She kicked the crotch of the guy who always calls me Fuckbeard when Jago’s back is turned, but they managed to hustle her out,along with tearful Cedric who’d turned his back on the whole scenario. Now that all is quiet in the dorm, with Wolfbane locked away in solitary and his supporting cast tranked down safely in their pits, I can safely itemise matters relating to the Order of the Brazen Head. I’ve gobbed out today’s input of sleepy-time, thanks to Simba throwing a shrill tantrum that distracted Jago at a crucial moment of the dosage ritual. So now, around midnight, in the little cone of bedside light, I am the only sentient being in the Creation, an archivist of the Akashic scrolls. Pol Pot’s revolution may have destroyed my artifacts but not the cellular structure of my memory. Of course she ransacked our home, looting, pillaging, laying waste . . . But I have the Lore by heart. I’ve copied it out laboriously over the years, filling a whole series of these black books. Jago pretends to humour me in this, but I still won’t reveal my stash as his own humours are far from consistent. For example, only last month he had a sudden pre-breakfast purge of our “traumatic memorabilia”, our “hoard of faecal souvenirs” as he called the contents of our bedside lockers. “This is the dark body of the Madonna you must destroy!” he shouted at Eamonn and Cedric, sweeping away their framed photos with his fat hand, grinding the pics underfoot, those saintly mothers and martyred wives, whoever, it’s all the same to Jago whenever the neo-Freudian fit hits him. Yet he was only inches away from a lost knowledge more subversive than any of his primal infantile soap-operas. I declare this is the Gnosis of the Brazen head and these are the lost letters of its Lore: 73 Harsnett Road, London SE 27 March 8, 1943 Dear Firestone, What a pleasure to receive your letter! It displays a grasp of occult scholarship which is impressive for someone still in their first year of undergraduate studies, albeit in the shadow of the Bodleian Library, near the banks of Isis. I myself took my first degree at Cambridge before my brief scholastic period at the seminary in Rome and my later researches in Vienna. But the cloisters of Oxford must still be charged with ancient potency, even in these dismal times.
The houses I had they took from me. It happened that the times were unpropitious: war, destruction, exile sometimes the hunter meets the migratory birds sometimes he doesn’t. Hunting was good in my time, lots of people felt the shot the others roam around or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale, nor the skylark nor about the little wagtail inscribing numbers with its tail in the light; I don’t know many things about houses I know they have their own race, nothing more. New at first, like babies playing in the orchards with the tassels of the sun, they embroider the colored window shutters and the shining doors over the day; when the architect finishes they change, they shrink or smile or even become resentful with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who would return if they could or those who vanished now that the world has turned into an immense hotel. I don’t know many things about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop even when sometimes, near the sea, in empty rooms with an iron bed with nothing of my own looking at the evening spider, I contemplate that someone is getting ready to come that they dress him up in white and black cloths with plenty of colorful jewels and around him venerable ladies with gray hair and dark lace shawls talk softly that he gets ready to come and say goodbye to me; or a woman with quivering eyelashes and slim waist returning from southern ports, Smyrna, Rhodes, Syracuse, Alexandria, from cities closed like warm window shutters with perfume made of gold fruits and herbs that she climbs the stairs without seeing those who slept under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow easily resentful, when you empty them.
…at their destination, and they should fasten their seat belts. Hermes looked down from the window. It was a cloudless night. He had a superb panoramic view of the city, full of lights flickering in the dark. He could distinguish the streets and the tall buildings as the aircraft slowly descended. They landed, and Hermes got up to take his carry-on bag from the overhead compartment, stepped off the plane, and said goodbye to Tom. An airline official led Hermes down the long hallways to the baggage area. He found his suitcase from the appropriate carousel and made his way to the arrivals area, where people waited for their friends and family members. Happy voices were everywhere; people embraced one another, kissing, laughing, and crying. He turned around as if to see someone he knew. There was no one there, he knew no one, and this was his first bitter moment of realization that he was so far away from people he loved. He wished Magda were here. He then sat on a bench and wondered aloud, “And now, where are you going, Hermes?” A question justified under the circumstances, a question he had no answer to, only the sense of loss, of abandonment, of forlornness, and fear crept into his heart. Then, as if from the great source, he felt he heard a voice that whispered to his heart, not to his ears. And it was the voice of his new motherland that said, “Welcome, Hermes, you are here in Vancouver now, go out there, find your way to do your studies and get your diploma. Your folks are waiting for you, back in Greece. They look forward to seeing you back. Your diploma is your goal and nothing less…” were the words he felt he heard, and the voice wasn’t any other but the voice of Canada, his temporary motherland, which, like a mother, took another orphan off the streets and gave him a chance. Suddenly, the fear he had just felt vanished, and a jolt of enthusiasm took over his senses. Hermes stood up. His eyes ran around the space of the large airport hall when his glance met the old woman whom he had helped in Montreal; she saw him too. At the same time, a very tall man with a good-looking woman approached…
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis has apparently decided that one literary universe is not enough — so here we are, somewhere between ancient myth, Canadian snowstorms, and a ceilidh in rural Ireland.
Mara: vequinox has been busy. The posts this week span translated Greek poetry, prose fiction across several continents, and lyric meditations on exile, memory, and the natural world.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry — specifically, what it means to gather voices from across a century of modern Greek literature into one place.
Modern Greek Poetry — Voices Across a Century
Mara: The Neo-Hellene anthology brings together poets whose work ranges from sensory abundance to stark political grief, and the question the collection keeps pressing is what holds a tradition together across such different registers.
Pip: The harvest poem that opens the anthology sets the tone — here is the line: "great swarms of bees rouse from their hives to drink the vine's ethereal smells and forage on its pistils full of nectar and spread the news in buzzing eulogies."
Mara: What that gets the reader is an almost ceremonial fullness — the countryside isn't backdrop, it's participant. The bees are eulogists. The girls are part of the same procession.
Pip: And then the anthology turns, hard. A second excerpt from the same collection gives us a garden where every rose is dead in a flowerpot-coffin and the cypress is described as endless martyrdom. Spring and elegy occupying the same volume.
Mara: Tasos Livaditis, in his selected poems, works in a completely different key — spare, almost parable-like. An old man sits in the rain covering an imaginary violin with his coat, and the speaker simply says he has always heard the music.
Pip: Nikos Engonopoulos takes a more ironic angle. His Sideris, the Croatian guard who considers himself a true Hellene and brings stacks of newspapers to a house where no one can read them to him, is both comic and quietly devastating.
Mara: Titos Patrikios and Yannis Ritsos pull toward the political. Patrikios warns against glorifying voices that hide something rotten, while still insisting that showing one's wounds requires real strength. Ritsos, across both volume three and volume six, moves between diary fragments of exile and a single grain of rice incised with war banners and deserters.
Pip: Constantine Cavafy's "Finalities" lands the coldest line in the batch — the danger was never where anyone was looking.
Mara: Hours of the Stars and Antony Fostieris round out the range — one spare and devotional, the other a long, careening walk down a dark avenue where God might be cycling past on an evening stroll.
Pip: That image of the margin — the figure walking alone, slightly afraid to look back — connects directly to what the prose poetry is doing with exile and identity.
Exile, Memory, and the Marginal Voice
Mara: The central question here is what poetry can do for people who never made it into the official story — the forgotten workers, the unnamed soldiers, the immigrants who stayed at the edge.
Pip: The AI review of Marginal puts it plainly: "Poetry becomes an act of restitution: it gives them the page they were denied."
Mara: What that means in practice is that marginality gets reframed — not as deprivation but, as the review argues, as a privileged vantage point. From the edge, the structures at the centre become visible.
Pip: The review also describes the book's movement as circular rather than progressive — the older consciousness revisits, asks again, remembers differently. That's a structural claim about how the poems are built, not just what they're about.
Mara: Introspection pushes this further into the psychological. Its speaker fights not just loneliness but his own identity — a vision described as multifaceted and plethoric, unable to settle against what the poem calls metallic and unbendable silence.
Pip: Entropy, Orange, and Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy each approach the same territory from a different angle — the newborn who doesn't know its origin, the speaker told to find a path in an ancestor's footsteps, the figure who existed on a feather's lightness somewhere between the exceptional and the ordinary.
Mara: Together they map a recurring concern: the self as something formed in transit, between languages, between homelands, between the living and the dead.
Pip: From lyric exile to something more novelistic — the fiction excerpts are doing their own version of this geography.
Narrative Excerpts — Lives in Motion
Mara: The fiction this week covers a wide arc — childhood in a mixed-language Romanian town, a failing engineer in maritime postings, a jazz-era romp through the Moscow Kremlin, and immigrant life in Vancouver — and the question is what kind of pressure each excerpt places on its characters.
Pip: The Gospel of Silence opens with a memory so specific it becomes universal: "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."
Mara: The upshot is a childhood rendered without sentimentality — the watermill, the castle, the Romanian-Hungarian schoolyard rivalries all exist in a balance the narrator knows will not hold.
Pip: He Rode Tall takes a different kind of reckoning. Joel, the engineer, has calculated that he is functioning at roughly a quarter of his capacity, and the excerpt's quiet horror is that he knows it precisely and intends to change nothing.
Mara: Jazz with Ella shifts the register entirely — light, comic, tourists navigating the Kremlin Armoury, debating whether a jewelled ladle qualifies as a pooper scooper and lining up for Lenin's tomb on its one open day.
Pip: Straits and Turns puts a Greek immigrant in Vancouver, writing his novel by a window overlooking the Lions, waiting for his girlfriend's visa situation to resolve — the geography of longing made very literal.
Mara: Swamped and The Unquiet Land close out the fiction range. One is set in the high-tension world of Vancouver brokerage, the other in an Irish ceilidh where a stiletto-tongued spinster is already certain the bride is pregnant.
Pip: The Unquiet Land's village gossip is sharper than any market analysis in Swamped — which is saying something. From human drama indoors to the weather outside.
Nature, Weather, and Myth
Mara: These poems ask how landscape becomes myth — and how myth survives when the land itself is fenced, frozen, or reduced to a watermelon slice of moon.
Pip: Mythography opens with two madrona trunks intertwined on a rocky promontory: "Two bodies interlocked bright reddish trunks firm in resolution to uphold the tree-pneuma benevolent auspice unison in the hug of the breeze."
Mara: The plain consequence is that the natural world here is never just scenery — the trees have pneuma, the bees have eulogies, the landscape holds a kind of civic or spiritual office.
Pip: Hear Me Out takes that mythic weight and scales it down to a watermelon slice of new moon — barely visible, mostly imagined, and somehow more present for it.
Mara: Rendition moves to the plains, where a rider on a mustang jumps a ravine against a dying sun, and the fences cutting across rolling fields carry the full weight of colonial enclosure. Vespers ends in the Arctic — Inukshuk's fingertips guiding a wolf's howl through a blizzard, with an arctic hare blinking beneath a dwarf willow, holding onto something the poem calls benevolent hope.
Pip: Four very different landscapes, one persistent argument: the world has its own grammar, and the poems are trying to learn it.
Mara: From a Greek harvest to an Arctic blizzard, the through-line is a poetry that refuses to let place be passive.
Pip: And a prose that keeps asking what it costs to be somewhere you weren't born — or to be exactly where you were born and still feel like a stranger.
Mara: Next time, we'll see what else arrives from the margins.
When he and Caitlin returned to the sitting room the music was just starting again, and dancers were sorting themselves out on the floor. But a sixteen-hand reel in the sitting room was much too ambitious. The set collapsed amid shouts and laughter, but the music played on. “Fiddlers are tireless,” someone said. “Wouldn’t it be good if they could pull a plough?” “And play the fiddle at the same time.” “That Dan Ryan is always on the fiddle—no matter what he’s doing.” “Hey Molly, what about a song?” “Give us The Sally Gardens, Molly.” “Good girl, Molly.” “Come on now, don’t be shy.” “She’ll start in a minute. Just wait and see.” “Sure she hasn’t the shapin’s o’ beginnin’ on her.” “She has surely. Good girl, Molly.” “The Sally Gardens, Molly.” Molly Noonan began to sing in a clear soprano voice the first of many songs. Almost everyone in the sitting room performed a song, a recitation, a step-dance or a tune on the fiddle or the pennywhistle. There were no more set dances. As the evening wore on, the ceilidh became quieter. In the kitchen a few women sat around the table talking over cups of tea. “I still think she’s pregnant already,” said a thin, bony woman with a face as sharp as the prow of a skiff. “You mark my words, she’ll be a mother well before nine months are out.” “Maire Kelly, you’ve an evil tongue in your head.” Una Slattery was loyal to Caitlin whom she had cared for as a little girl. “No, I haven’t,” said Maire. “But I have a sharp eye. I can tell when a woman’s pregnant. And I’m always right. Wasn’t I right about the Dooley girl? And Lizzie Thompson? And I’m right about Caitlin MacLir.” “Caitlin Carrick,” said Maggie Potter, a woman in her thirties more talked about than talkative. She had been engaged for thirteen years to Willy Dunn, a farmer who refused to leave his mother to marry. “Caitlin Carrick. I’m sorry. I’m not used to that yet.” Maire Kelly was a stiletto-tongued spinster not known to be afraid of speaking her mind. “Barbed wire in a black dress,” was Slattery’s description of her. “Mind you,” Maire went on, “I’m not reproaching her. It’s happened manys a time before and it’ll happen manys a time again. Michael Carrick is a handsome big man, straight and steady as they come. He’ll make a good husband and father.”
Hank stopped before a hammered gold ladle outlined in pearls, which had been owned by Tsar Volodya Feodorovich and was dated 1618. “Wow, dig this jewelled pooper scooper.” Marty laughed. “Hey, take a look at Lona. She’s practically salivating over that medallion.” The two darted over to join her in front of a glass case. “What is it?” Hank asked her. “An encolpion,” Lona said, without tearing her eyes away from the outsized milky-blue sardonyx. “It was made in the 17th century.” Carved on its surface was a depiction of a haloed St. John set within an oval gold filigree border studded with jewels. “Bet it’s worth a bundle,” Hank said. Natasha scurried over, too, just in time to catch Hank’s last words. “Treasures of the Armoury are closely guarded,” she announced. “By whom? Is that your security?” Lona asked innocently. An elderly woman, face lined, kerchief on her head, sat slumped, hands in lap, in a plain wooden chair near the doorway. “Oh, Natasha, yoo-hoo!” called Linda Appleton. The guide winced as Linda descended on her like a warship sailing into action. “Can you tell me whether photos are permitted in here because David is taking lots of them?” As they moved off to sort out David’s picture-taking proclivities, Hank took the opportunity to corner Lona. “So what’s an encolpion?” he asked, not expecting an answer. Lona turned away from the showcase reluctantly. “It’s a medallion worn by bishops, of course. Don’t you know anything?” Hank couldn’t think of a suitable response so he sloped off, frowning. ★ If they had visited only the Kremlin that first morning, it would have been enough stimulation for the jet-lagged travellers. Jennifer had already used up half a notebook with details of their breakfast, the church, the soldiers’ uniforms and the carriage of Catherine the Great. But instead of stopping for lunch, their tour guide led them out of the Armoury, back into Red Square and up to the longest and most silent of queues that they had seen thus far—for the mandatory visit to Lenin’s tomb. “Lenin’s memorial has been closed to visitors during renovations,” she told the group. “You are lucky to visit on this one day that it will be open.”
The Dancer It was a cloudy April day; one could hardly discern the mountains to the north shore, where two mountain peaks resembling lions stood facing each other as if they were playing a good game of chess without any concern for the people of Vancouver, down by the shores. These two lions were so symbolically attached to the lives of Vancouver citizens that they had named the bridge which connected the Lower Mainland with the North Shore ‘Lion’s Gate Bridge’, the same way the Hellenes had the Lion’s Gate at Mycenae. Costa was sitting by the window of his one-bedroom suite and kept writing a few lines of the novel he had started a few months earlier, as his eyes suddenly left the paper and gazed at the expanse towards the North Shore, on the other side of the harbour. Indeed, Vancouver was a beautiful city situated on the edge of the land by the Pacific Ocean, on the west side of which the lands of the Orient were located, including Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, and, to the south, Australia. He got up to refill his coffee mug and lit a cigarette. It was Tuesday, his day off, so he didn’t have much to do other than write a few lines and perhaps go to Stanley Park for a stroll until his wife came home. His mind ran to the nasty letter he got from his father when he disclosed to them that his girlfriend from Athens had joined him in Vancouver and that they lived together and perhaps they’d get married soon so she could stay permanently; his girlfriend had come with a visitors visa which meant she had to leave in three months unless Costa married her thus making her wife of a legal immigrant.
Reason intervened at last and yanked their wild thoughts back to reality at almost the same moment. As suddenly as they started, they both stopped and stepped apart. Frances quickly fixed her clothing and hair, took a deep breath, and walked out of Eteo’s office. Helena and Logan noticed her brusque, nervous manner as she passed them on the way to her office and thought their different thoughts about what might just have taken place in their boss’s office. Meanwhile Eteo’s mind ran back to the VSE annual gala the previous November. Pacific Trends had reserved three tables and invited its top twenty brokers and the four big wigs of the firm to occupy the twenty-four seats. Before the dinner, people gathered, mingled, talked, exchanged ideas, laughed, and gossiped. Eteo always attended these events—he was always among the ten top producers in his firm—but that year he had truly paid attention to Frances Woodruff for the first time. She was also a perennial big producer, and on that occasion she had been seated with Bradley and the other big wigs. Eteo was at the adjacent table with seven other brokers. It was shortly after his divorce, something all his colleagues had known about, and when Eteo was at the bar getting a drink, Frances came up behind him, rubbed her beautiful, lush breasts lightly against his back, and then hugged him from behind. In front of everybody else at the bar she said, “Hello, handsome Cretan,” her voice resonating with everything Eteo was tuned to at that moment. When Eteo told Logan about this startling show of affection the next day, his son had said, “Be careful, dad, take precautions. She’s known to sleep around.” Eteo had laughed and assured him he would be careful, but he had never pursued the affair even though he had often imagined it. He promised himself that this time he would not fail to visit Frances soon and light his devotional candle on her altar, as he put it to himself. Pleased with that image, he turned to his screen and the behavior of the stocks in his accounts. The performance was good on every front except Golden Veins, where he remained exposed without any reasonable exit. He called Richard.
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.
But for the most part, it was a year or so here and there with postings to what sounds like exotic locations, such as New Guinea, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Cape Town, Chile, South Korea, and Lisbon. A long time ago, Joel had figured out that he wasn’t getting the top assignments any longer, but at this point, he was just thankful to have a job, any job as an engineer and he knew that he was desperately hanging onto this posting. Early on at Empire, he figured out that Mr. Lee wasn’t a fan of his hard-drinking nightlife and was less than excited about tolerating it. Mr. Lee had explained to Joel on his first day at the new office that he had asked the home office to consider sending another engineer to help with this project. It wasn’t that Mr. Lee didn’t know Joel’s abilities yet; it was that Mr. Lee already knew of Joel. In the maritime engineering community, word gets around fairly quickly, and the word on Joel was that he was a has-been, or maybe more accurately, a never-been. Recruited to the firm right out of university at the age of twenty-two, Joel was marked for great things. There was no doubt that Joel had an incredible wealth of potential, but that potential seemed to dry up a long time ago. So here he was, six months into a project to shore up the foundation of an old terminal, and after a twenty-five year career with the same firm, Joel could sense that the end was near. Already the project was way behind and significantly over budget. And Joel knew that although they couldn’t pin everything on him, many of the problems were a direct result of him screwing up. Being as he was, from consuming vast quantities of alcohol daily
Joel just couldn’t keep up anymore. At best he was half the engineer that he used to be and even back then he was only putting in half the effort. If his calculations were right, Joel figured that he was probably functioning at something close to a quarter of an engineer. This project really needed a fully functioning, experienced senior engineer. He knew it. But he wasn’t about to change. Or even if he wanted to, and some mornings he certainly felt like he wanted to, but he just didn’t even know how…
