Posts filed under 'greek mythology'

Of the Quotidian and the Epic: On Daniel Lipara’s Another Life

"Another Life" is a tiny cosmos, a subtle and refined explosion, a bursting ocean with waves crashing on a nearby and familial shore . . .

Another Life by Daniel Lipara, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Eulialia Books, 2021

The first poem in Daniel Lipara’s debut collection Otra vida, released in English as Another Life (Eulalia Books, 2021), is a page and a half long. Entitled “Susana, lotus flower,” it lasts a lifetime. Many lifetimes. The poem is sweet and painful, excruciating and grotesque, charged with fragility and hope and tenderness and memory (“her father the son of a butcher who fled the pogroms all the way to Argentina”), visceral with pain (“they shrank her stomach with a belt the belt snapped open scratched her innards”), and void of commas. It’s as vivid as it is memorable, and it sets the tone for the rest of the book.

Another Life is a family album laced with beautiful writing; I like to think of the poems as spotless, multichapter vignettes, quickly spun by a well-oiled stereoscope. In Lipara’s ranging collection, we follow a family—a very real and flawed family—moved and motivated by love, grief, and hope, as told to us by a narrator in awe with his surroundings.

After pious aunt Susana of the opening poem, we read about Jorge—the father, “the tiller (. . .) and master griller,” and later Aeolus, the god of the wind. As personal and intimate as Lipara’s work feels, the narrator also becomes preoccupied with what plays out in the greater background, with its history, characters, tales, and myths. In this, Another Life feels both quotidian and epic. Soon after, we meet Liliana, the mother, who is “five foot nine she has big bones and bleach blond hair” and is dying of cancer, though we don’t learn about this until later. (It is hinted at subtly, however, during her first appearance: “(she) lays her hands onto my mother’s vengeful cells.”)

After this introduction, we meet Sai Baba of India; Liliana will travel to his ashram looking to cure her cancer. This journey is first introduced as a premonition: “I dreamed we went to India and your mother was healed,” says Susana. Then we see the family waiting at the airport, on the plane, and reaching Indira Gandhi Airport. We see water buffalos. We see rice fields. We see India through the eyes of a young Daniel, and we see him experiencing the country, silently amazed by its colors, odors, sights, and sounds—again being drawn into the background with its world of fascination, again merging the quotidian and the epic.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Archilochus on the Solar Eclipse, 648 BC

All that we human beings have assumed will be in doubt

In tribute to the total solar eclipse that was visible across the United States on Monday, we’re excited to present a poem written nearly 2500 years ago on April 6, 648 BC by Archilochus, a Greek lyric poet from the island of Paros who was well-known for composing poems based on his emotions and experiences. What remains of the poem Archilochus composed is a fragment that recounts a solar eclipse, where, needless to say, things get very weird very quickly. Translated by Aaron Poochigian. 

Nothing’s unreasonable, nothing too much, nothing stunning,

now that Zeus the Father of the Gods has cloaked the light

to make it night at noontime, even though the sun was shining.

Terrible dread has fallen upon men. From here on out

all that we human beings have assumed will be in doubt,

and no one should be shocked to see, in briny acres, land

animals, walking creatures, having sex with dolphins, when

their four legs come to love the sounding waves more than the sand,

and dolphins with their flippers come to love a mountain glen.

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Aaron Poochigian is the author of the thriller in verse Mr. Either/Or (www.mreitheror.com) and the poetry collection Manhattanite (www.aaronpoochigian.com).

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Translation Tuesday: Prologue to Bacchae by Euripides

"I have compelled this town to rant and howl, / dressed it in fawnskin, put my pine-cone-tipped / and ivy-vested spear into its hands"

Dionysus:

Here I am, Dionysus, Zeus’s son,
the god whom Semele, the daughter of Cadmus,
birthed, with a bolt of lightning for a midwife.
I am back home in the land of Thebes.

My sacred form exchanged for this mere mortal
disguise, I have arrived here where the Springs
of Dirce and the river Ismenos
are flowing. I can see my lightning-blasted
mother’s tomb right there beside the palace,
and I can see as well her former bedroom’s
rubble giving off the living flame
of Zeus’ fire—Hera’s deathless rage
against my mother. I am pleased that Cadmus
has set the site off as a sanctuary
to keep her memory. I am the one
who covered it on all sides round with grape leaves
and ripe grape clusters. READ MORE…