooped over the unthankful table. The sun slides in through the open window and plays onto the opposite wall folding my chest I search for my breath in the dust of my papers. A thousand sounds life vibrates sweetly in the freedom of the street I’m exhausted, my eyes and mind are blurry yet I still write. I know of two sunlit lilies in a vase next to me as if they’ve sprung up from a grave.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis — translator, poet, publisher, and apparently a one-person archive of everything Greek literature has ever felt about mortality, love, and the road.
Mara: vequinox has been busy. Today we're moving through modern Greek poetry in translation, then into myth and mortality, and finally into fiction and travel narratives that cross borders both literal and historical.
Pip: Let's start with the poets.
Voices Across the Aegean: Modern Greek Poetry in Translation
Mara: The throughline across these translations is a question: what survives when a poem crosses languages? The Cavafy post gives us one answer through the myth of Achilles and a god who betrays his own prophecy.
Pip: And Cavafy frames it with Plato first, which is a move — citing the Republic to set up a poem about divine bad faith. The quote lands hard: "Yet, he, himself… who sang the hymn… he killed my son."
Mara: That line is Thetis speaking. Apollo sang paeans at her wedding foretelling her son's long life, and then personally went to Troy and killed Achilles. The prophecy and the killing share the same mouth.
Pip: Which is either theology or the oldest recorded case of a conflict of interest.
Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume V and Volume VI — push into similar territory from a different angle. Volume V gives us the evening star as an eraser moving back and forth over a mistake that never quite disappears, birth and death as a rhythm rather than a sequence.
Mara: Volume VI's "Same Word" watches language itself tremble under its own unfamiliar meaning, like a nerve that shivers and bursts. Ritsos keeps returning to the threshold between sense and silence.
Pip: Tasos Livaditis takes that threshold into a tavern. The bouzouki player in Volume II swears every day he'll turn his life around, and every night the world deepens and pulls him back through the door.
Mara: George Seferis in the Collected Poems gives us crickets ticking out of rhythm, a house full of them, and the line "we don't even whisper, because the machine is speeding before horror and contempt." The anthology Neo-Hellene Poets lands a parable about a bird that can learn every sweet song except the words "I love you."
Pip: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Selected Poems counts time differently: "I count time with what I've lived and what is forthcoming that resembles the incomparable end. Only, look, the craft and the fisherman can't be separated from the blue."
Mara: Titos Patrikios in Selected Poems is more pointed — "Economic Development" watches emigration and foreign investment rise together while newspapers announce cultural ideals are being maintained. And Nuances holds the sharpest compression: a poem called "Repetitions" that names peace as something a sword erases.
Pip: Red in Black steps outside Greece entirely, finding illumination in Craiova, Romania, through Brancusi sculptures — the Blind Boy and The Kiss — connecting Greek poetic consciousness to Romanian artistic space. That range from Cavafy's Troy to a Romanian museum is the real scope of this project.
Mara: From mythic time to the present tense — which is exactly where the next set of poems lives.
Eros, Entropy, and the Weight of Ending
Pip: This cluster asks what myth and love actually cost — not in the abstract, but in the body, in the moment, in the interruption.
Mara: Medusa opens with a poem called "Gravestone" where Eros descends to a melancholic youth and a widow turns in the moonlight, and then the poem pivots without warning: "Nothing matters more than the armchair craving my body as the widow craves her late husband."
Pip: The domestic interruptions — the faucet, the table, the wife demanding full attention — aren't a joke at the poem's expense. They're the actual argument: desire and the ordinary are not separate territories.
Mara: Entropy's "Eternal Cycle" strips that argument to its bones — earth aging, returning its shine, then embracing each thing on its path toward what it always longed for. Wheat Ears traces the same arc through a single memory: beauty glimpsed through a window, understood only later when years have become dry leaves on a sidewalk.
Pip: Rendition and Life is a Poem hold the stranger registers — one a requiem tracking dawn through alcohol and fear, the other a surrealist marketplace where oaks erect monuments and white rabbits somersault on floating meadows. Hours of the Stars closes it with a prologue about those who never let their glance reach the light, and the chaste people who do.
Mara: That tension between those who see and those who can't — it runs through the fiction too.
Roads Taken Hard: Fiction and Travel Across Borders
Pip: The fiction here is about people in motion — and motion that doesn't stop even when it probably should.
Mara: Ugga frames that with unusual economy: "For the light to change the production must pause and the pause must be produced methodically." Four lines that describe filmmaking and also, quietly, everything else.
Pip: In Turbulent Times gives us Ian Anderson driving furiously south from Lisburn, cursing his own idea the entire way, and not stopping. The road is "drunken," the steering wheel swung "in fury, like a ship's skipper in a storm."
Mara: The rationing detail grounds it precisely in postwar Northern Ireland — no meal over five shillings, no more than three courses, restaurants exempt and resented for it. The historical texture is load-bearing.
Pip: Straits and Turns puts a mechanic behind a fogged window in a Vancouver train yard, rain dripping steadily, "poetically, he'd say." The Circle moves between Baghdad and a new apartment, a move organized with pizzas and a reserved elevator and a view west toward the Pacific.
Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men is the furthest journey — Irish monks in North America, a guide warning that the trip takes five or six seasons and that stragglers get left behind. And Jazz with Ella lands in Moscow, a Canadian teacher stepping onto Soviet soil and remembering Churchill: "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
Pip: She suspected it was hyperbole. Then she stepped off the plane.
Mara: What holds all of this together is the act of crossing — languages, borders, centuries, the distance between a prophecy and its betrayal.
Pip: Next time, we'll see where that crossing takes us.
The evening star, have you noticed, sweat evening star looks like an eraser rubbing on the same spot as if erasing our mistake, which mistake? And you hear an imperceptible sound as the eraser goes back and forth over the mistake which isn’t erased. Tiny slivers of paper fall on the trees and sparkle. It’s a pleasant involvement and it doesn’t matter the mistake isn’t erased; the polite, persistent, the steady movement of the star is enough like the first and last concept-rhythm; heavenly energy, practical too like that of the loom and the verse the evening star stirs amid the cypresses golden shuttle between the long mourning threads one hiding our mistake and the other showing it not ours, mistake of the world, inherited mistake what was a mistake? Our birth or death? Have you noticed? The autumn evenings are beautiful, friendly they erase our guilt in a calm, general guilt and establish a secret friendship among us, a friendship of rhythm, yes, yes, exactly a rhythmical friendship, that’s it, it goes back and forth, birth-death, lust-dream, act-silence, it’s an exit, I’m saying to you, to the back side, the darker, straight to heaven.
A bunch of strange people come every night to find some warmth and consolation in her songs, those people who talk of their old, dead friends, as they are still there accompanying them and every so often they spill some wine on the floor, a libation to the irreversible end. Elias said to him, “Will you leave her alone?” “No”, the other said. Then Elias, being a smart man said to him: “if you love her get married to her, she’s all yours”. The other backed down. You see he wanted her for the bed scene not for his table; that was too much. Then Elias decided to marry her. God bless his soul. Elias dead for twenty years now and she relives each night with the insignificant eternal words. At that exact moment the man with bouzouki entered: he swears all day long that he’ll turn his life around but when night comes and the world becomes deeper and those distant voices with their deadly attraction are heard (where do they come from?) as if someone suddenly pushes him as he passes through the first tavern, (indeed he often was startled and turned to see who pushed him) he enters and starts to drink and drink and play for himself, endless hours, with foggy eyes, wrapped around his bouzouki as if fighting a demon. “Only Olga was good; this Hebrew and Asimina drink a lot and then they urinate in their cloths. Another one, Barbara, daughter of the Phanariotisa, when she drank her pants always fell then, come John, get the mop” (to help clean the floor of the tavern for some wine as payment).
Illumination In the darkness of your day the smile of a female youth I discovered and suddenly the spring appeared among the curled pine needles the sparrow’s chirp calling its mate that firstly I heard amid the thin foliage of the shrubs, echo of soothing raindrops, reminded me the meditative whisper I felt in the Blind Boy and The Kiss by Brancusi which I encountered in your Museum’s prudent display Craiova, city of the ascetic and pulsing vein of the anchorite you’ve functioned in the boy’s sweet cry and in the cradle of civilization proud female smiling youth with optimism the future you invite Craiova, artistic city of Romania my path to illumination you’ve underscored
VII something vague gave birth to me even if they told me I was born in the sunshine. small in passion and in sorrow I walk toward something light that will be life and I stop… I return…death. I count time with what I’ve lived and what is forthcoming that resembles the incomparable end. only, look, the craft and the fisherman can’t be separated from the blue
PARABLE The morning star can never shine as you when you appear, joy-giving lass nor does the green clover have as much as you have freshness on your sweetened lips nor do the flowers of narcissus have such fragrance as your lightest breath nor does the bird know how to sing such sweet songs as your inventive lips. One only it can’t learn—to sing I love you— and for this, I dare to say, another soul may die.
Manolis Aligizakis 