“ . . . when flesh did enter . . . ”
There were two branches and in the center something barbed with teeth
an orphan hunger
with greedy gulps it sips the light
the petrified milk
chews lunatic air
hews the flesh
pollutes the ears
web of streets
unwalked city that shakes with rage
the eyelids blind engrave the earth
a giant’s hand clasps my leg
slaughtermeat unconscious
the gills fall away
the chest swells
a cricket’s freed from my navel—I
speak.
You can walk I
Walking brings you close to small things
you can catch them in hand and they fit
some you can open, shatter, uproot,
can taste your breath in their dormant flesh.
But some are less approachable.
Only the gaze can come close
But the gaze
isn’t enough.
Branches and leaves, ditches filled with water and frogs
fall down from my eyes
With each step the soil drinks me, the thirsty earth.
The place becomes
a spoon that wants to empty me
someplace /else
You can walk II
One gets used to a life of stepping aside
stooping beneath the sheepfolds
lifting up the rocks.
There below live wriggling creatures
They do not know the light
a thousand feet tickle your throat
without song coming out
but there comes an instant when your hand touches
without reaching out.
There are methods to make it last
there are methods to make it last:
You can hold your breath
Or close your eyes so tight
Then drums in the heat
Then bloodred stars in such plangent silence
Then dense blindness and chlorophyll dress
Then mouth open and dust to fill it
Then soil for you to eat
Game I
the orange-grove: does not exist
the black trunks: do not exist
the diaphanous flowers: do not exist
the mythic fruits: do not exist
what exists is a high stone wall
hawks circle around it
their eyes are my marbles
when I sit there
the spot becomes a hiding-place
Game II
With a wooden sword I learn to sow death
to asphodels—off with your heads!
ruin! to the torsos of the murderers
of the velvet mullein, fuzzy-leafed
in the end I sit motionless and beaten
so many bodies exhausted me
& still so many encircle me (without
resistance)—I’m not even breathing
around my throat I wear a necklace of ants
it’s here: the hour I gather vowels
Notes on the Book of the Soil
Katerina Iliopoulou
translated from the Greek by Jackson Watson
In her poetry, Katerina Iliopoulou constructs a kind of archaeology of the present, a lyric topography where emplacement and wandering, separation and encounter, song, individual experience, and traces of history crisscross the landscape. The poems from The Book of the Soil (Το βιβλιο του χωματος, Melani Editions, 2011) explore this archaeology from the perspective of the soil (χώμα), both as the physical landscape (sheepfolds, ditches, frogs, and stones) and the psychological ground (the lessons and games of childhood) from which the poet—and poetry—springs.
I’ve been translating Katerina’s poems for over a year now, and no group of poems has been quite so enjoyable to translate as the poems from “The Book of the Soil.” I find them totally engrossing, totally surprising, and folded and coiled as tightly as any nest of vipers. But what’s inside these poems’ fangs isn’t venom: it's powerful, embodied sensation—more a drug than a poison.
In translating these poems, I wanted to capture Iliopoulou’s ecstatic blend of intensity and flow. Her images emerge as starkly as a skeleton from the dirt, but her language curves smoothly through balanced, assonant waves. Together, image and language lend an exquisite, chthonic quality to these poems. Translating, in part, meant shaping my English to affect this intensity without sacrificing their compression and sheen. Similarly challenging was capturing the poem’s moments of childlike play and discovery in a way that felt neither over-serious nor saccharine. To achieve all this (or even make a decent attempt), I was especially helped by my fellow participants at the 2025 Princeton Hellenic Studies Translation Workshop—huge thanks to Karen Emmerich, Peter Constantine, Michael Alexandratos, Joanna Eleftheriou, Dimitra Loumiotis, and Panagiota Stoltidou for guiding these translations towards their current forms.
I’ve been translating Katerina’s poems for over a year now, and no group of poems has been quite so enjoyable to translate as the poems from “The Book of the Soil.” I find them totally engrossing, totally surprising, and folded and coiled as tightly as any nest of vipers. But what’s inside these poems’ fangs isn’t venom: it's powerful, embodied sensation—more a drug than a poison.
In translating these poems, I wanted to capture Iliopoulou’s ecstatic blend of intensity and flow. Her images emerge as starkly as a skeleton from the dirt, but her language curves smoothly through balanced, assonant waves. Together, image and language lend an exquisite, chthonic quality to these poems. Translating, in part, meant shaping my English to affect this intensity without sacrificing their compression and sheen. Similarly challenging was capturing the poem’s moments of childlike play and discovery in a way that felt neither over-serious nor saccharine. To achieve all this (or even make a decent attempt), I was especially helped by my fellow participants at the 2025 Princeton Hellenic Studies Translation Workshop—huge thanks to Karen Emmerich, Peter Constantine, Michael Alexandratos, Joanna Eleftheriou, Dimitra Loumiotis, and Panagiota Stoltidou for guiding these translations towards their current forms.
Katerina Iliopoulou is a poet, artist, and translator who lives and works in Athens. She is the author of five poetry books, a book of poetry and photography, a book of short stories, and a soon-to-be published novel. Since 2013, she has been the editor-in-chief of FRMK (FaRMaKo), a cutting-edge, award-winning journal on poetry, theory, and the visual arts. She is also the editor of the bilingual web platform greekpoetrynow.com.
Jackson Watson is a writer and translator from Georgia, U.S. They live in Providence, Rhode Island, now, where they work as a wildlife rehabilitator and serve as a poetry reader for Nat. Brut and Tyger Quarterly. Their work is published or forthcoming in mercury firs, Fence, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere.
