The sandy stretch beneath the Mureş River embankment served as the beach. In summer we went there every day on foot, enjoying the water, the sunlight, watching the girls and women as though the order of the world might remain unchanged forever. Back then the watermill still functioned for a while, the one that had once belonged to my maternal grandparents. And the Rákóczi-Kornis castle had not yet collapsed into ruin — it operated as an agricultural school. At school we committed every prank imaginable. Teachers were still permitted to use corporal punishment. We received hard slaps. Șerban’s method was the cruelest: he grabbed the hair beside one’s ear and lifted until the tuft remained in his hand. Others struck our palms with rulers. If we jerked our hand away, we had to stretch it out again until the blow landed properly. Our hands throbbed for days afterward. That was why the favorite punishment was being thrown out of class. Then at least we could find something to occupy ourselves with. It was a mixed-language school, with Romanian and Hungarian classes. Back then the balance was still more or less even. Later the proportions shifted; the Hungarian secondary school disappeared, and even in the elementary school fewer and fewer Hungarian pupils remained. At that time there were no dramatic ethnic tensions. It amounted to little more than the strongest Hungarian boy, Józsi Türke — who later became my brother-in-law — testing his strength against Grecu, the Romanians’ muscular champion. The children circled around them, each camp proclaiming its own warrior the victor. Church holidays meant something slightly different to us children than to the devout believers. At Christmas we went caroling. For weeks beforehand we practiced Christmas songs, sometimes at our house, sometimes at my friend István’s. Amid the many false, whining voices filling the streets, our singing was beautiful, and those who welcomed our carols praised us for it.
At the Margins of Existence: Love, Exile and Mortality in Marginal
This seasonal structure is fundamental. Autumn and winter repeatedly signify ageing, loneliness and approaching death; spring signals erotic renewal, resurrection and possibility. This poet’s universe therefore remains tragic without becoming nihilistic. The later sequence “Longing,” consisting of fourteen numbered poems, concentrates these concerns into a more intimate and meditative form. Its recurring invitation “Come, sit next to me” changes the relationship between the poet and the addressee. The voice becomes conversational, almost testamentary. The speaker wishes to remember love, political dreams, failures, friends, unnamed victims, forgotten workers, soldiers and the people whose history exists outside its official narrative. Here the connection with The Incidentals becomes explicit. One poem recalls the revolution that was never begun and the world that was never changed, then sings for those “incidentals” who never raised banners or became heroes. Another goes further and demands that these anonymous people finally be made heroic, because they lived so that others could receive glory.
This is perhaps one of the most important developments in Aligizakis’s recent poetry. The marginal and the incidental become related categories. Both designate those excluded from the centre of historical narration. Poetry becomes an act of restitution: it gives them the page they were denied. Stylistically, Marginal moves between short lyrical poems and expansive free-verse meditations. Aligizakis often relies on accumulation rather than conventional narrative development. Image follows image through associative logic: flower, flesh, sunbeam, mythological figure, household object, political allusion, death, memory. Punctuation is frequently minimized, creating long currents of thought in which perception seems to precede grammatical organization. At its strongest, this technique creates remarkable fluidity. The poems appear to move as memory itself moves—suddenly, irrationally, sensually. A flower may open onto childhood; a body onto mythology; a window onto mortality; an abandoned house onto the mystery of origin.
“Pilgrimage” is among the volume’s finest examples. The speaker returns to the family home, not simply as a visitor but as someone searching for the place where his existence began. Four walls, rocks, wind, the location of the childhood crib and the orientation of the door become coordinates of personal mythology. The house is a finite space placed inside infinity. Biography becomes metaphysics. This exploration continues in “Wisdom of the Nude,” where the abandoned family home becomes associated with an abandoned body, and absence itself becomes a form of knowledge. Such poems reveal Aligizakis at his most compelling: personal memory is neither memoir nor nostalgia but material for ontological inquiry. The volume is not without excess. Aligizakis frequently returns to the same constellation of images—flowers, irises, Eros, death, light, statues, female beauty, loneliness, ancient Greek mythology—and some poems state philosophically what their imagery has already conveyed more effectively. Erotic rhetoric can likewise become so insistent that individual images lose some of their uniqueness. Yet repetition in Marginal also functions almost musically. These motifs return like themes in a long composition, altered slightly by age, memory and context. And repetition is appropriate to a book about ageing.
The older consciousness does not simply advance. It circles. It revisits. It asks again. It remembers differently. The final movement of Longing therefore offers an appropriate culmination. The lovers sit together at dawn and look toward the first rays of light. Their love becomes “blessing,” “endurance,” and “eternity,” and the concluding vision imagines them giving birth metaphorically to a new generation of immortals. This is not naïve immortality. Aligizakis knows too much about death for that. The immortality envisioned by Marginal is the human refusal to let death possess the whole meaning of life.
We die, but we have loved. We disappear, but someone remembers our voice. The homeland changes, but the landscape survives in language. The house becomes empty, but the first cry of the child remains somewhere between its walls. The lover vanishes, but her shadow continues to occupy the arms of memory. The immigrant may remain marginal, yet the very margin from which he speaks allows him to see what those standing comfortably at the centre often cannot. And perhaps this is the central achievement of Marginal. Manolis Aligizakis transforms marginality from a condition of deprivation into a privileged poetic perspective. From the edge, the structures of the centre become visible. From exile, homeland can be questioned. From old age, youth can be understood differently. From loneliness, love acquires its full weight. From the proximity of death, the body becomes luminous. Marginal is therefore a book of boundaries, but also of their transgression. Its poetry continually inhabits the narrow strip between the temporary and the eternal. And in that uncertain territory, among flowers, bodies, memories, myths, empty rooms and returning light, the poet finds what poetry has always sought: not an escape from mortality, but a language capable of standing before it.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where Greek modernist poetry, frontier fiction, and poems about desire share the same digital neighborhood — which is either a very ambitious curatorial vision or the world's most eclectic bookshelf.
Mara: vequinox has been posting across all of that territory this week — translations of major Greek poets, a wide range of fiction excerpts, and poetry collections that sit somewhere between the surreal and the visceral. Let's start with the Greek poetry translations.
Greek Poets, Translated and Alive
Pip: The question underneath all these translations is whether a poem can survive the crossing — from modern Greek into English, from one cultural world into another, without losing whatever made it matter in the first place.
Mara: The Tasos Livaditis volume, long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, gives you a direct answer in the verse itself: "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."
Pip: That line does something interesting — it frames grief as a structural flaw in the person, not a wound from outside. The rock wouldn't feel any of this. The human does, and that's the problem.
Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume IV and Volume V — push into similar territory from different angles. The Volume IV poem "Method of Optimism" describes a man whose face stays sunlit even as everything around him is almost black, furniture, faces, time, windows. Volume V is starker: "Come on, let's finish it, he said, continuance is boring."
Pip: Ritsos apparently had no patience for the long goodbye.
Mara: Titos Patrikios takes a different approach in his Selected Poems — the poem "Monument" builds an image of everyday inertia, "without a bang, without pleasure, with inert touch deep in your viscera," which is a very specific kind of monument to build.
Pip: The Nikos Engonopoulos collection moves through myth and desire, tracing a line from ancient phallic dances to "these black eyes that look at me." And the George Seferis Collected Poems lands somewhere more desolate — "High mountains, you can't hear us! Help! Help!" — a cry that expects no answer.
Mara: What holds all of these together is the translation work itself, carrying voices across decades and languages. That same labor of rendering inner life legible shows up differently in the fiction excerpts.
Fiction's Pressures: Family, Land, and Conflict
Pip: The fiction this week keeps returning to one question — what happens when the world outside a family is in crisis and the world inside it is already broken?
Mara: The excerpt from He Rode Tall sets the frame clearly: seventeen-year-old Joel is riding the high ridges on July 20, 1969, and the narration notes that "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."
Pip: That date is doing quiet work. The moon landing is happening on a radio somewhere while this kid is counting cattle and absorbing his father's cruelty. History as backdrop to a family that has no room for it.
Mara: Jazz with Ella moves the coordinates entirely — Moscow, a young woman named Jennifer discovering she has family in the Soviet Union, and a conversation that keeps circling a family accident nobody names directly. She says, "Everything about my family is to do with the accident." And then she decides to send a telegram rather than call, because withholding, as the narrator puts it, ran in the family.
Pip: Withholding as inheritance. That is a very compact way to describe a very large problem.
Mara: In Turbulent Times and The Unquiet Land both place their characters inside Irish political fractures — the latter featuring a long pub argument about partition, two nations, two parliaments, and a Council of Ireland that one character calls "two sham parliaments and a Council that can't raise a single tax." The tension is constitutional, but it's also personal.
Pip: Wellspring of Love and Water in the Wilderness share a quieter register — a nurse named Tyne appears in both, at a patient's bedside in one, tending her aunt in the other, prayer and practicality running side by side.
Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men takes the widest historical lens — a traveling company of Norse, Irish, and Indigenous characters crossing a continent, with a Mandan chief named Fire Maker telling stories by campfire, and a monk determined to make converts.
Pip: Poodie James and Straits and Turns close out the range — one a tense small-town confrontation between a reporter and a sweating councilman who would very much like the past to stay in the past, the other a Greek-diaspora social scene where desire and social performance are basically the same activity.
Mara: Across all of it, characters are navigating what they've inherited — land, silence, conflict, family damage. The poetry collections make that inheritance lyric rather than narrative.
Desire, Dread, and the Surreal Interior
Pip: The poetry here isn't interested in resolved emotion — it's interested in the moment before resolution, or the moment when resolution turns out to be impossible.
Mara: The Gospel of Silence opens this territory with a prose-poem voice that is unusually direct: "For a long time, I believed one stays alive by understanding everything. Now I know there are things one must simply endure, survive."
Pip: That's a significant revision to make about your own operating assumptions. And the childhood scenes that follow — ice cracking underfoot, wading into black marsh water, counting leeches as proof of having gone somewhere forbidden — all enact it physically.
Mara: Medusa frames desire as interruption — grand mythic language about "an apocalyptic prophecy" and "the parabolic myth of my oppressed life" cut through by italicized domestic voices: "Get up and help me do the dishes." The sublime and the mundane are arguing in the same stanza.
Pip: The mundane wins on points, as it usually does.
Mara: Nuances and Impulses work in shorter, more compressed registers — whispered desire in the first, dancers and an old man lost in reverie in the second. Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy gives the speaker a different kind of motion: "I was a river passer, a mule rider, an engraving on the rock — mule and man, the same flesh."
Pip: Entropy, Troglodytes, and Ugga push toward something more abstract — cells dying without noticing, troglodytes dividing the first earthly ownership while fireflies drift through cave air, and a sequence of compressed philosophical fragments about thought, logos, and the concept of the infinite reduced to "tiny concept for first-grade school."
Mara: What runs through all of it is a refusal to separate the body from the idea — desire is always also dread, survival is always also endurance, and the inner life keeps finding the outer world waiting for it.
Pip: Greek modernism, frontier families, diaspora parties, ice cracking under children's feet — it's a wide map.
Mara: What connects it is the pressure of inheritance — what gets passed down, what gets translated, what gets endured. More of that territory next time.
For a long time, I believed one stays alive by understanding everything. Now I know there are things one must simply endure, survive. Children love excitement, challenges, danger. Often they fail to perceive risks, or else they underestimate them. They do not avoid danger; they examine it like some mechanism full of secrets whose moment of activation they do not yet understand. We were the same. In winter we ventured out onto the barely frozen lake, whose ice cracked beneath every step as if warning us — or perhaps luring us onward. We knew it was dangerous, but knowledge alone was never enough reason to turn back. If the ice gave way beneath one of us, we pulled him out however we could, then ran home racing time itself before his wet clothes froze onto his body. Now it seems as though it was not we who ran, but earlier versions of ourselves whom no one can ever catch again. In summer we waded into the murky marsh with its black waters. I do not know what drew us there; perhaps the fact that it had no boundaries, only density. We pushed through it waist-deep, later picking leeches off ourselves on the shore — though we simply called them bloodsuckers, as if the name alone could strip them of all strangeness. We felt no disgust toward them; we counted them instead, as though they were proof we had gone where we should not have gone. Stealing melons and fruit from the collective farm fields was almost a ritual. It was not hunger that drove us, but prohibition. The appearance of the field guard always set the same scene in motion: waving his stick, he charged after us while we fled, as though some ancient story wished to retell itself again and again. The older boys escaped easily; the younger ones cried because the guard had come too close. Now I know the fear did not come from the stick, but from the realization that the world was capable of hunting us down. I remember other runs as well. “Korea” — that was what they called the two new streets built after the flood. In the house beside the lake lived a Romani family. Their eldest boy was violent and cruel — or rather, unavoidable.
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.
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.
Rick looked disconsolately through the second-storey classroom window at sheets of freezing rain, the weathered fence of the Pennsylvania Railroad coal yard and the blackened struts of the steel bridge that shuddered ever so slightly when a train passed over it, then back at Sister Assunta who was preaching, again, about The Immortal Soul as she paced back and forth in front of the blackboard behind her desk, slapping the pointer against her palm like a riding crop. “Pagans!” she was saying, “You were all born pagans and you must be taught to fear (her pointer hissed and snapped loudly against the desk blotter) the power of Almighty God.” Silence. Some of them lowered their heads to avoid her stare. But Rick was puzzled. That kind old man who lived forever in the sky was merciful and just. He was love itself. Why should anyone be afraid of him? He raised his hand. Forty-two pairs of eyes swung toward the front of the room, afraid for him, but excited by the drama that might be about to unfold. Sister Assunta merely glared and went on pacing, her voice hoarse with a nearly demonic fierceness. Rick took his arm carefully out of the air. “Daily, you neglect your immortal souls. They may already be lost to eternal damnation.” She stopped precisely behind her desk chair, her florid minutely wrinkled skin drawn into a tight smile. Rick tried to look inside himself. There wasn’t much light. After a while he became concerned. Where was his immortal soul, anyway, why couldn’t he find it? Then something round and flat like a communion wafer came into focus. It was tilted, like the head of a snare drum, and it was so clean it glowed. He began to understand. When you did bad stuff, soot fell on it out of the dark, then, if you confessed and said five Hail Marys,
five our fathers, and an act of contrition, an invisible power swept it clean again. And immediately, almost automatically, his pubescent mind reached for what he knew to be forbidden. The kids called her The Beauty Queen. Her dad owned the bar and grill at the corner of Monmouth and Fifth. She spent a lot of time with her followers in the extra lot next to her house her grandparents had made into a large garden surrounded by hedges, and dotted with trees. When she came out for a walk, all the guys stopped what they were doing and watched her tight pedal pushers, her graceful careless moves…
The Lost 1% Finally you turned me into yourself, my love! Or perhaps I’ve been this way all along unable to answer the same way when they tell me “I love you”. Unable to say, “me too…”, or “I also love you.” The phrase almost reaches my lips but is not stated. To observe other men with that sad and full of agony glance, the one I noticed in your eyes for a long time, and not being able to answer. Now I can understand what you felt. I feel the same way. Now, I know what it means for the other person to expect something from your lips and you unable to utter a word. And it is not that you don’t love the person, it’s not that you don’t care for them. The opposite, you care and you hurt more so. But that 1 % that is missing, that you miss and without it the word isn’t said. That 1 % you know you won’t ever find. That, as if you came faulty out of the factory and you miss something, what you’ll never acquire and as a result you’ll never be able to give it to anyone. And you’ll remain like Sisyphus to go up and down the mountain with the weight of love on your back, forever searching to unload it and to offer it somewhere. 70 But there will never be anyone to lighten up your load no one will ever walk along with you up the mountain and no one will ever give you a hand just to stop you from slipping down the slope. Because simply you can’t grasp onto anybody’s hand you can’t grasp onto anything.
The postman in Mail moves from house to house carrying news of marriages, births, and children living far away. For everyone else, he is the bearer of messages, while tears run down his face because he too waits for a letter that never arrives.
Here lies one of Aligizakis’s strongest poetic gifts: his ability to create an entire human destiny from a few concrete gestures.
He does not write psychological portraits in the conventional sense. Of many of his characters we know almost nothing. We are given an occupation, a gesture, a memory, an object.
The rest is accomplished by metaphor. The net becomes a trap. The rope becomes a life.
Bookkeeping becomes an account with death.
The felling of a tree becomes an image of our own disappearance. The letter becomes a metaphor for absence. The shoe becomes the sign that, for a little while longer, we may still walk upon the earth.
This poetic world is at once archaic and contemporary. Hades and Thanatos move naturally through gas stations, diners, hospitals, stock-market screens, garages, and Canadian immigration offices. For Aligizakis, Greek mythology is not museum material but a still-living language through which human finitude can be expressed.
The immigrant is therefore a particularly significant figure. In Immigrant, the protagonist leaves his homeland to begin a new life on the other side of the planet. He promises his youth and productive years to the new country in exchange for security—but the poem’s ruthless conclusion suggests that in doing so he has, in a sense, sold himself “for a few dollars more.”
This experience carries particular resonance in the work of a poet whose own biography has been shaped by emigration. Yet Aligizakis does not write autobiographical complaint. Migration becomes another model of the human condition: we all make exchanges with the world. We give time for money, freedom for security, dreams for predictability. The only question is whether we are aware of the contract we have signed.
The Incidentals is not a comfortable book. Nor does it wish to be.
It is often rough, grotesque, ironic, sometimes sarcastic. It refuses to beautify the body, old age, labour, or death. Aligizakis occasionally uses brutal language to awaken the reader from precisely the complacency he wishes to attack.
Yet beneath this harshness lies an unusual humanism.
Because if these people were truly incidental, no poems would be written about them.
Poetry itself refutes the title.
The moment the poet writes about Gladys, Mathew, Stefan, Benjamin, Galanos, or the nameless postman, he abolishes their insignificance. He lifts them out of the anonymous mass of time. Society may have counted them as numbers, but poetry gives them names, faces, stories, and deaths.
This is perhaps the most beautiful ethical gesture of the volume. Poetry cannot defeat death.
But it can defeat oblivion—if only for the duration of a poem.
Manolis Aligizakis’s The Incidentals is therefore far more than a collection of poems about ordinary people. It is at once a modern dance of death, a social diagnosis, a sequence of philosophical parables, and an ironic catalogue of human existence. The volume asks how many people live out their lives without ever daring to move away from the stake to which an invisible rope has tied them.
And it asks an even more difficult question: how long is the rope on which we ourselves live?
The poet cannot answer that question for us.
Perhaps this is precisely the point at which the stories of the „incidentals” cease to be the stories of others. And ours begins.
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.
