For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems from the Greek writer Danae Sioziou, translated by Panagiota Stoltidou. In the first, “Athenian Days”, we’re transported into the commotion of daily life in the Greek capital. Sioziou balances familiar images (insects, breakfast, untrustworthy-seeming people you encounter in the streets) with a more mystical register: “kaleidoscopic / entropies, shells of dreams”. In a melancholic voice, the city hints at an inner vitality, buried by long years of decay. The second poem, “Tropicalities”, is a philosophical meditation on paradoxes, and impossibilities reminiscent of Heraclitus. Various objects are listed in turn, but they are defined by their inability to fulfill the functions for which they were designed. In contrast, time’s incessant march seems all-powerful.
Athenian Days
Athenian days: flirtations
of cockroaches, eggs sunny side up,
of shady characters, totems, kaleidoscopic
entropies, shells of dreams.
I know nothing of rising
stars, the eye is fixed on the first
hour, I am the center of the city,
the bustle, you say, of the here and now.
And if I saw you yesterday, my little light-eating
nightmare, boomerang, brought back
from nothing, shining messenger,
you, moon, I remain dead
only in terrible depths does the drowned
tree of life shine within me.
Tropicalities
There is a garden, but it doesn’t extend
there is a ladder, but no change in height
there is a ceiling fan,
but no constant temperature
there is nighttime, morning time,
the perfect function of the photocell
the locking of the door, the alarm,
and my own passage from fire to ice.
Translated from the Greek by Panagiota Stoltidou
Danae Sioziou is a multilingual poet, translator, and cultural worker. Her first poetry collection received the Hellenic Writers’ Association Jannis Varveris Literary Award and the State Prize for Young Writers. Her second book was shortlisted for the 2022 National Prize for Poetry; in 2024, she published her third collection, Epistles. Sioziou was a fellow of the Santa Maddalena Foundation and Villa Ruffieux. Her work has been translated into over thirteen languages, featured in international journals and anthologies and presented at major literary events internationally. She curates the Purple Medusas Literature Festival and works for the Book History Lab at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her translations include works by Susan Sontag and John Berger.
Panagiota Stoltidou is a writer and translator from modern Greek. Her translations of Danae Sioziou’s Probable Landscapes have been awarded a sample translation grant from the Hellenic Foundation for Culture. Her reviews, poetry and translations have appeared at Hopscotch Translation, Quarto, Sarka, The Columbia Review and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Filmpost.
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