Languages

The waves fell on the shore like shipwrecked men, broken-spirited, disheartened and weak, one after the next, with clipped moans, small sighs, one after the next. The squall had begun to die down in mid-afternoon and now the sun was shaping a huge burning hourglass over the calm waters which were full of seaweed and branches and pinecones and tin cans and plastic bags and wood from fishcrates—thin bleached sticks like the bones of fish that had been eaten by bigger fish. But in the...

The offices of the Central Bank are on Pireos Avenue. I head down Alexandras so as to turn onto Patision and hit Pireos at Omonia Square. That’s the logical route, only in Greece what’s logical never gets you anywhere. Right past the hospital I get stuck in a traffic jam with all the trappings: shouting, cursing, honking, rude gestures. The drivers in front of me are trying desperately to escape their fate, the way the pickpockets of yesteryear used to run around looking for a...

Marianna Domvrou stepped out of the corner store carrying a red bucket and match­ing mop. She enjoyed running errands in her new neighborhood, as if she were an ordinary woman in need of ordinary things. When people recognized her and smiled at her—which happened often, almost incessantly—Marianna would return the smile and con­tinue on her way. She knew people felt the need to stop and stare until she dis­appeared from sight, though she never turned to check. By...

I listen to the sounds, in this room; the house must be settling. I smell me everywhere, I remember the first body.             Finger insistent, upright; wanting to speak. I hear something, perhaps horses, running outside. I sketch with my nail. You sit beside me and watch.             Weak stomach; dreaming of horses. The room, the evening, drowns. I sleep. Another body—it intervenes, watches...

The Greek poet Dimitris Athinakis came of age with the new millennium.  Raised in a Greece of fast and cataclysmic change, he belongs to a new generation of writers whose works are bringing brave new directions to the Modern Greek literary continuum.  Peter Constantine: We last met in clouds of tear gas during the May 2010 riots in Athens, in a Greece that seems markedly changed.  How does this new Greek reality affect you as a poet?     Dimitris...

October 27, 2006 Tamara, I’m writing to send you my new address. In case you’re still getting mail for me, you can forward it here: Katina Mela, Erodiou 8 (off Euripidou), Athens. I’ll find out the zip code and send that, too. The apartment here is smaller than ours, the main bedroom is more or less connected to the living room. Well, it’s separated by a sliding door, but you can hear everything if someone’s in the living room. (Not that there’s ever...

Half sleep half death. My hands in springtime my heart in mud. Thus I transform myself. Between spring and not spring where trees are deep and waves strike root. Thus I transform myself. Half Nikos half death.  

Listen You who chew on my solitude with your televisions on You who attend my funeral every morning to light a candle Listen I will drive a verb into your eyes I will plant a beat in your chests I don’t have a cent in my heart or smooth talk and epithets hidden in my pocket I scatter my beauty on concrete streets I dip my hands in poets’ blood I write everything in 9 mm caliber There’s no one for me to respect A twenty-one-year-old Muslim punk I bear...

With fingers—fingertips and edge of nail— he plots fires with tongues of snakes, a child yearning for sheer drops, with paper wings on his shoulders, thinking and thinking of fires and acts of violence. For years he lives in the basement of his polychrome dreams where dampness lingers and moldy poison drips from walls. He devours his scribblings and is never hungry, but only whines for water which he likes winter-chilled, not cold. He stubs out his cigarettes on the...

darling, when it comes to strawberries you’re like me more, and more and sugar, brandy in mom’s tin pan all summer. you’ve strawberried yourself you leave my tongue red my taste sweet sweet from thoughts, and red. the red, the thoughts, not hidden. just joined. with simmering smiles and minds set fire.   Translation of "Pare me sto stathero." Copyright Yiannis Moundelas. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2010 by Sarah McCann....

Night does not fall nor does it come   Night slowly breaks within me   Because I am a lake ever faceless and I am mud in the dreams of secret stars   So night no longer falls nor does it come night takes leave like a good guest  

gulls woke me and the sun the month january at the foot of the mountain my day at sea, in raging waves, i proved an awful captain, anchor caught in a burnt fir.   Translation of "Iméra, A." Copyright Yiannis Moundelas. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2010 by Sarah McCann. All rights reserved.

The pages that follow were found by me in a sorry state of disorder, amidst a number of other worthless papers, spotted with tropical mildew, ready for the fire, in the basement of a bookstore where I worked for a number of years as a classifier. What follows is the personal history, and last-minute confessions, of a man and his ways. Before presenting this book to the Greek world of letters, I feel it necessary to publicly thank, in these very flat lines, Mr. Realon Delorean, an old...

I haven't seen that chain-smoking Spanish girl for days. Not at our ten o'clock break, and not during the shift. I guess she's been fired. Keine Disziplin!—no discipline. She'd told me in the corridor that she can't handle all this. What can't she handle? She can't handle all the rules, all that Disziplin. A village girl like her couldn't cope with walking on concrete city sidewalks after our shift. Maybe she's dead. But if she'd died, her...

Sotiris Dimitriou's novels and short stories are known for their focus on the underside of contemporary Greek society, in particular the experiences of an immigrant underclass. Importantly, they are equally well-known for their daring and provocative use of language: Dimitriou mixes a number of ethnically marked vernaculars and registers of language to recreate the Greek language and also challenge the preconceptions of a mainstream reader. Dimitriou thus places language at the very...

The last car—let's call it the leader's—flashed its headlights, and the signal was relayed from car to car all the way to the first in line, which was then responsible for promptly finding an appropriate place to park. The convoy of expensive cars slid purposefully off the tarmac, their wheels shuddering on the gravel until they came to a stop, arranged haphazardly on sparse intersecting shadows. The drivers emerged and made their way towards the last car to see what...

"Flying Dolphin!" Alan leapt out of bed. It was a quarter to seven and he had missed the boat. He had packed his bags and dressed for the trip the night before, and though it was May he'd even put on his Burberry raincoat so as to be completely ready. Then he sat on his bed smoking and drinking coffee, listening to the church bells marking the hours, counting them as they passed, holding his watch up to his ear to make sure it hadn't stopped. He saw the whole night pass before...

The cab driver was in the mood for conversation, but his passenger wasn't. So the tape deck came on and Angela Dimitriou started work at seven-thirty in the morning. Side by side in a silver twin frame on the dashboard, the singer and the Virgin Mary kept the driver company. He was a thirtyish, scrawny man with a huge mustache and big brown eyes, a frappé in a special holder, and a well-cared-for car with good tires that was now leaving the olive groves behind, climbing the...

The kid was turning his stubby little chest this way and that with his arms stretched wide like the wings of a glider whirling out of control. There were few people on the sidewalk of September 3rd Street and so his mother didn't have to hold the groceries in one hand and him by the other. She let him walk along the side farthest from the road under a regime of partial autonomy. The kid spotted the tin can in Victoria Square at a distance of about ten paces. Previously he had kicked...

Galina Petrova was walking to work under the weight of a humid, suffocating heat. There were only two blocks to go, but she had started dragging her feet. She stopped at the kiosk on the corner to catch her breath and drank from her water bottle. She thought of the conversation she'd had that morning with her husband, Liosha, and instinctively bit her lip. That's how birds make their nests, by stealing. Well, we're birds, too. Those had been his exact words. Exhausted, she...

I kept walking slow-like, straight ahead, the road took me back to the river. Same place the ship stopped the first day, then it left and went further up. I saw someone who looked like a watchman. I ask him, Grik sala? No answer. I ask him again, he points further up the road. I walk along in that direction, there was a small house with a fence around it, real low. I go inside. Hello, I say, they look at me, two men and some women, they don't say a thing. I turn to go,...

I woke up the next morning with my head on a stranger's thigh while the head of another stranger was resting on my leg. My entire body was stiff, I was freezing cold and shaking all over. Someone had lit a fire inside the warehouse to get warm. The cold pierced right through your bones. They were taking a risk because if the Greek police spotted it, they would go berserk. I started to move cautiously, trying not to wake either the man above me or the man underneath me. I was partially...

My cousin and I entered a dense cornfield that was taller than either of us. It was a large tract behind Aunt Tasia's house. We were only thirteen. We blended in, so we were invisible. Like being in the jungle. We forged a path among the rows, pushing aside the tall stalks, and they just kept snapping back in our faces. We'd laugh out of sheer delight. It was afternoon, and everyone was asleep. We were oblivious to everyone. We reached the chicken coop. All was quiet. Afterward...

After the rain, the clouds shrank and the sky shone silver. The phone would ring any minute now. I was standing over the receiver when its shrill snarl echoed in the room. "How are you?" "Fine. And you?" "Fine." "Any news?" "The same. And you?" "Same here too." "Did you think it over?" "I thought it over." "Well?" "I don't know, we'll see." We hung up and each took a sip of coffee, in her own kitchen, standing in front of her own window, feeling guilty for...

You are pallid, you are losing blood and life. You stop a cab. The driver peers into his rearview mirror. You are not there. You leave a sword on the back seat in lieu of the fare. You become a trickle of holy water, a yellow aircraft, a toy train. You remove the mask, your pallid dream. You serve breakfast to Kung Jiang with his long, aged fingers. You write love letters in Minoan script and leave them on the kitchen table.  

Vladimir (for some reason) made me happy. We went to the circus together and watched the sunrise. At night I would rest my cheek on his chest and dream of snow. He would read me fairy tales and make me relish the bare essentials. One day I came back and he wasn't there. (Or perhaps pieces of my skin were missing.) Vladimir flayed my feelings (stole my life) and ran to catch the last train to Russia. For the next poem in this sequence, click here.

I am alive. Alive. My fingers look like nine little soldiers doing their drill in front of the window. In the building across the street a dustcloth waves at me. The hand doing the dusting is invisible. Only the dancing dustcloth. If I turn my back to it, I see an empty room. The wooden floor creaks and sags. How will I sleep here? I moved four hours ago. Or maybe five? The first thing I did when I came into the room was to line up my cosmetics on the floor. The bright bottles gave...

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.--Oscar Wilde Buried inside us were the sounds of the words our parents managed to utter in the moment of intercourse before they fell silent at the wonder of budding life. Buried inside us were the sounds of the songs we heard in the cradle before our mothers had forgotten the oracles of the Virgin. Buried inside us were the sounds of the grinding of bones that blossomed as the...

However many times I now set out on the road of return the distance between us never lessens. My only hope of seeing you again is to also rise definitively to the glory of utter stillness. Athens, 11 February 1990

The Oracles of the Virgin Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.--Oscar Wilde Buried inside us were the sounds of the words our parents managed to utter in the moment of intercourse before they fell silent at the wonder of budding life. Buried inside us were the sounds of the songs we heard in the cradle before our mothers had forgotten the oracles of the Virgin. Buried inside us were the sounds of the grinding of...