…what beautiful mound hidden under that skimpy bathing suit she wore, the Muse of my day with her flowing brunette hair, her balanced curves, her excellent sized breasts, her exquisite buttocks which she moved in an erotic way unparalleled to any I had ever seen and trust me I’ve seen many, far too many to know the beauty from the average and even more so from the unworthy of my glance and this ethereal beauty walked as if floating over the smooth sand just as my dream of touching those exquisite curves brought me to heavens. Indeed, the ancient Muses were there interacting and playing with her, and I couldn’t see any difference between today’s earthly Muse and the Ancient ones, and here she was turned towards me when, suddenly, our glances met. She sensed that, behind my sunglasses, my eyes were fixated on her ethereal saunter, and she remained focused on me for more than ten seconds: the first acknowledgement. Yes, I was looking at her, and she knew it, and that was enough for the game of love to be played when she went back to her chair and, turning it to the sunshine, she lay her calligraphic body onto the multicoloured towel and gazed at the open water of the quiet and serene cove. I let myself travel along with her glance. I marvelled at the natural beauty of the cove with lapping waves and its whooshing breeze, while I didn’t hesitate to imagine this day’s wonder in the body of the tourist. In her early thirties she represented the female queen of the beach, yes, there were others too, some very pretty as well, yet this one was the special one of who one with exquisite taste, like myself, could easily get himself loose in the imaginary game two people play when the chance arises and this were my thoughts when suddenly the Ammoudara Aphrodite turned her body to her stomach letting the bright sunshine play with her back, from the top of her head to the very lustful buttocks and legs of hers, indeed it was that moment that she stared towards where I was sitting and realizing I was still with her she fixated her glance towards me. I raised my hand and lowered my sunglasses a bit, and seeing her from the top of my glasses, I smiled a full smile at her, to which, to my utter surprise, she also lowered her sunglasses and stared at me from the top of hers.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has assembled a catalog that moves from ancient Greek anguish to Canadian prairie winters to stock market schemes — which is either a literary festival or a very ambitious reading list, depending on your weekend.
Mara: vequinox brings all of it together on this site — translations of modern Greek poetry, original verse on love and desire, and a run of novels spanning hardship across continents and generations. Let's start with the poetry coming out of Greece.
Voices From Modern Greece
Pip: The modern Greek poets gathered here are working a particular problem — how do you hold loss, resistance, and beauty in the same breath without one canceling the others out.
Mara: The Yannis Ritsos volume sets the tone early. The poem "The Inexpressible" builds toward this image: "the blind musician, tired, goes back up. He puts his violin case on the chair. He opens it; two of the three glasses are in it. They are shining and whole."
Pip: So the broken things you carried out in guilt come back intact — the poem turns on that reversal, the indestructibility of what you thought you'd lost for good.
Mara: Constantine Cavafy's "Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto" works a related tension — the great No that is right and still burdens its speaker for life. Nikos Engonopoulos in "Goalpost" pushes into civic dread, asking whether the Sunday bells will be followed by hymns or machine guns.
Pip: Engonopoulos lands the ambiguity without resolving it, which is its own kind of answer.
Mara: Tasos Livaditis in "Simple Talk" insists on plainness as survival — speaking, loving, dying "in a simple way." George Seferis in "The Shape of Fate" asks who orders destruction from behind, and Titos Patrikios watches a man of creative mind reduced to counting whether his wages last the month.
Mara: Antony Fostieris names "certain pain" that strikes the empty heart beyond all desire. The Neo-Hellene anthology and the Troglodytes collection round out the range, from birch-forest dawn to an invocation of the Goddess to purge the ego entirely.
Pip: Ten poets, one through-line: the thing that survives is rarely the thing you expected to keep.
Mara: The love poems take that survivorship somewhere more intimate — let's move there now.
Love At Both Edges
Pip: The love and desire poems here are not soft — they treat longing as a force with weight and consequence, something closer to weather than to sentiment.
Mara: "The Incidentals" opens the territory directly: "the seething angst of lust demands her body's contours and dark caves on the altar of Aphrodite deserving unemotional dedication, like any archon sitting up high, like any God jealous or self-absorbed and relaxed."
Pip: Desire framed as liturgy — the body as offering, the worshipper as functionary. That's a cold altar.
Mara: "Hear Me Out" pulls in the opposite direction emotionally but lands in the same isolation: two people on parallel paths going opposite directions, past the point where they first met, with only the roundness of the earth as any possible reunion.
Mara: "Wheat Ears" compresses the whole arc into image — "two bodies defining the shape of a monad," synthesis as astronomical and emotional at once. "Rendition" closes it with a line that strips possession entirely: "Of all you have amassed, none is yours."
Pip: Love, desire, and ultimately the inventory comes up empty. The novels take that emptiness and put it in a house with bad insulation — let's go there.
Novels Of Endurance And Reckoning
Pip: The fiction here keeps returning to people held in place by circumstance — weather, pregnancy, poverty, complicity — and asking what they do with the time they cannot escape.
Mara: "Fury of the Wind" makes that literal. Sarah, isolated on a prairie homestead through a brutal winter, moves house plants to the kitchen table each night to keep them from freezing, writes letters that take weeks to arrive, and waits. The passage reads: "she missed the companionship of others, especially Penny. What would she give to be able to sit down to a cup of tea in Penny's cheerful kitchen?"
Pip: A cup of tea as the full measure of what isolation costs. That's a precise kind of grief.
Mara: "The Unquiet Land" puts a different kind of waiting at its center — Mother Ross, who knows Caitlin is pregnant before the wedding, removes her own mother's ring from her finger and gives it to Michael for the ceremony. She hears Caitlin sobbing upstairs and swallows her own agony whole.
Pip: Respectability as ransom, as Mother Ross calls it — and she's already paid her installment.
Mara: "Water in the Wilderness" moves the tension into a seedy hotel corridor, Tyne's knees going weak as she waits for a deteriorated Corky Conrad to open his door. "Prairie Roots" grounds everything in the farming community's frank hierarchy — survival first, schooling second, and a father who insisted otherwise.
Mara: "Jazz with Ella" sends Jennifer onto a plane into a storm, retreating into questions about why she was chosen over Paul for a Soviet Union language tour, and what it cost her in salary to say yes. "Introspection" and "Hours of the Stars" work in verse — the first building toward "the final, greatest monad," the second catching grandparents' long faces at a christening where the names chosen feel like paganism to them.
Pip: Naming a child wrong, apparently, is its own form of hardship.
Mara: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" and "Poodie James" both circle institutions — policing and journalism respectively — where the people inside them are just competent enough to see the problem and just constrained enough to struggle with what to do about it. And "Swamped" drops into the financial world, where Eteo watches Platinum stock move and starts making his list of who gets rewarded.
Pip: Every novel here is about someone watching a system from just inside or just outside it, trying to figure out the angle of least damage.
Mara: Which is, when you step back, exactly what the Greek poets were doing too — just with fewer stock tickers.
Pip: The thread running through all of it is endurance — the blind musician climbing back upstairs, Sarah moving the geraniums, Cavafy's speaker living with the right No.
Mara: And the question underneath: what holds its shape when everything else breaks. More of that in the next episode.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis publishes the way some people breathe — steadily, in verse and prose, across centuries of Greek tradition and continents of lived experience, and apparently without pause.
Mara: That range is exactly what this episode covers. vequinox brings us poetry rooted in the Modern Greek tradition, fiction set in the rhythms of family and rural life, and prose that tracks what happens when people collide with systems, borders, and each other.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry.
Voices Out of the Greek Tradition
Mara: The Modern Greek poetry segment raises a real question: what does it mean to translate and present a tradition this deep — from ancient myth to twentieth-century masters — and keep it alive on the page?
Pip: The excerpt from Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy puts that question in mythic terms. The setup is a figure who outlasts every riddler sent to challenge her: "all the mouths which uttered the riddles were swallowed by the hungry Hades and she walked over their bodies."
Mara: So survival here is the answer to every riddle. The Sphinx-like figure doesn't solve the questions — she simply endures them, which is its own kind of mastery.
Pip: The Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume V and Volume VI — work in that same register of weight and endurance. Volume VI's "The Sick Man" watches darkness move toward naked figures and statues until it "lights the whole house" and transforms ordinary objects into something luminous. Volume V gives us a messenger announcing victory amid thousands of deaths, the king returning with "a wound between his eyes" through which death itself could see.
Mara: Introspection closes on a similar note of earned return — "from which I have come and to which I'll ultimately arrive at my destined hour." And the anthology Neo-Hellene Poets anchors that continuity in something smaller: a poplar tree that once answered laughter and now answers only tears.
Pip: Antony Fostieris offers the most compressed version of this whole project — a poem that defines a poem as simply "rhythmically contemplating emotion." Three words doing the work of a manifesto.
Mara: Opera Bufa, Nikos Engonopoulos, Orange, Entropy, Medusa, Yannis Ritsos Volume II, Tasos Livaditis, Cloe and Alexandra, Troglodytes, Wheat Ears — all of them circle the same territory: desire, mortality, the weight of history pressing into the present moment.
Pip: Which is also, it turns out, the territory of the fiction — just told in longer sentences.
Seasons, Soil, and the People Who Stay
Mara: The fiction gathered here under family and rural life isn't nostalgic so much as precise — these posts ask what it costs to belong somewhere, and what it feels like when belonging is about to change.
Pip: Still Waters sets that up in a single anxious domestic moment. Tyne has just accepted a marriage proposal, and the evening should be simple joy — but the excerpt catches her mid-hesitation: "I'm tired, that's all. Tomorrow, I'll be fine. Just let me go to bed now, and I'll be fresh as a daisy to take Cam to church tomorrow."
Mara: The gap between what she says and what she feels is where the whole novel lives. She watches her father take Cam's arm through the doorway and thinks "no more worries" — but the narration keeps undercutting her.
Pip: He Rode Tall trades domestic interiors for the arena. Joel and Tanya are in the finals, twenty horses, thousands watching, and the warm-up pen is almost meditative — he doesn't want nerves to make him overwork his horse before the performance even starts.
Mara: Swamped goes further back — two boys in a Cretan summer, watering tomato rows by hand, stealing a watermelon from a neighboring field, counting swims at the end of each day. Anthony selects the ripest melon by the sound it makes when tapped.
Pip: Prairie Roots does the same work in a Canadian winter register — stubble turned over, fences repaired, straw hauled to the barn, the first snow arriving before every chore is finished.
Mara: Jazz with Ella shifts the stakes entirely. The rural quiet is gone — the scene is an airport, a man named Volodya terrified at a security line, his companions forming a quiet circle around him. The question "what are they looking for" carries a completely different weight here than it does in a tomato field.
Pip: And then there's Wheat Ears, which compresses all of this into a short poem about a person who keeps urging change while never leaving the recliner.
Mara: The tension between staying and moving runs through every one of these — which is also what the next set of posts is made of.
When the System Pushes Back
Mara: The fiction in this segment puts characters directly against institutions, communities, and the small frictions that reveal larger fault lines — the question is how people hold themselves together when the pressure is social and the rules keep shifting.
Pip: In Turbulent Times sets that up through what isn't said. Caitlin learns that Connie has stayed behind at the cottage after Robert left, and Michael never mentioned it. The scene plays out in careful domestic choreography: "If Caitlin had had any suspicions about Michael and Connie Hanlon, remembering how Connie had come on to him in the square in Corrymore on Tuesday, she did not show them."
Mara: The restraint is the point. The whole excerpt is about watching and not speaking, suspecting and not asking — the farmhouse kitchen as a pressure vessel.
Pip: Small Change runs a different kind of social friction — street-level, adolescent, transactional. A kid who gets straight A's in a neighborhood of C-minuses rents out a Stilson wrench to Paulie, the local legend, for a buck an hour or any fraction thereof.
Mara: The negotiation is sharp and funny, but the stakes are real — belonging in that world means knowing how to do business without losing standing on either side.
Pip: Straits and Turns moves that immigrant-workplace dynamic into a Vancouver factory, where Mike writes a poem on folded toilet paper while waiting for Luigi to finish his shift tasks, and the Italian-Greek solidarity is summarized in a single phrase: "una fatcha una ratsa."
Mara: The Qliphoth takes the friction into something stranger — Lucas, trapped in what reads like a nightmare transit terminal, punches an iron pillar to test whether the world is real, and the guards and bystanders laugh in unison while a security conference crackles around him.
Pip: All four of these are about the same thing: what a person does when the system looks back and doesn't recognize them.
Mara: From mythic riddles to tomato fields to airport security lines — the thread connecting all of it is people trying to locate themselves inside something larger.
Pip: And the poetry keeps asking whether language is the map or the territory. Next time, we'll see where that question leads.
Manolis Aligizakis 