Pip: Libros Libertad, where the reading list arrives like a freight train through a glade — which, as it turns out, is a fairly literal description of what's inside.
Mara: vequinox has been busy. This episode moves through Modern Greek poetry, love and exile, fiction caught between family and freedom, and a philosophical essay on myth and the imaginative.
Pip: Quite a range for one week's work.
Mara: Let's start with the poetry.
Modern Greek Poetry: Voices From the Margins
Pip: Greek poetry doesn't often get shelf space in English-language publishing, so what's happening here is worth pausing on — a sustained effort to bring multiple poets, across generations and registers, into translation and print.
Mara: The anchor is Tasos Livaditis — Poems, Volume II, and the poem there sets the tone immediately: "And we finally die, unknown, in the darkest corner of the poem."
Pip: That line does a lot of work. It's not despair exactly — it's something more like a reckoning with invisibility, with the self that never quite finished becoming itself.
Mara: The Livaditis Selected Poems collection extends that territory, with prose-poem fragments built around misrecognition and the uncanny — a figure so miserable "the lamp walked ahead of him on its own."
Pip: Short line, long shadow.
Mara: The Neo-Hellene Poets anthology widens the lens considerably, pulling in voices like the "Forgetfulness" poem, where the speaker asks the sea and the forest whether they are truly what he once knew.
Pip: And Kariotakis-Polydouri frames two poets through their tragic relationship — the poem "As I Die" has that line about disappointment rising "like myrrh" from life's flowers, which is either beautiful or deeply alarming depending on your Tuesday.
Mara: Yannis Ritsos — Poems, Volume III brings a starker register: diary entries from exile, barbed wire, a black cat running with the moon tied to its tail.
Pip: Antony Fostieris and Miltos Sachtouris each contribute their own textures — Fostieris with a mind "poured out into the cosmos," Sachtouris with a sprawling, carnivalesque vision of gods and harlots and golden teeth. And Titos Patrikios and Red in Black round it out — one measuring life in steps toward an abyss, the other in a touch so light it ends with the single word "transcendence."
Mara: What holds them together is the anthology impulse itself — the argument that these voices belong in the same conversation. That case keeps being made, collection by collection. Which connects directly to what exile and longing do to a voice — the next segment lives there.
Love, Loss, and the Weight of Departure
Pip: If the poetry segment is about visibility, this one is about what you carry when you leave — or when you're left.
Mara: Übermensch opens the territory directly. The poem "Independence" ends: "I like those who stand over the gaping mouth of the Abyss and in an exalted way cry out: I'm not afraid."
Pip: That's not bravado — it reads as the only honest response to a life that never delivered its promised meaning.
Mara: Nostos and Algos works the same terrain through the image of a train ride you never chose, where every stop loops you back to your starting point so long as you carry "diminutive envy and great jealousy" alongside you.
Pip: Entropy pushes further into dissolution — a speaker searching for "the path to the unexpected, to a route that doesn't know itself." The Long Road answers with a freight train and a worm-eaten apple, which is either a metaphor or a very bad gift.
Mara: Second Advent of Zeus closes the loop mythically — Athena erects a statue, places a wilted daffodil over the speaker's heart, and the speaker vanishes into the sea. And Vespers holds the quieter register: a poem about reflection and its original, neither quite real.
Pip: The question underneath all of it is whether departure ever actually ends, or just changes address. The fiction takes that question and puts it in a room with other people.
Fiction: Family, Duty, and the Unfinished Self
Pip: The fiction here isn't interested in tidy resolutions — it's interested in the pressure that accumulates inside households where people want different things and can't quite say so.
Mara: The Unquiet Land anchors the segment. Caitlin lies awake thinking of Padraig, and the prose is precise about the split: "That sanctimonious self-righteousness her father had seen in Padraig's nature had risen to the surface. She saw it plainly now herself. It swamped those more attractive traits that she had always admired in Padraig."
Pip: What's sharp there is that admiration and disillusionment coexist — she hasn't stopped seeing him clearly, she's just seeing more of him now.
Mara: In Turbulent Times runs a parallel track — a woman named Nora who gave up a promising art career to raise children, arguing that "wasting talent is sinful," and a husband who genuinely cannot understand why money wouldn't be reason enough.
Pip: That scene where she snaps a biscuit into crumbles mid-sentence is doing more work than a paragraph of exposition.
Mara: Straits and Turns shifts to younger characters — students retaking a chemistry exam, pairing off, one quietly asking another why he failed when she knew he knew the material. The Gospel of Silence moves into far darker institutional pressure: seminarians crawling across a frozen river while officers demand they sing louder until "the last spark of self-respect dies inside you."
Pip: And Hours of the Stars pulls back to something almost wordless — a short poem, four lines, a speaker whose eyes "remain clean" despite everything seen. It lands like a breath after all that pressure.
Mara: The thread across all of it is the cost of being legible to a system — family, church, school, state — that was never designed around you. The essay segment asks where those systems come from in the first place.
The Imaginative: Myth, Chaos, and Philosophical Origins
Pip: The essay on the structure of the human imaginative is doing something genuinely ambitious — tracing how philosophical thought became possible by starting before philosophy, with Hesiod and Homer.
Mara: The key move is this: "unlike other ancient civilisations, the poietic Imaginative of the Greeks conceives the birth of the world as a creation ex nihilo, out of Chaos, rather than as an act of will performed by a supreme anthropomorphic being."
Pip: So the argument is that Greek cosmology's openness — Chaos first, then differentiation — is what left room for questioning. No supreme author means the world can be interrogated.
Mara: It's a short excerpt, but it positions the essay as intellectual history working backward through myth to find the conditions that made reason possible. Which is a long way of asking: what has to be true about your origin story before you can start doubting it?
Pip: From Chaos to the frozen Olt River to a woman snapping a biscuit — the week's reading holds together more than it has any right to.
Mara: The thread is the self under pressure: from systems, from time, from the people who were supposed to understand.
Pip: Same territory next time, probably. Different rooms.
Mara: We'll be here.
