…the pharmacist — to her name-day celebration, and alongside the many exquisite dishes she played the piano beautifully. She also took in her two sisters, who passed the time with card games and reading. I found the endless solitaire and other card games played for hours beside tables laden with pastries and tea — in winter in the parlor, in summer on the terrace — unbearably boring. Between the identical walls of the dormitory rooms I learned to pay attention to others and to myself, to write amid silence and noise alike. 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. That was the first time I understood literature was not merely abstract curriculum but could become an intimate bodily experience as well. I founded a literary circle attended not only by students but by teachers too. We did not merely dissect our own writings; we immersed ourselves in literary history and theory, argued, doubted, reread everything that until then had seemed certain. Meanwhile I danced in a folk-dance ensemble wearing traditional costume, and played bass guitar in a successful pop band where rhythm held us together even when direction often remained uncertain. And like local stars entertaining the student audience, we enjoyed the special attention of girls, which manifested itself sometimes in shy smiles, sometimes in stolen glances, sometimes in laughter too loud to be natural, and although we accepted this innocent admiration with confident ease, in truth all of us longed for the same thing: that one day someone might notice not merely the role in us, but the human being as well. Even then the prankster in me resurfaced. Back then there were no text messages, no instant communication; communication possessed its own slow, paper-scented magic. At the Ditrău grammar school — I do not know whether such a thing existed elsewhere — there operated a peculiar institution called Flash Mail.
Her smile disappeared. ‘Oh I’m sorry, Ian. I can’t. Liam’s going out. Tomorrow afternoon I could. As long as I’m back by tea-time. Before Liam goes out.’ Nora looked expectantly at this Scottish builder who was beginning to invade her daily thoughts as she his. Her heart started beating with an excitement she hadn’t felt since Joe Carney was alive. ‘What time?’ ‘Half-one, or thereabouts.’ The ash-blonde poked her head round the door. ‘Will Mrs Liam Dooley please stop flirting with the customers and come home to her husband and wee’ns?’ Nora laughed. ‘I’m coming, Bridie,’ she called. Then in a quiet whisper she said, ‘See you tomorrow, Ian.’ Ian walked back into the bar, but his feet did not touch the carpet. ‘One for the road, gentlemen?’ he suggested light-heartedly. ‘A wee deoch an doruis.’ ‘Make mine a double,’ said Copplestone. ‘I have a wife upstairs.’ ‘And you should have a double yourself, Ian,’ Copplestone’s colleague suggested. ‘To celebrate your victory.’ ‘What victory?’ Ian asked innocently. ‘If I’m not mistaken, Ian—and I’m something of an expert in these matters—you won yourself a black-haired beauty this evening. She’s yours, Ian. Heart, soul, and body, she’s all yours.’ ҂ ‘What will you have to drink, Nora?’ ‘Just tea, thank you, Ian. And maybe a couple of digestive biscuits or something.’ Nora looked at the young waiter behind her. ‘Is that all right?’ ‘Certainly, madam. Would you like cheese with the biscuits?’ ‘No thank you.’ The waiter turned to Ian. ‘And you, sir? What can I get for you?’ ‘A Drambuie, please.’ ‘Thank you, sir.’ ‘What’s Drambuie?’ Nora asked as the waiter glided away. ‘It’s a Scottish liqueur made from Highland malt Scotch whiskey and heather honey. Just superb. Would you like to try it?’ ‘Not just now, thank you. It sounds good, but I’m just gasping for a cup of tea. Maybe some time again.’ Ian caught the words ‘some time again’ and held them like something precious.
The car, a 1953 Cadillac convertible, stood in front of the Tournquists’ house. Red and shiny, it had gleaming white wall tires. Tyne had not seen it there on any of her previous visits. As Cam drew his Buick alongside, she said, “Your parents must have visitors.” “I don’t think so, honey. There’s no car here except what belongs to the family.” “Oh, did they get a new ….” She stopped, realization dawning. “Oh no, Cam, it can’t be … not mine.” Stunned, she remained seated until he came around to open her door. “I’ll let them tell you.” Cam helped her out, and led her up the front steps. At the top, she put her hand on the wrought iron rail and turned to look back. “Oh, my goodness,” she murmured. The car was indeed hers, Arthur Tournquist informed her a few minutes later. “But, I can’t let you … really, it’s too much ….” “Tyne, will you please stop mumbling and accept our gift graciously?” Arthur smiled at her, but Tyne sensed his impatience. What did one do in a situation like this? She didn’t want to refuse a gift. On the other hand, this gift was much too extravagant, the most she had hoped for being a second-hand older model something. She had no idea what she had expected, because she knew little about cars. But this … even if she was to be their daughter-in-law, she could not accept a gift like this. And that’s just the point, she thought. If Cam and I were already married, it might be a different matter. They could have waited … they should have waited. She thought about Moe and the humble little television set from her future in-laws. She would give anything to be able to trade places with Moe right now, or at least be able to trade gifts. Since that was impossible, she craved the next best thing – to call Aunt Millie and ask her advice.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has assembled a site where Greek modernism, prairie crime fiction, and erotic lyric poetry share the same address — which is either an act of radical curation or a very ambitious filing system.
Mara: vequinox is behind all of it — translations, original poems, fiction excerpts, and critical reviews — and today we're moving through Greek poetry and myth, literary fiction and crime, and the territory of love, loss, and desire. Let's start with the poetry.
Greek Poetry, Myth, and the Weight of Small Images
Pip: The question this cluster of work keeps pressing is what a short poem can actually hold — whether compression is a limitation or its own kind of argument.
Mara: The AI review of Yannis Ritsos, Poems, Volume I, sets this up directly. Looking at the poem "Doxology," it finds that "the compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury."
Pip: So the short poem isn't a reduced version of something larger — it's a form that keeps meaning genuinely open rather than resolving it into comfort.
Mara: That's exactly the review's claim. The man resembling a dusty, leafless tree, the sun that has burned him remaining beyond burning — the review argues the restraint lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and solar power stay visible rather than collapse into consolation. "Memory" and "Winter is Approaching" work the same way, using domestic objects — a father's silence, a repurposed hat, a stored collar — to carry psychological weight without fixing their meaning.
Pip: Objects that survive their original use and acquire something stranger. That's also what Yannis Ritsos, Poems, Volume VI does with "Transmutation" — chairs rearranged after a funeral, a lit match that suddenly reflects back at you.
Mara: The Katerina Anghelaki Rooke selection gives Penelope a voice that does something similar — holding absence as a discipline. The Kariotakis-Polydouri tragic love story frames escape as transformation into "golden dust in the air." Cavafy's "Ithaca" makes the journey itself the point, not the destination.
Pip: And George Seferis folds political urgency right into elegy — "Sensual Elpinor" cuts between a grieving woman and a radio bulletin about war, with cyclamens and pine needles running through both.
Mara: Miltos Sachtouris in the Collected Poems takes that further — beauty sprinkled over ugliness, a voice stolen, a severed head floating downstream with closed eyelids. Nikos Engonopoulos frames the poet-figure Belisarius as someone called upon in crisis and then forgotten. Nostos and Algos, Introspection, Second Advent of Zeus, Entropy, and Ugga all extend this — myth as a structure for thinking about origin, exile, and what gets inherited.
Pip: And then An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative steps back to ask what the faculty behind all this image-making actually is — Aristotle couldn't define it, Kant got close but missed it.
Mara: The Nuances review ties it together: the collection's most persuasive poems are those where "a particular object or scene" carries the argument — a doll with a missing arm, a rusted bicycle, a coffee cup. The Qliphoth takes a different angle, using letters and occult ritual to approach the same threshold between perception and the inexplicable.
Pip: From poems about what objects remember, let's move to fiction about what people do when their world falls apart.
Literary Fiction and the Pressure of Ordinary Lives
Pip: The fiction here keeps returning to a specific kind of crisis — the moment when an ordered life suddenly has no floor under it.
Mara: Jazz with Ella sets up a different register first: a group of travelers on a cultural tour, conversation about Cold War exchanges, Russian language lessons, the texture of being young and curious in a politically charged world. One character explains, "Learning by talking is the best way. That's why I didn't pack my Ozhegov."
Pip: Easy and social on the surface — but the other fiction excerpts don't stay there.
Mara: Straits and Turns goes somewhere much darker. A man's marriage ends in a single morning, and the excerpt traces exactly how a structured identity — a CIA agent's code, his protocol — becomes the mechanism of his destruction rather than his rescue. Poodie James works at a quieter pitch: a police lieutenant weighing whether to run for mayor after a death reshapes a small town's politics. Fury of the Wind grounds itself in the Canadian prairies, in schoolhouse registers and farming families and the slow inheritance of values across generations. The Unquiet Land puts economic pressure at the center — fishermen who can't sell their catch, fishmongers charging prices the catch can't justify. Ken Kirkby, Warrior Painter brings in a nonfiction register: a painter who discovers his missing work displayed in a stranger's home, sold by a gallery that never paid him.
Pip: Which is, in its way, the same structural collapse — an arrangement that was supposed to hold, and didn't. Now for the work that lives closest to the body.
Love, Loss, and What the Body Carries Forward
Mara: This segment's question is what desire and loss actually do to a person — whether they diminish or, strangely, clarify.
Pip: Straits and Turns makes the stakes immediate. The collapse of a marriage doesn't just unsettle a man — it dismantles the entire system of meaning he'd built around himself. Loss here isn't elegiac; it's structural failure.
Mara: Katerina Anghelaki Rooke's Penelope offers something harder to categorize. She says of forgetting: "my only reward is that I finally understand what's human presence what's absence or how the ego functions in such desolation." That's not consolation — it's knowledge purchased at cost.
Pip: And then Triptych and Second Advent of Zeus come at desire from the body outward — touch and arousal as their own form of location, a way of knowing where you are.
Mara: Kariotakis-Polydouri frames escape from grief as dissolution — becoming golden dust, entering an unfamiliar land where darkness doesn't exist. Miltos Sachtouris in the Collected Poems shows the cost of that dissolution: beauty sprinkled over ugliness, a voice stolen, silence where song used to be. George Seferis holds the elegiac and the erotic together — a woman who has lost her light, the blind man still singing.
Pip: What stays with me is how consistently the site treats compression as a form of honesty — the short poem, the telling object, the moment of collapse that says more than the explanation would.
Mara: And how the same pressure shows up across every register — lyric, fiction, elegy. Next time, we'll see what else is accumulating on the site.
“She is a real renaissance mistress.” Then the sirens blew for an air raid warning, bringing me back to monstrous cramps and headache. Can you explain this apparition? Is it a pure elemental? A form from naid or dryad realms? Am I alone in encountering such phenomena ? I feel exhausted and confused by experiences like these but I know I must persist. My growing sense of isolation is compounded by my social situation. As a Scholarship boy from a Cardiff grammar school I find it hard to fit into this genial squirearchy of rugby players and would-be lawyers, whose rituals revolve around sconces of beer and Bump Suppers. The few apologists for the Left have a totally sentimental notion of ‘working-class life’ in industrial areas. I have refused to be their mascot. My tutors change constantly. I am anxious to serve my country but I’m told my medical history (TB and a childhood head injury that sometimes affects my vision) may well have grounded my dreams of flying; although I expect call-up papers at any time. In the meantime, it seems more important to raise one’s whole Being to the Gods than to tinker away with essays about the Scottish Chaucerians or the influence of Trollope. Your Brazen Head society sounds most attractive and it would be a great privilege to attend the next meeting. I could volunteer a paper on the Enochian Magic of Dr. John Dee, but feel I am indeed ready to go beyond academic research into collective working of rites. I think you would find me an eager pupil. Yours most sincerely in the fellowship of The Gods, Richard Firestone. (There are gaps, lacunae, broken spaces, and now the God of the Gaps is laughing at me, and I forget how many letters there were at this stage. I have a confused vision of a huge alcoved reception room, black walls, indigo recesses, old women in ratty furs natter coldly, a spider crawls down the chandelier, but it’s going too fast, I can’t get it down, I keep missing it, have to go on, on, into the summer of ’43 . . . )
In Notes on the Margins of Time, the short poem does not merely reduce the scale of the longer lyric. It changes the reader’s experience of implication. “Doxology” concentrates its action into the relation between a damaged human figure and the sun he praises (93). The man resembles a dusty, leafless tree; the sun that has burned him remains beyond burning. The compactness prevents the relation from settling into a straightforward moral. Praise may suggest endurance, dependence, helplessness, or an affirmation made despite injury. The English is strongest in its refusal to explain which response should dominate.
The repeated tree establishes the man’s exposure before the final contrast arrives. The poem’s restraint matters more than any single ornamental effect. Its language lets the asymmetry between human vulnerability and the sun’s power remain visible. A more elaborately lyrical translation could easily turn that asymmetry into consolation. Here, the starkness permits a harder reading: praise does not prove that suffering has been reconciled with justice. It shows a human response whose dignity and difficulty cannot be separated.
“Hour of Song,” printed on the same page, similarly finds expression at a moment of deprivation rather than abundance. Wine and fruit are present when singing is forgotten; separation supplies the occasion on which song becomes necessary. The poem reverses the expectation that fullness generates art and loss merely silences it. Its short lines make that reversal almost ceremonially plain. Manolis’s uncluttered diction allows the relation between the two moments to remain the main event. The poem needs no explanation of why people sing; its arrangement of circumstances performs the explanation.
Elsewhere, the domestic image carries a more troubling psychological charge. In “Memory,” a father returns without greeting his family, while the others remain absorbed in their own relations (98). The child’s perception is organized by the father’s silence, the window, the storm, and the cross-shaped mark disclosed by lightning. What might have remained a minor household omission becomes a retrospective scene of separation. The poem is not simply remembering an event. It is showing how an event acquires meaning when remembered, and how the child’s image persists beyond the occasion that produced it.
This is an important test of English syntax. The delayed and repeated references to the father create a hesitation appropriate to recollection, yet some constructions are cumbersome enough to slow comprehension unnecessarily. The reader can distinguish that grammatical friction from the productive uncertainty of the image itself. What the window-cross signifies may remain open; who has failed to notice a greeting should be clear. The distinction matters because the poem’s emotional force depends on ordinary actions being apprehensible before their meanings become strange.
“Winter is Approaching” offers another powerful transformation of the domestic (97). A former hat becomes a place for chickens’ eggs, while a father’s stored collar helps define the coming cold. These objects have survived their original occasions of use, acquiring new functions or retaining an unsettling remnant of an old one. The trees’ association with mothballs brings seasonal change into the atmosphere of storage and inheritance. Such images demonstrate why Ritsos’s objects should not be reduced to emblems with fixed meanings. Their force comes from displaced use, touch, and memory.
The English miniatures are often successful precisely because they preserve this practical identity of things. A hat remains a hat even while it becomes a nest; a collar remains a piece of clothing even while it carries paternal distance. The material object is not discarded once the metaphor has been understood. Manolis’s plain nouns help maintain the double attention that these poems require. The reader must see both what an object is and what a particular history has made it capable of suggesting.
(If you like poetry of this kind, you may find more about this great poet in the following links)
4 Therefore I sit and contemplate: what man has that is truly his since my life assumes its importance when I narrate it to someone like daylight that is important to the blind who, at least, need to be seen thus I sleep in peace knowing that someone else risks on my behalf, the one they know, only that each morning, just not to betray myself, I have to gather the broken pieces of the nightmare and Uncle Elias, very old, powdered with talc, since he lived humbly, returned each Christmas and spent his evenings making birds, not real ones, just to make sure they wouldn’t lift up the house again; in fact, one night I retried, and I swore with such empathy that the few cloths I had placed in the room almost dried up, yet just that, and the bed, Judas the Iscariot, betrays me to them every morning I therefore preferred to walk aimlessly, a true delight to my kind of people, and then I truly found myself close to my life, like the very sick who love the next fellow and who stand absentmindedly under the trees or wear old pyjamas or die fast like honeymoons and Mr. Such and Such was very joyous when he made money though that didn’t stop him from slapping me two or three times a day so that my poor mother’s milk went bad and we had to exhume her so other seasons wouldn’t be in danger; Besides, how can I learn new tricks at my age? In fact I’d like to stop here for a moment as it happens in old transcribed glorious documents or like the drunkard who stands in front of the icons for a while before he goes to spend the funeral money on drinks and then the expulsions from parish to parish, short affairs with the handrails, mysterious way of wearing the same hat all the time and this woman at the end of the road, so forgotten that her steps are heard from inside all the fairy tales; then there is always a sorrow for ourselves in all our illusions like our true residence that lasts as long as a song.
(If this poem touched you, you may find more about this beautiful book of translations in the following links)
…“I’m going out. I’ll be back in two hours. I don’t want to find you here when I get back,” she said in a stern voice and left. He sank into his armchair in a world that had collapsed around him. His wife didn’t want to see him again. Where could he go? His life was a big question mark. His life was so arranged and well set up until this morning. His life of order and security has suddenly become chaos and disarray, a gigantic open mouth ready to swallow him. His orderly life has turned into a disorderly one. How could he live now? How could he face his co-workers on Monday? Could he talk to someone? Did he have anyone to talk to? A quick thought flashed through his mind, and he felt shivers travelling through his whole body. He walked upstairs to their bedroom. Everything seemed to be in place. Then why does his life feel upside down? He stepped into the closet. His clothes hung orderly in it. On the top shelf, he groped for the box. He took it down. Went to the bathroom. He placed the box on the counter. He opened the box: he looked at his service revolver. He hadn’t cleaned it in a while. Like a zombie, he loaded his pistol with ammunition. He stared at himself in the mirror. The code. Yes, he remembered the code they all followed, their protocol. That dark thought ran through his mind again, and this time it didn’t make him shiver at all. He felt peaceful. He felt better. The code was what he had followed all his life. A code, a protocol, the secure way of a CIA agent. It’s the same code he had to follow to the bitter end. When everything goes into disarray, and everything becomes nothing but chaos, the code must come into place. Tears flowed down his cheeks as he stared at his face and then faced the pistol in his hand. Suddenly, a euphoric sense of well-being overtook him as if someone was protecting him. He felt strong, good, and comfortable. Heroic. He smiled at himself. He winked at himself. What would she think when she found him? Would she cry? Would she laugh at him exiting this way? His eyes filled with tears, and somehow, he felt an inexplicable warmth, as if in a different state of mind, in that dimension that various books described. He put the barrel of the pistol in his mouth and, following the example of so many others before him, Bradley pulled the trigger.
(If this excerpt spoke to you, you can find more about this book in the following links)
“I bet none of your sons’ll be fishermen,” Sweeney argued. “You can’t make a decent living at it any more. The whole industry’s gone mad.” He reached out and poured the formerly rejected half bottle of porter into a glass. “What did it cost to run a boat before the war? A hundred pounds a week maybe. Now it costs around three, four hundred. Even more for the big boats. You’re paying out more than you’re taking in.” “I’m not.” “Then you’re an exception, Joe; and I wish I knew how you did it.” Sweeney was staring at the pale, frothy head in his glass of porter. Then he looked up at Joe. “It must be galling for you to get tuppence or thruppence a pound for your fish at the quayside and watch the fishmongers in their shops rake in anything from sixpence to half a crown.” “And there’s damned little going for sixpence, I can tell you,” said Slattery. “In fact the housewives in the city are complaining because they can’t get enough fish, and the fishermen are complaining because they can’t get rid of it. I hear that whitings were so plentiful during Lent that fishermen couldn’t give them away. They had to send them to the manure yard. I think Michael was wise to sell out. Not that he’s a fisherman anyway.” “Speak of the Devil and he appears,” said Sweeney. “How are you, Michael? Come and join us.” Michael and Caitlin had just appeared at the dining-room door and looked in. “We’re going pretty soon,” said Joe Carney. “Don’t give us that impatient look.” “They’re not very hospitable, are they, Joe?” Sweeney teased with a leer. “Wouldn’t you much rather be surrounded with good friends, lots of food and plenty to drink on a miserable, wet night like this than stuck in here all alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to?” “I would to be sure, Sweeney,” Joe agreed. “Come on, you two, sit down, have another drink, enjoy the craic.” “I think we should take the hint and go,” said Seamus Slattery. “It’s getting to be very late. This isn’t one of Finn’s parties.” “You don’t have to leave on our account,” said Caitlin. “Oh, I think we do,” Slattery declared. “It’s been a long and memorable day for you two lovebirds.” “Well, your wife’s still gossiping in the kitchen,” said Sweeney. “Go and grab hold of her and tell her it’s time to go home. Come on, we’ll all go together.” Twenty minutes later the house was empty, and Michael and Caitlin sat…
“There won’t be any children, Mrs. White. It’s summer holidays,” Lona said with a smirk. Paul rolled his eyes skyward. Jennifer felt a little sheepish. Lona was probably correct. However, it was irritating the way she always ensured that everyone knew she was correct. It was time to change the subject. “How did you happen to study Russian, David?” she said, leaning back in the grass, ignoring Lona and fixing on the young man. He had an intelligent, open face with sparkling white teeth but even at the age of 25, his hairline was just starting its slide toward the back of his head. She knew that his family was of English descent, not unlike her own history on her father’s side. “My father’s in the Air Force,” said David, “and I guess we’ve lived on a dozen different bases as I grew up—Germany, Italy and NORAD in Colorado. I picked up a little of every language but never Russian.” “So why Russian?” Lona asked. “Well, six years ago I got chosen along with a lot of other army and air force brats to go on a teen cultural exchange to the U.S.S.R. I had no knowledge of the country before that. We were just supposed to be shining examples of North American kids. It was sure different than this tour. It had been organized by Sputnik—that’s the youth tour group—and we had cocky Komsomol leaders not much older than us in charge.” “So you have more than a nodding acquaintance with Lenin?” “And Marx. And Brezhnev. The Komsomol is seriously political, and this was before the signing of the SALT treaty so east-west tensions were high. Believe it or not, it’s more relaxed now.” “But how did you learn the language?” Paul asked. “Oh, we had a crash course before the trip. Then we stayed in a dormitory for four months and ate with the Eastern European kids, so we learned a lot that way. We didn’t visit the churches back then because they tried to pretend that they didn’t exist. Instead, we had to study in the dorm a lot and debate the class struggle or dialectical materialism with our team leader. Most of us didn’t have a clue!” “My god, I’m not sure I could define them now,” laughed Jennifer. “But I bet we’ll know by the end of this trip.” “Well, that was what sparked my interest in Russian. Learning by talking is the best way. That’s why I didn’t pack my Ozhegov.”
