Pip: Welcome to Libros Libertad — where the shelves run deep and the poems run deeper, sometimes all the way to the bottom of a creek with someone's identity card floating away.
Mara: This episode covers work curated by vequinox across three territories: Greek poets in translation, then prose and poetry wrestling with memory, exile, and belonging, and finally the body, nature, and desire in some unexpected company.
Pip: Let's start with the Greek poets.
Tasos Livaditis and the Greek Tradition in Translation
Mara: The question here is what it means to translate Greek poetry — not just the language but the particular weight these poems carry: displacement, myth, political reckoning, and Eros in forms ranging from surreal prose-poem to tight lyric.
Pip: Tasos Livaditis opens this with something almost unbearable. The setup is a woman in a park, and the poem "The Nails" goes: "her purse with her identity card, floated down the creek, and we couldn't find out anything about her."
Mara: The upshot is anonymity as a condition, not an accident. The poem refuses resolution — the speaker climbs to a loft, finds only hay, and stays on the sidelines hoping to recover a lost soul. It is grief without a name to attach it to.
Pip: Yannis Ritsos in "Violation" burns the wooden horse in an oven — its eyes glassy, unable to catch fire. Myth as something that cannot quite be destroyed, which is either comforting or ominous depending on your afternoon.
Mara: Constantine Cavafy's "Trojans" makes the political stakes explicit: "Our efforts are like those of the unfortunate. Like the efforts of the Trojans." Titos Patrikios pushes further — a poem dated August 1957 turns on a crowd demanding justice until one voice says the wall was always inside them.
Pip: Antony Fostieris gives us Eros as cotton candy — sticky, airborne, briefly beautiful. Nikos Engonopoulos rides a tram through rain toward the Acropolis, consoled by marble. "Cloe and Alexandra" answers every imagined thing with longing. "Hours of the Stars" gives us Hercules cracking the night's cheekbones like walnuts.
Mara: And there is a post linking to three poems by Dimitra Gerogianni — the thread extends beyond the translations into contemporary Greek voices as well.
Pip: From myth and marble, the next territory gets personal — memory, exile, and the cost of belonging.
Memory, Exile, and the Weight of Belonging
Mara: These works ask what survives when a language, a place, or a self is slowly eroded — whether by migration, political upheaval, or time.
Pip: "The Gospel of Silence" anchors the theme. The passage describes a Hungarian-language school quietly abolished, and the prose lands here: "Memories cling stubbornly, yet they cannot halt time; they merely testify in silence that once, here, the world spoke differently, about different things, to different people."
Mara: That is minority language loss rendered as lived atmosphere rather than statistic. The corridor that echoes differently after the decision — not dramatically, just gradually, irresistibly.
Pip: "Straits and Turns" takes the immigrant experience sideways — a Greek laborer named Mike earns the right to drive a rail yard engine one hundred yards, coached by a Scottish foreman who tells him to brake "softly, like when you caress the body of your woman." Small dignity, enormous meaning.
Mara: "In Turbulent Times" works the Irish coast — a man negotiating borrowed space, a cottage key, the low-grade hostility of a mountain he cannot move. "Redemption" follows a student named Hermes whose scholarly excellence astonishes his professors, building a life through sheer disciplined attention.
Pip: "Ugga" reaches back to the first storyteller at the fire, warning the tribal leader that the man with better stories will take everything. "Twelve Narratives of the Gypsy" rings bells on lambs across hillsides — wealth sealed away, sweetness still audible.
Mara: "Nostos and Algos" — the title literally means homecoming and pain — gives us a young sparrow on a branch who clips his own wing feathers and writes: "no need for these anymore." "Entropy" and "The Long Road" both circle the Aegean and its losses, fathers lost in whirlpools of numbers, a man groaning in Edinburgh Castle's sunless dungeon.
Pip: All of it asking the same question: what do you carry when the place that made you no longer holds you? Which brings us to what the body does in the meantime.
The Body, Nature, and the Act of Making
Mara: This segment sits at the intersection of physical sensation, the natural world, and the creative act — asking how desire and craft are related.
Pip: "Ken Kirkby — Warrior Painter" is the anchor, and the quote is Kirkby on his own process: "People end up fixing the mess we made, rather than taking steps to avoid making a mess in the first place." He finds this unbearably frustrating — and builds anyway.
Mara: The consequence is a portrait of creative intelligence that thinks ahead of language, plans in the body before the parietal cortex catches up. Kirkby cannot always explain the plan, but the plan is already sound.
Pip: "Vernal Equinox" puts desire in similar terms — approach as an ancient chant, the body nearing another body with "a soft feathery song." "Medusa" strips the romance: a think tank calculates pounds of flesh against the cost of a projectile. Nature and body, yes — just not the version anyone ordered.
Mara: "Blood, Feathers and Holy Men" moves through forest trails, medicinal roots, and a monk composing hymns to nature while his heart skips a beat beside Yamka. "Prairie Roots" grounds everything in chores, milking schedules, and a baseball tournament that the cows outlasted. "An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative" argues that time and space are themselves products of a poietic faculty — imagination as the architecture beneath all perception. And a post on Diane di Prima rounds out the theme, linking to work on abandonment and its aftermath.
Pip: Greek myth, a floating identity card, a rail engine braked like a caress, a sparrow clipping its own wings — it is quite a week at Libros Libertad.
Mara: The thread underneath all of it is what endures: language, memory, the body's knowledge. Next time, we will see what else surfaces.
