Tag: nostalgia

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Exile

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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.

Tasos Livaditis – Poems, Volume II

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Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

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.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4051627

https://www.amazon.com/dp/192676398X

Podcast Episode: Modern Greek Poetry And Memory

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has built a catalog that stretches from Nobel laureates to Soviet jazz clubs to a monk worrying about a vow of celibacy in the Canadian wilderness — so, a fairly focused literary project.

Mara: vequinox covers all of that here: modern Greek poetry collections, critical reviews of those collections, and a wide range of memoir, fiction, and travel writing. Let's start with the poetry itself.

Modern Greek Poetry Collections

Pip: The collections gathered here share a preoccupation with grief that refuses to stay still — it moves, it waits, it names itself after mythological figures. The question running through all of them is what form feeling takes when language is the only container left.

Mara: The anthology Neo-Hellene Poets opens that question directly. One poem sets the tone: "I shall wait for the star again to tell it, holding back a tear that has appeared in my eyes, that like a joy I held you in my embrace warm and gleaming, my complete grief."

Pip: Complete grief — not partial, not fading. The poem doesn't resolve the loss; it holds it like something precious. That's the emotional logic the whole anthology operates on.

Mara: The Seferis and Ritsos volumes push into stranger territory. The George Seferis Collected Poems moves through ritual and silence — oil on limbs, a crippled man in a courtyard, coins falling. The two Yannis Ritsos volumes, Volume VI and Volume VII, work in long associative sequences: eggshells creaking under a blind man's feet, a statue making peace with rain, a bus nearly empty by the seashore.

Pip: Ritsos in particular seems constitutionally opposed to the tidy image.

Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Selected Poems names a stone Oedipus — irregular, gouged, tumbling — and licks it "to the end of my story until I understand what choice means." And Marginal closes the group with a more direct lyric longing, asking simply to sit close during cold winter nights and erase tears from eyelids.

Pip: From Nobel Prize territory to that — the range is the point. Which raises the question of how critics are actually reading this work.

Poetry Reviews And Anthologies

Mara: The reviews here do something useful: they slow down and describe what the poems are actually doing. The AI review of Yannis Ritsos Poems Volume VI focuses on how the collection handles moral witness. Here is the passage on one poem: "Whether we read them as payment, recognition, mockery, or some mixture of these, his earlier silence has acquired a social form. Ritsos needs little explanation to show how wrongdoing can make a place for itself within ordinary manners and a person's wish to avoid trouble."

Pip: So the political and the domestic are the same room. A glove on a kitchen table becomes a form of defiance; a neighbor's silence becomes complicity wearing a bouquet.

Mara: The review of Rendition takes a similar approach to Aligizakis's own poetry collection, tracing how war's damage continues long after impact — in the psyche, in intimacy, in the daily labor of staying alive. And the review of Tasos Livaditis Poems Volume II, which was long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize, emphasizes how Livaditis uses humor and religious imagery to keep sorrow from settling into a single solemn tone.

Pip: Grief seasoned with comedy, transcendence explained by having lost the way. That's a more interesting theology than most.

Mara: All three reviews share a method: they trust the poems to carry political and emotional weight simultaneously, without separating the two. That same refusal to separate things out runs through the fiction and memoir too.

Memoir Fiction And Travel

Pip: The prose writing spans Soviet Leningrad, the Canadian frontier, a Vancouver taxi at ten in the morning, and a Greek immigrant sitting exams — which is either a very broad canvas or proof that displacement is the one subject.

Mara: Jazz with Ella sets the tone early. A character named Volodya understands that his entire strategy for keeping his job is a stopgap: "Truly, he would never be free to play his music until he left the Soviet Union. Forever." Meanwhile, Jennifer arrives in Leningrad and sees sunshine yellow buildings and lacy ironwork on bridges — the city beautiful and crumbling at once.

Pip: The outside dazzles; the inside knows the score. That tension carries through most of these books.

Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men moves it to the North American wilderness — Rordan and Yamka lost in a darkening forest, a priest awake all night praying not for their survival but for the Brother's vow of celibacy. Redemption follows Hermes through Vancouver, studying, dreaming of home, watching a supervisor's faint smile as he hands in his exam paper.

Pip: A faint smile of satisfaction — that's the whole immigrant experience compressed into one supervisor's face.

Mara: Straits and Turns takes a taxi driver's-eye view: customers sleeping off a drunk in the back seat while he calculates the fare and thinks about what his parents might be eating for supper back home. He Rode Tall works in a different register entirely — a Western, Joel grooming a sorrel gelding in a barn, the smell of sweaty horses and leather as a kind of homecoming.

Mara: The lyric writing collected in Vernal Equinox, The Long Road, Hear Me Out, Marginal, and Kariotakis-Polydouri: The Tragic Love Story runs alongside the prose — poems about a new moon at zero percent, a mirror ruminating on two diverging paths, Athens giving itself to April like a lover.

Pip: And then there is Mythography, which steps back entirely — a painter's brush stopping before it completes the body, visitors seeing peels of skin, strips of cinnamon bark. An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative goes further still, tracing how the absence of sacred books and rigid dogma in ancient Greece gave rise to what it calls a distinctive and unique Imaginative — the birthplace, it argues, of the free spirit and critical thought.

Mara: Which is not a side note. It is the philosophical ground under everything else in the catalog — the reason a stone gets named Oedipus, the reason grief can be called complete.

Pip: So the throughline is attention — to a glove, a faint smile, a zero-percent moon, an eggshell underfoot.

Mara: And the argument that paying attention is never neutral. More of that next time.

Tasos Livaditis-Poems, Volume II, Review by AI

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Long-listed for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Awards

2023 Longlist Announcement

Excerpt

Livaditis can carry that wish into much more startling territory. In “Poet,” a man encounters an abandoned baby, hesitates, and then takes the child home. His body develops the means to feed it. The event is impossible, but the emotional logic is exact: another person’s need calls forth a capacity he did not previously possess. Here poetic imagination becomes a form of responsibility. It does more than decorate experience with unusual images. It asks what kind of transformation might be necessary if we fully accepted the demand made upon us by another vulnerable life.

That imaginative generosity should not obscure the book’s humor. Livaditis is often funny, sometimes mischievously so, and his humor prevents the prevailing sorrow from settling into a single solemn tone. “Correspondence” exposes a writer’s vanity through a deliciously uncomfortable reversal involving a roommate and a letter. “Fame” makes recognition arrive under circumstances in which nobody would sensibly desire it. Bureaucratic procedures elsewhere become absurd performances whose logic survives only by humiliating the person subjected to them. We laugh, but the laughter often catches against something painful. The joke reveals how readily institutions, ambitions, and even literary dreams lose contact with human needs.

The religious imagery is equally resistant to solemn predictability. God, Christ, angels, resurrection, and Paradise appear repeatedly, but they do not assemble into a reassuring system. Divine figures may seem uncertain or vulnerable; miracles may answer a small embarrassment rather than a grand theological question. In “Answer,” walking on the waves receives an explanation grounded in having lost the way. The reversal brings transcendence close to ordinary bewilderment. What matters is often less the possession of divine power than the possibility that the divine might understand weakness. Livaditis’s sacred imagination is most persuasive when it bends toward the person who cannot manage.

Nor does political conviction disappear when religion is spoken. “Applied Marxism,” with its comic relationship between hidden money and approaching moonlight, lets material calculation and imaginative freedom disturb one another. The poem is too brief and playful to function as a doctrinal argument. Its interest lies in the friction between ways of valuing the world. Across the volume, economic deprivation remains tangible even when a scene becomes dreamlike. Rent, hunger, wages, worn clothing, and precarious shelter keep returning. Poems may travel beyond ordinary reality, but poverty continues to determine who waits, who serves, who commands, and who is allowed to rest.

“Horse Eyed Women” gives these concerns a larger dramatic setting. Its hotel gathers desire, loneliness, money, recollection, and violence within a temporary place of lodging. People arrive carrying lives that cannot be understood from their public appearance. The hotel clerk’s relationship with a useless key is especially suggestive: an object associated with access becomes an instrument of longing for an inaccessible past. Around the more conspicuous dramas, the maids continue their work. Their conversations and their presence near the dirty sink draw attention toward the labour that supports other people’s stories, then remains to deal with what those stories leave behind.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4051627

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763564

Yannis Ritsos-Poems, Volume VI, Review by AI

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Excerpt

The memory of the mother singing in another room deepens this idea. Her song belongs to a life that exceeds her children’s needs. The imagination follows her into a youth before they were born, before the losses that define their present. For a moment, motherhood opens into the larger existence of a woman with her own beauty, anticipation, and pleasure. The scene is tender partly because it releases her from being only a figure in someone else’s grief. Ritsos’s attention allows the remembered person to possess a freedom beyond the remembering mind.

Near the end, a sparrow shakes rain from its wings. The poem explicitly resists turning this movement into a symbol. After so much imaginative transformation, that refusal is refreshing: the bird can simply be there, and two people can look at it together. The man becomes able to touch another hand, and the prose ending brings a kiss where a question about lighting the lamp might have been. Connection returns through bodily presence. The poem has not explained away death, but it has made room for an encounter that grief had seemed to prohibit.

Writing of the Blind Man, the largest section, returns us to a world where seeing and understanding cannot be equated. Blind figures sometimes recognise what others miss; apparent witnesses fail to act; people look closely without admitting what they know. The title suggests an art made under conditions of incomplete access, where touch, sound, intuition, and uncertainty matter alongside sight. These poems repeatedly challenge the comfort of being an observer. To have noticed something may create an obligation, and the wish to remain uninvolved can become another form of participation.

“Eyewitness” makes that problem quietly disturbing. A man sees burglars entering a neighbouring house and waits for somebody else to raise the alarm. Nobody does. Later, the burglars arrive at his own door with bouquets. The flowers place him in a situation whose politeness feels more threatening than an accusation. Whether we read them as payment, recognition, mockery, or some mixture of these, his earlier silence has acquired a social form. Ritsos needs little explanation to show how wrongdoing can make a place for itself within ordinary manners and a person’s wish to avoid trouble.

“Real Hands” offers a different response to disappearance. A man has vanished, perhaps been taken away, leaving gloves on the kitchen table. Those who remain place bread, a flower, or a wineglass among the empty fingers. The gloves preserve the shape of contact while making absence painfully visible. The final recognition that gloves cannot be handcuffed gives the poem a restrained defiance. The person may have been removed, but affection continues to address him through what remains. Here an everyday object becomes a means of refusing the complete erasure of a human being.

The poem also shows why the collection’s political and intimate dimensions are inseparable. Fear appears in kitchens and bedrooms as well as public spaces. Violence changes the meaning of a glove, a knock, an empty chair, or a pair of shoes. The foreword and introduction place strong emphasis on Ritsos’s human concern, and the poems demonstrate how demanding such concern can be. Their compassion includes unease, self-questioning, anger, and the recognition that people sometimes cooperate with what harms them or others. Humanism here must contend with the damaged behaviour of actual human beings.

https://draft2digital.com/book/4278093#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763785

Rendition, Review by AI

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excerpt

…The final sequence, beginning with “Moonscape” and continuing through “Perforated Dreams,” expands this antiwar vision into a sustained meditation on modern conflict, bodily injury, revenge, and aftermath. Here the book is at its most direct. Bombs, improvised explosive devices, amputations, displaced civilians, medical care, grief, and revenge appear without the protective distance of abstraction. The poems attend both to soldiers and to those whose devastated lives make further violence imaginable. “Ibrahim,” in its briefness, is devastating: a young man’s shoes remain under his bed while he leaves to join the resistance after his sister is killed by a bomb. The poem refuses to simplify him into either hero or villain. It gives us only grief, absence, and the lethal logic of retaliation.

This ethical complexity continues in “Homo Homini Lupus,” where a boy prepares an explosive device while the poem asks whether horrific deaths can restore his sister. The answer, of course, is no, but the question matters because it refuses easy moral distance. Aligizakis sees war as a machinery of reciprocal mutilation. The dying, the bereaved, the wounded, the revenge-seeking, and the innocent inhabit a single ruinous system. The poems do not excuse violence; they insist that violence must be understood as humanly generated and humanly suffered.

The physical consequences of war are rendered with painful clarity in “Psalms,” “Mistral,” “Aura,” “Autumn,” and “Perforated Dreams.” These poems do not turn away from the damaged body. The wounded soldier is half alive, dependent on prosthetics, medication, tubes, and the uncertain loyalty of a lover. Questions of masculinity, desire, shame, and survival are faced directly. In “Mistral,” the repeated question—whether she will stay—becomes a haunting refrain. The poem understands that injury does not end with the blast; it continues in the psyche, in intimacy, in self-perception, and in the long daily labour of remaining alive.

The visual design of Rendition supports the work well. The generous white space, centred or carefully arranged lines, and clear page-by-page presentation give the poems room to enact their pauses and visual shifts. The book’s longer sequences feel purposeful rather than merely expansive, while the epigraphs create meaningful thresholds between its sections. The layout is restrained, allowing the language and imagery to remain central.

Some readers may find Aligizakis’s abundance challenging. The poems often move rapidly from one register to another, and the language can be deliberately heightened, filled with mythic, religious, erotic, and philosophical vocabulary. Occasionally, a poem’s accumulation of images may obscure its strongest emotional line. But this profusion is also an essential part of the book’s character. Aligizakis is a poet of excess in the best sense: he wants the lyric to hold more than one thing at once. He does not wish to choose between the flower and the weapon, the ancient god and the hospital room, the lover’s body and the broken soldier’s body. His work gains its urgency from refusing those separations.

Rendition is ultimately a book about what remains after the moment of impact. It asks how one lives after desire is altered, after the body is injured, after a loved one is lost, after a bullet is fired, after a god has gone silent. Its answer is not consolation in any easy form. Rather, the collection offers attention: to the wounded body, the grieving mother, the city alley, the desert, the gull, the sparrow, the lover, and the small finite world whose mystery is no less profound than the infinite. Aligizakis writes with moral passion and a richly visual imagination. Rendition is an intense, challenging, and compassionate collection, one that turns lyric poetry into an act of witness.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/098107359X

Straits and Turns

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Excerpt

EARLY SHOPPING

…was that the cigarette smoke overpowered any other bodily foul smell
expected in such cases. They arrived in front of the store they were
headed to at eight forty-five, so they had an hour and a quarter to wait
outside until the famous store opened its doors. The driver calculated
quickly that this meant about twenty-some dollars of waiting time;
however, he turned the engine off and stretched his legs in front of his
seat, trying not to pay attention to the click of the taxi meter, which
clicked ten cents every few seconds, a sound so loud you’d think the
whole neighbourhood could hear it.
Right at that time, the driver counted it as about seven in the
evening in his homeland. He wondered what his parents could be
doing at this time while he waited outside the government-run Liquor
Store, where his customers wanted to buy something. Perhaps his
parents were having their supper at this time, or they had gone to a
local taverna to have their meal along with friends. His eyes fell on the
customers in the back seat who were almost asleep in their drunken
stupor, and he lowered the window of his door a little to let some fresh
air come into the space and freshen it up.
Without any unforeseen things, the doors of the Government-
run Liquor Store opened at exactly ten o’clock when he woke
up his customers, who helped each other get out of the car and staggered
into the store. Minutes later, they got out, joyous and smiling
like kids who got a good mark for their schoolwork, each holding a
Mickey of whisky. They got into the taxi again, and the driver started
taking them back to their place, which they reached in fifteen minutes.
The fare was eighteen dollars and some cents. The white guy
took out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to the driver. The customer
didn’t ask for his change. The driver didn’t rush to hand it over
to him. The thing was, they went and bought two Mickeys, which
cost them around four dollars each, while they paid twenty bucks to
the taxi driver.
Yes, as strange as it might sound, the earth kept on going around
its axis with no thought about the two drunk customers who had collected
the Government cheque a couple of days ago…

https://draft2digital.com/book/4250839#print

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763866

Podcast Episode: Greek Poetry And Fiction

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis — poet, translator, publisher, and apparently the kind of person who simply does not stop. vequinox has been busy.

Mara: Very busy. This episode covers Modern Greek poetry and translation, prose fiction across several novels, and a stretch into art, science, and biography. There is a lot of ground here.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Modern Greek Poetry: Voices Across the Tradition

Mara: This segment is about what it means to carry a poetic tradition forward — through original work, through translation, and through the anthology form that holds multiple voices at once.

Pip: The poem "Rendition" opens with an image that is hard to shake. Here is the line: "Your spirit dances in the yards of the pious white men and in school orphans where you disposed your last smile reflex vomiting brain unwired from spit or swallow no light no wind."

Mara: That sequence — the orphan yard, the unwired brain, the total absence of light or wind — maps a kind of spiritual dispossession. The body and the institution are at war, and the body is losing.

Pip: "Second Advent of Zeus" goes the other direction: spring, oleanders, the vernal equinox, Eros. The same tradition, but breathing.

Mara: And the Yannis Ritsos translations — both Volume VI and Volume VII — show what that tradition looks like across decades of one poet's work. Volume VII gives us the "Hour of the Shepherds," with children suddenly feeling grown because they can look into a water well or climb to the attic. Volume VI's "Before and After Drowning" is stranger: objects fall into a well, dark water rises, and a woman floats the next day without her ankle ring.

Pip: Ritsos makes the domestic uncanny in about forty words flat. That is a skill.

Mara: "Red in Black" brings it back to the sensory — August heat, sweat, a sparrow chasing a cicada mid-air, two people taking hands to help the insect survive. "Wheat Ears" turns the confessional booth into a small comedy: the speaker's greatest sins are loving hyacinths, swallows, children's laughter, and beggars. The priest sends him straight to purgatory.

Pip: Loving beggars: straight to purgatory. The Church has always had a complicated relationship with the Beatitudes.

Mara: "Chthonian Bodies" reaches toward the mythic — coastal red cedars, sequoias as hyperboles of nature, and Hyperion addressed directly. The anthology "Neo-Hellene Poets" frames the whole tradition around isolation: "Hideously alone, with the chiton of your dream permanently ripped, you marched to a famous country that vanished in the deep heart of infinity."

Pip: Then there is Constantine Cavafy's Orofernhis — a man who was briefly a king, dedicated himself entirely to pleasure and gold, governed nothing, was quickly removed, and whose end history did not bother to record.

Mara: Cavafy's point is that the coin outlasts the man. The translated selections from Katerina Anghelaki Rooke and Antony Fostieris round out the range — Rooke on love's distortion of time, Fostieris on wind that strips people bare and leaves crows to finish the work.

Pip: From spring oleanders to crows on a naked body. The tradition contains multitudes.

Mara: The fiction pulls in a different direction — toward prose, toward narrative, toward the question of what happens when history enters a room uninvited.

Fiction in Excerpt: History, Intimacy, and the Open Road

Pip: The fiction here keeps returning to one question: what does an institution — military, religious, social — do to the people inside it?

Mara: "The Gospel of Silence" answers that directly. The setup is theology students ordered into military service for the first time in their country's history. The excerpt reads: "walls built out of a peculiar indifference, a world in which suffering was not punishment, but a natural condition."

Pip: Suffering as ambient condition rather than imposed penalty — that is a colder observation than outright cruelty, and the novel seems to know it.

Mara: "In the Quiet After Slaughter" works at the other end of the emotional register — a car club draw, a beauty queen, a garage eventually collapsed by termites. Ed applies to the military because he does not know what else to do. The institution absorbs him the same way.

Pip: "The Unquiet Land" stays domestic: a wedding night, a pregnancy just discovered, and a husband who cannot make love to his wife because, as he puts it, there is a live human being in there with eyes and hands and heart and brain.

Mara: Caitlin's response — "it's protected like a seed in an apple" — is practical and warm. His paralysis is not. The scene is very quiet and very tense.

Pip: "Swamped" goes outdoors entirely — a hunting morning, a dog named Irma, a rabbit flushed from an osier bush. "Jazz with Ella" goes to Moscow: utilitarian architecture, a student murmuring "Leningrad" to herself on a bus, waiting for contrast. "Still Waters" closes on a woman jumping out of a moving car rather than agree to move in with her fiance's parents. "The Long Road" frames all of it as a crossroads pointing nowhere — "your glance is a mirror, your gray hair reminds you of bygone days when you had choices."

Mara: The fiction and the poetry are asking the same question from different angles. The art and science writing asks it differently still.

Art, Science, and the Corruption of Words

Pip: "Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter" takes a detour into quantum mechanics that turns out to be about language. The excerpt makes the point plainly: a quantum leap in common usage means a very large jump, but in physics it is the tiniest possible shift — "the absolute opposite of popular understanding."

Mara: The book uses Einstein's Nobel Prize as its entry point — awarded for photoelectric effect, not relativity, because relativity was deemed too controversial. And the Big Bang, the excerpt notes, could not have been a bang at all: no atmosphere, no sound. "Logically, it must have started with a Big Nothing."

Pip: Science named the origin of everything after a sound that could not have existed. That is either poetry or a press release.

Mara: "Introspection" works the same territory from inside — the speaker evaluates modern morals, sees bank accounts of the few growing while others' earnings shrink, and concludes that ego and greed have changed the planet's route toward destruction. The third post in this group, a piece on Michalis Grammatas, extends the biographical reach further into the Greek cultural world.

Pip: Words get corrupted. Institutions absorb people. Poems survive.

Mara: Next episode, we'll see what else survives.

Pip: The thread running through all of it is what outlasts the person — the coin, the logbook, the poem, the dog returning with the rabbit.

Mara: And the question of what institutions do to the people inside them, which the poetry and the fiction keep circling from different angles.

Constantine Cavafy

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Orofernis
He who is handsome, and his delicate
face is smiling on the four-drachma coin,
is Orofernis, son of Ariarathis.
As a child, they ousted him from Cappadocia,
out of his father’s magnificent palace
and sent him to grow up
in Ionia, to be forgotten among strangers.
Oh, those beautiful Ionian nights
when fearlessly, and clearly in a Hellenic way,
he got to know the fullness of carnal pleasure.
In his heart, always an Asian.
But in his manners and in his speech, Greek,
dressed up in turquoise, in a Greek chiton
his body fragrant with jasmine,
among the handsome Ionian youths,
the most handsome, the most ideal.
Later, when the Syrians entered
Cappadocia, and made him a king,
he dedicated himself and his monarchy
to enjoy a new pleasure every day,
to greedily gather gold and silver,
and to delight, and to boast,
watching his riches piling and shining.
As for the care of the place, and governing,
he had no idea what was happening around him.
The Cappadocians quickly removed him.
And he ended up in Syria, in the palace
of Demetrios, where he lazed around partying.
One day, though, his great idleness was
interrupted by unusual thoughts.
He remembered that from his mother, Antiochida
and from the old Stratoniki,
he was connected to the crown
of Syria, almost a Seleucid.
For a while, he got out of the lust and drunkenness,
and ineptly, and half dazed
he felt a longing to scheme something,
to do something, to plan something,
but he failed miserably and got worn out.
His end was written somewhere, but got lost,
or perhaps history passed it by,
and rightfully so, not bothering
to record such a paltry event.
He who on the four-drachma coin
left the charm of his beautiful youth,
the light of his youthful beauty,
an aesthetic memory of that Ionian boy,
is Orofernis, son of Ariarathis.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763823

Podcast Episode: Poetry, Memory, And Exile

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Pip: Manolis Aligizakis's site this week is running at full capacity — Greek myth, prairie crows, frozen train bells, and at least one dolphin swimming through time.

Mara: vequinox has been publishing across a wide range, and today we're moving through modern Greek poetry and translation, prose excerpts from fiction and memoir, and writing that puts landscape and labor front and center.

Pip: Let's start with the poetry.

Greek Voices, Ancient Echoes

Mara: The question running through this cluster of posts is what Greek poetry — ancient myth, modern grief, translated voices — actually does to a reader when it lands in English.

Pip: The post on Vernal Equinox sets the stakes quietly. The speaker imagines a reunion at a plaza statue, and the whole poem turns on readiness: "holding a book in my left hand and a carnation in the other just in case you come looking to stir my emotions just in case you come yearning for kisses like that cold October morning we separated."

Mara: So the upshot is that the poem holds two timelines at once — the separation and the imagined return — and the carnation is both hopeful and defensive. That tension is the whole poem.

Pip: The Cloe and Alexandra post does something similar with closure. The speaker locks up the poems, demands back a kiss key, notes the museum is closed on Fridays — and a dolphin earring, hung on the ear eons ago, drowns in tears never shed. Grief rendered as bureaucratic inventory.

Mara: The Tasos Livaditis translation frames mortality differently. The prose poem called Daily Use ends: "I opened the door and followed my path. And at night, at dinner, in horror, I listened as they narrated their stories, which, in a way, silenced the dark, remote outside — there, where we had lived."

Pip: Livaditis makes the ordinary genuinely unsettling. The host hides, the doorbell rings, and survival looks a lot like just keeping your balance against the table.

Mara: Yannis Ritsos, in the Volume V post, works the same territory through objects — an ashtray, a hanger, cologne in a barber shop — and a woman who scratches a mandarin and then simply vanishes. Memory fails to anchor things to places.

Pip: And then the Entropy post asks what to do with Odysseus now — "conscious of a tribe that commits suicide as it stands and listens to the echo of oars on the horizon." Which is a question that does not have a comfortable answer.

Mara: Titos Patrikios, in the Crossroads post, puts the same fracture into a friendship: paths that once ran together now "rise like wild horses," and the speaker grieves a common tongue lost forever. The Hours of the Stars post goes the other direction — sensory, almost ecstatic, nymphs singing by water springs, the Zodiac aroused, Hypnos laid to sleep in open palms.

Pip: Constantine Cavafy's post gives us a king declaring Alexandria the center of the Panhellenic world in every word and every art — confident, a little absurd, entirely convincing. Nostos and Algos asks why the gardenia sighed and the clock went silent, and gets no answer, which is the answer.

Mara: Antony Fostieris frames emotion as infrastructure — "the wire that reaches the heart of the void" — and armies moving through heavenly spaces. Nikos Engonopoulos assembles Ottoman benefactors, Italian collaborators, sixteenth-century French poets, and the monk who discovered gunpowder into one gloriously unruly stanza. Medusa drops the mythological register entirely for a citizen on a couch, beer belly out, fingers on an Enter button, boom.

Pip: And the POETS Day post on Oscar Wilde rounds out the week's range — from ancient Ithaca to Victorian wit in one scroll.

Mara: What holds all of it together is translation as an act of preservation — and the prose excerpts this week make a similar argument about memory and form.

Prose, Memory, And The Self On The Page

Pip: This segment is about what prose does when it gets personal — memoir shading into fiction, characters discovering themselves through other people, and the question of whether a self can be written into existence.

Mara: The Gospel of Silence puts it directly. The narrator, finding his footing in a dormitory school, writes to survive: "I tried fitting words together so they might express me, preserve me. My young literature teacher read and evaluated my writings in her apartment; the situation was at once embarrassing and liberating. It was as though the boundaries between text and life had blurred."

Pip: So literature stops being curriculum and becomes something you live inside. That's the real claim of the excerpt — not that writing is therapeutic, but that it's constitutive.

Mara: In Turbulent Times works the same boundary between role and person, but through attraction. Nora and Ian circle each other across a bar counter, and a colleague delivers the verdict plainly: "Heart, soul, and body, she's all yours." Ian catches the words "some time again" and holds them like something precious.

Pip: Redemption follows Hermes through immigrant life in Canada, where the local warmth surprises him — people talk to you on buses without caring who you are or what you're wearing, and he writes home with such enthusiasm he asks Magda whether she could see herself living there with him.

Mara: Blood, Feathers and Holy Men takes the widest geographic and cultural scope — Norse settlers, Mandan storytelling, a winter cave, a monk who hates carved figures and endures the cold only under protest. The community holds together through craft and story rather than doctrine.

Pip: Ken Kirkby, Warrior Painter offers a different kind of self-construction — the artist deploying a Rain Man ruse to deflect unwanted attention, then losing his cover, and concluding that what's missing from most self-assessment is a sense of humor.

Mara: And the Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative makes the philosophical case underneath all of it: the human mind creates ex nihilo, just as God did, and the new worlds built by science and technology carry their own kind of truth — though whether that truth can replace ontological truth remains, as the excerpt puts it, "highly debatable."

Pip: From the self preserved in a school dormitory to the world created from nothing — the scale shifts, but the argument stays the same. Which is also, in a way, what the landscape writing is doing.

Work, Ground, And What Stays

Pip: This segment is about labor in physical places — what bodies do in cold yards and prairie woodlots, and what that work leaves behind.

Mara: Straits and Turns anchors the segment in a rail yard on a freezing night. The bell won't sound because the air pipe has frozen, and the crew works through it: "Darkness had covered the yard like a shroud, and poetic images came into Mike's mind, which he promised himself that he'd write some time later."

Pip: He files the poetry away for later and keeps washing the engines. That's the whole economy of the scene — work first, meaning later, maybe.

Mara: Prairie Roots puts the same energy into springtime crow-nest raiding on a farm — organized, purposeful, and genuinely joyful. The excerpt notes that low wet spots meant rubber boots, and stopping to hunt tadpoles, and "all these things added to the joy of being young and alive."

Pip: Ugga compresses the same ground into verse: "someone squares three stones, two down, one up, to steady it" — and inside that act, the first Mason is born, the first window to the future.

Mara: Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy frames the craftsman as someone who cannot help making the wrong thing beautifully — crowns for palaces that no longer exist, always missing a name. And The Long Road follows a worm across brown leaves, brainless yet wise enough to crawl on his skin and declare the rules of life.

Pip: From frozen bell to fat worm — the ground keeps producing its own argument.

Mara: The thread across all of it is preservation — words that keep a self intact, translations that carry a voice across languages, labor that leaves something behind even when the bell won't ring.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what else the ground turns up.