Yiorgos Chouliaras [Greece]

 

 

Refugees
 
On the other side
of the photograph I write to remind myself
not where and when but who
 
I am not in the photograph
 
They left us nothing
to take with us
Only this photograph
 
If you turn it over you will see me
 
Is that you in the photograph, they ask me
I don’t know what to tell you
 
(Translated by David Mason & the author)
 
 

Odysseus at Home
 
Using my guile as everyone knows
I left my shadow at sea
and returned directly to Ithaca.
 
Nobody believed that I am here.
 
I, too, now pass my days
like one of the suitors.
I am secretly weaving, however.
 
Penelope is alarmed every morning
to find a new dress on the loom.
She immediately makes us unravel it
each suitor pulling on a different thread.
 
Her body will become a wedding gown
when she is left without any dress
and completely naked
she will marry one of us
dispersing others to foreign places.
 
It is in our interest therefore
if history is delayed as we all
become part of her plot.
 
Time passes this way, waiting
for Odysseus to arrive.
 
(Translated by Maria Koundoura & the author)
 
 
 
Confutation of Dualism
 
It is unfathomable to his mind
that the idea of passion
has overcome his body
 
and now a body
is all he has in mind
 
(Translated by Maria Koundoura & the author)
 
 
 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Yiorgos Chouliaras is a Greek poet, essayist, prose writer, and translator. In 2014, he was awarded an Academy of Athens prize for innovative writing and for his work in its entirety. His poetry in translation has been published in leading periodicals and anthologies, such as Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, World Literature Today, and Modern European Poets, and in Bulgaria, Croatia, France, India, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Slovenia, Sweden, and Turkey among other countries. Born in Thessaloniki, he studied and worked mostly in New York, before returning to Athens from Dublin. He has worked as a university lecturer, advisor to cultural institutions, correspondent, and press counselor at Greek diplomatic missions. A co-founder of influential Greek-language literary journals and editor of literary and scholarly publications in the U.S., he has been elected President of the Hellenic Authors’ Society, the principal association of literary writers in Greece. A recent interview: https://librotimes.com/interview-yiorgos-chouliaras.