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Anthony Marra gave an extremely interesting interview to Lena Papadimitriou for BHMAgazino magazine, on the occasion of the publication of his book The Tsar of Love and Children (translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis). A tsar is making his mark in Trump’s America. The novelist of the youngest American generation, obsessed with Russian and Chechen history, returns with his new book and explains to BHMAgazino why history is the most inventive storyteller.The interview was published on Sunday 29 January and you can read it below: Following the multi-award-winning Constellation of Vital Phenomena, perhaps the most significant prose writer of the newest American generation, who already has many fans around the world (including Sarah Jessica Parker), returns with the book *The Tsar of Love and Children* (published by Ikaros), in a masterful translation by Achilleas Kyriakidis. Without hiding his obsession with history, the 32-year-old Anthony Mara creates a sweeping, episodic novel or a collection of nine short stories that read as a single novel (whichever way you choose to interpret it), set against the backdrop of the Soviet Union, before and after its dissolution. Mara gathers snapshots of life, with protagonists whom historiography often attempts to erase: ordinary people. The first story, for example, is set in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s purges, featuring the painter-retoucher Roman Markin, who ‘erases’ faces with an airbrush on behalf of the propaganda department. In conversation with BHMAgazino, the American author who insists on delving into the Russian and Chechen universe speaks about Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America, and why history is the most inventive storyteller.It is more than obvious that you have an obsessive relationship with history. So, what are you, ultimately, a storyteller or a history nerd? ‘A wonderful question, but I don’t think it lends itself to a black-and-white answer. Above all, I’m a history nerd, and there is no more inventive storyteller than History itself.’ The US was largely unaware of Chechnya’s existence, at least until the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Your own interest in the region began as soon as you arrived to study in St Petersburg, just a few days after the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had exposed human rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya. Truly, were you not afraid to tackle such a sensitive international issue through fiction? ‘Literature has a duty to engage with complex and controversial issues. For readers who are fortunate enough to live in countries that enjoy peace, a novel is perhaps the closest they will ever get to places like Chechnya, Syria or Iraq. Readers are willing to travel anywhere in literature, provided the story is good enough. Asking readers to feel compassion for the victims of these conflicts and to identify with them seems even more crucial today, as Europe faces the refugee crisis. In a broader sense, I have focused my attention more on those about whom we learn the least: ordinary citizens. Although The Constellation of Vital Phenomena delves into the history of that specific region, the story of the war’s impact on ordinary people could, geographically speaking, have been set anywhere.”Did you discover anything paradoxical during your research into Russian and Chechen history? ‘Many paradoxes! The other day I was reading Arkady Ostrovsky’s book *The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War*. He writes that in the 1930s, workers in British shipyards found messages written in charcoal on imported timber. They came from prisoners in the Siberian gulags; these messages on the logs they were cutting were their only means of communication with the outside world. Ostrovsky devotes no more than a line or two to this in his book, yet an entire novel could spring from such a small moment. ‘Given that you have researched Russia and the Russian mindset in depth... how would you actually describe Putin’s Russia? Does it have any hope of becoming great again? ‘When I started writing about Russia nine years ago, I still harboured some hopes. The last decade has largely managed to extinguish them. The democratic reforms of the 1990s have been dismantled under the Putin regime. The rule of law no longer functions. Putin has turned the presidency into his own personal prison cell; he cannot escape, for fear of reprisals. I suspect he will rule Russia for the rest of his life. However, states are greater than their politicians. The same country that produced Putin has also produced ‘Pussy Riot’. Putin’s Russia will never be great, but the Russia of ‘Pussy Riot’ already is.’ How popular are you in Russia today? ‘My books have not been published in Russia, which is hardly surprising, given that they do not paint a particularly flattering picture of life under Putin’s regime. I have, of course, given lectures at a few universities and interviews to opposition newspapers, but I suspect that outside intellectual circles I am unknown.”The stories in your latest book—so distinct yet so inextricably linked—are set against the backdrop of the turbulent history of the Soviet Union before and after its dissolution. And yet, the reader gets the sense that your central canvas is human stories. Would you say that, for the most part, you write about those whom historiography struggles to erase? ‘Undoubtedly, that’s a lovely way of putting it. And, yes, that has been the aim of my work so far: to reconstruct those scattered stories that History has forgotten, ignored or erased.” Would you say that *The Tsar of Love and the Child* is a political book? ‘When you write about highly charged moments in history, you are not really in a position to avoid politics, so, in that sense, yes, it is. And both *The Constellation of Vital Phenomena* and *The Tsar of Love and the Child* focus on characters who are far from the sources of political power but close to its effects. Both books explore the ways in which politics can permeate and corrupt the personal sphere. Both are set in parts of the world where the price paid by those who oppose central authority is far higher than that borne by those who do the same in most Western countries. Neither, however, has its own political agenda.’ From the very first page of ‘The Tsar’, one gets a sense of science fiction. I think the final pages confirm this... ‘We tend to think of dystopias and apocalyptic future universes exclusively as products of science fiction. “Star Wars”, “The Hunger Games”, “Mad Max”, etc. And yet, for someone living in Grozny in 1999, the apocalypse has already arrived. For someone in Moscow in 1937, dystopia is everywhere. We don’t need to look to the stars or to the future. For many people, it is already here.’ Correct me if I’m wrong, but it is said that your involvement with the Russian world has now come to an end and that you are currently writing a novel set in Los Angeles and Italy. Would you really consider writing something about Greece? With the unprecedented economic crisis that nearly destabilised the whole of Europe and the waves of refugees, plenty of history is being written here. I assure you there are countless, semi-educated ordinary people... ‘One of the reasons I became involved with Chechnya was the absence of novels examining its modern history in the English language. This is not the case with Greece. You are right, there is no chapter in modern European history more dramatic and more urgent than that of Greece. However, Greece can boast a vibrant literary tradition, which is already producing the texts that will breathe life and meaning into this entire chapter of history. However, if anyone is willing to host me in your country, I would be truly delighted to begin my research.The book is, among other things, prophetic. I would remind you that one of your characters, Sergei, reads Donald Trump’s autobiography when he begins intensive English lessons. ‘It was purely coincidental. I wrote that particular passage long before Trump announced his presidential bid and I really had no idea what fate had in store for us. In that story, I tried to imagine what the ideal model would be for an aspiring hustler. In the category of ‘flashy, tasteless, gilded ass-kissing artists’, Donald Trump is king.Do you think there is a category of Americans ready to believe anything, even if it defies their common sense? Apart, of course, from the Tom Hanks fans you mention in the book... ‘Undoubtedly, I would put Donald Trump’s ardent fans at the top of the list. Anyone who bought one of his ridiculous red caps. It is disheartening how prone to delusion—however unrealistic, absurd and cruel it may be—many of my fellow countrymen prove to be. I grew up in Washington DC and the pizzeria in my neighbourhood is a place called ‘Comet Ping Pong’. My closest childhood friend was working there when, a few weeks ago, a madman turned up with an automatic weapon and opened fire (fortunately, without anyone being injured). What was the gunman’s motive? He had read a ‘fake news’ story claiming that Hillary Clinton was coordinating a satanic, cannibalistic child prostitution ring from inside that pizzeria (note: with ‘clients’ including senior members of her campaign team). And as if that weren’t terrifying enough, the national security adviser to the newly elected US President (note: Michael Flynn) had tweeted this conspiracy theory in recent months (note: according to which young children are being prostituted to Democrats). Now, the inmates are running the asylum.”What sort of American are you? “At the moment, a disheartened American. I have never been prouder to be an American than when Obama was elected, nor more ashamed than when Trump was elected. Obama’s track record, his belief in the possibility of hope and change, was confirmation that the hope I had for America was well-founded. The prejudice and stupidity of Donald Trump and all those he represents were nothing but the sad confirmation that my fear for America was also well-founded.’ In the introduction to her latest book, *Iron Curtain* , the naturalised Polish-American Anne Applebaum writes: ‘There have been regimes that sought absolute control not only over the organs of the state but over human nature itself.’ She concludes that we should today study in depth the ways in which totalitarianism operated in the past, since ‘we cannot be certain that mobile phones, the internet and satellite photographs will not end up as tools of control’. Do you agree? ‘The fundamental dangers of the “surveillance state”, which people like Edward Snowden have brought to light, were always projected into the future. Whatever one may hold against them, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama operated within the framework of democratic, liberal rules. There was never any great danger that either of them would engage in widespread spying or the systematic silencing of opposing voices. The real danger has always been the possibility that these powerful and privacy-invading technologies might fall into the hands of a completely unaccountable president, with no respect for or faith in the rule of law and institutions. For the past fifteen years, this possibility has been placed beyond the visible horizon, in the distant future. The problem with the future is that it always becomes the present.The rise of the far right in Europe and the rest of the world resembles a nightmarish echo of the 1930s. How, indeed, do you explain humanity’s almost inherent inability to learn from history? “It is a reasonable question that everyone is struggling to answer. One fairly strong argument I have read is that the last generation capable of recalling memories from the 1930s has passed away. In other words, there is no longer a living memory of where far-right, nationalist, populist demagoguery can lead. It is likely that those fortunate enough to have lived through the last seventy years of peace regard this as the status quo rather than an anomaly in European history, a fact that explains their tendency to act with less prudence. As for our inability to learn from history, I would say that we are capable of learning only what we are willing to hear.’ Ultimately, is *The Tsar of Love and Children* exclusively the product of historical research and imagination? Weren’t you tempted to weave in autobiographical elements? “Of course. There are quite a few small, autobiographical references. For example, the comments about Jim Carrey from ‘The Grozny Travel Agency’, I picked those up from a conversation I had with a Carrey fan in Chechnya. But also, quite a few of Alexei’s descriptions and experiences are my own genuine experiences, from the time I lived in Russia myself. As for my own doomed childhood dream of becoming an astronaut, it is the coda (ed.: the closing section in music) that brings ‘The Tsar’ to a close. Finally, the best lines in the book were first tried out in conversations between me and my parents or my girlfriend.” Could you describe a typical day for you? “I once heard a writer say that he only works when he’s inspired and makes sure he’s inspired from 9.00 to 5.00. That’s more or less what a typical day in my life looks like.”

Dimitris Nollas, on the occasion of the publication of his book *Stories Are Always Foreign* (Short Stories 1974–2016), which brings together his entire body of short fiction to date in a single volume, gave an exclusive interview to Dimitris Fyssas for Athens Voice. Dimitris Fyssas notes, among other things: “Ikaros has produced yet another landmark book, and I, a long-time fan of Mr Nollas, was quick to secure the first interview he has given about ‘Stories Are Always Foreign’.” Enjoy the interview below:

The Greek poet and academic, Kiki Dimoula, on the occasion of the publication of her poetry collection ‘Ano Telia’, spoke with journalist Yiannis Hatzigeorgiou in the magazine ‘Filgood’ of the newspaper ‘Fileleftheros’ in Cyprus.The interview was published on Sunday 11 December and you can read it below: “Are there answers to ‘Must love be faithful? And if it isn’t, what should we do? Love with our arms crossed?”, Mrs Dimoula? I think the only one who would definitely answer “yes, we should love with our arms crossed” is Christ... As for mortals, they would answer according to the advice their endurance would give them... Please forgive me for prefacing every answer with ‘I think’. It is a polite, perhaps even prudent, cover for the honest ‘I don’t know’.What do you not know about life?… I do not know how it can be beautiful. Nor do I know how, whilst it is not beautiful – at least not constantly – it is constantly desirable and beloved. What is it that makes it so unpleasant at times? Whatever unpleasant things do. And above all, memory, the reminder that time is passing and so I will lose what I like or dislike. That’s no small thing – time is no small matter in life. Has the passing of time ever frightened you? When I was 16, it didn’t frighten me. When I was 20, it didn’t scare me. But after 35, I started to get the jitters… Now? Now I can’t even think about it. Now I’m really scared. Really, really scared. I’m not scared of anything else. And one way I found to combat that fear was to sit down and write a book. That takes time away from me a little… What is love to you? It’s an unknown thing… A completely unknown and uncertain thing. I don’t know what love is. Why do you say that? Because, my dear, we don’t know what the soul is. Just as we don’t know what feelings are either. We know nothing! Nothing is constant in this world and nothing has just one form all the time. So it is with love: it changes constantly. Think how great love can suddenly turn into no love at all! Therefore, I ask you too, what is love? Have you never had the certainty in your life that you were loved deeply? No. Now, if you mean whether my poems were loved, that is another story. I cannot say that I was loved deeply by many people. By my children, yes. By my mother, yes. By Athos Dimoulas, as much as I needed to be loved, because excesses aren’t nice. I, yes, loved very much. And Athos Dimoulas, and the days that passed, and the bad days that passed…In what way did you love the bad days too?… I loved those very much too. If I were told I had another five years of unpleasant days ahead, provided they didn’t involve the loss of people close to me, I would gladly live through five years of unpleasant days.How do you interpret the expression ‘I’m fine’? ‘I’m fine’ means I’m forgetting about death. Has something happened, has a little time passed—perhaps even three minutes—during which I’m not thinking about death? Then I’m fine! When I’m not thinking about it, I’m fine. How did you cope in the past with the loss of people very dear to you? Very badly. It was very hard. And I suffered from severe depression. My whole life changed. And when we talk about losses, I mean the loss of Athos Dimoulas. No other loss is as heavy as the loss of a person with whom you have lived for 35 years and who is suddenly gone. It’s not a simple thing; it’s nightmarish.Is there any way to ease this pain? Fortunately, time lends a hand and we no longer feel that acute pain that feels like madness – because we don’t forget. And it is madness, especially at first, because you cannot comprehend what has happened. How a person was lost. It’s not easy. It’s terrifying and impossible to describe the feeling that takes the place of this loss. Have you suffered many times in your life? I find that quite easy. It doesn’t take much for me to feel pain. Perhaps I get over the little things easily. But, in any case, I must say that I am sensitive; I am susceptible to pain. So what is joy? It is something entirely fleeting. Joy is being able to put your worries aside.Has happiness been a distant concept in your life? I have often, and with great regret, apologised for happy situations that I misinterpreted as sparse or even uncertain, when they were not. Is ‘happiness’, then, a difficult word for you?It isn’t difficult, no. Because happiness is, in any case, an unknown word. I don’t even know if such a thing exists in the world. Unless we’re fooling ourselves by saying ‘I’m happy’. What is this happiness which, if it exists, not everyone can have? So perhaps we all lead miserable lives? I don’t know. The things that cause our mood to change suddenly are elusive and unpredictable. You can’t foresee them. Something that is extremely unpleasant might not affect me at all, whilst something that is only slightly unpleasant for others might completely break me. It is a matter of the soul as to what a soul can face heroically. When does the soul become a heroine? Every day.In what way? Because every day it loses. And it’s terrifying to know that this soul, which you’ve never seen, which you’ve never touched, will one day leave along with the whole body. Fortunately, though, that’s how it is. Because it would be terrifying for the body to die and the soul to live on. Do both leave together? Yes. And one is inside the other. I think the body is the soul’s hiding place. What, in the end, is poetry, Mrs Dimoula? Passion or love? Or simply work – just as a bank employee goes to work every day? I think it is both passion and love, but above all a tireless, hard-working perseverance. Have words ever become a threat to the routine of your existence? For your daily life – which involves cleaning, cooking, going for walks, chatting on the phone with friends – without knowing what inspiration means and moving to another level, beyond this world?I deeply appreciate everyday life for its fertility. It conceives days, and it is itself the skilful midwife who gives birth to itself. Every day. And it is this precious regularity that inspires repetition. We criticise it as tedious, forgetting that it prolongs our lives. For how long? As long as time sees fit. Have you ever felt you were reaching God whilst writing a poem? As if it were not your own? As if someone else were dictating it to you? No ambition of mine has ever troubled God by asking Him to fulfil it. His own great creation demands His constant protection. Simply, if a poem, whilst impossible to write despite my efforts, is suddenly written, I do not claim it as my own; I say that the mysterious wrote it, or perhaps chance, whose DNA I believe is akin to that of the mysterious.You mentioned the word ‘ambition’. Have you ever been ambitious? Is it possible for me not to be and yet sit here writing a book? Of course I am. The first stage is that I have something inside me and I want to bring it out, but there is also the expectation that people will like it, because if they don’t, I can’t take it back.Why is poetry, in most cases, identified with melancholy and silence? Is it forbidden to embrace the joy and bustle of the world? Of course not. It is neither forbidden nor does it turn it away. It simply does not convince it that they have the lasting value to be included in its inspirations. How are ‘melancholies derailed’, Ms Dimoula? But how else – poetic licence. This very verse was written with that same licence.When you finish a poem, how do you feel? Relief? Or does it ‘torment’ you, days later, over its perfection, over the ‘what if’—what if a word had been placed elsewhere, perhaps the result would have been better?I don’t have blind faith in my poems, and so I let myself be gnawed away by a persistent, nagging anxiety. What about you? Is it possible not to have faith in your poems? No faith at all! None whatsoever, ever. I have a constant sense of uncertainty, even when the poems are applauded. And I think it’s quite right that I feel this way. It makes me more careful, more restrained in general; my head doesn’t get carried away and I’m very down-to-earth. I often think, ‘If I like this poem, does that mean it’s any good?’ I don’t know what a good poem is! They say that everything in life is mathematical. Even the way you arrange the words in a sentence. What is poetry?In my own opinion, of course, poetry is a very reverent ‘I don’t know’. Is poetry logical? Or perhaps not? Poetry has a logic that can only be deciphered by its half-brother, known as inspired absurdity.Does poetry sometimes tell lies? They aren’t exactly lies. They are a noble veiling of the unbearably crude truth. Are there moments when you would prefer your mind not to create poetry? Where, at times, does all this become a torment? I did not choose my temperament and its symptoms. I found it ready-made and respected it, adhering to it to the letter.Do you believe you were born with the destiny to become a poet? I regard ‘poet’ simply as a nickname for ‘human being’. Your poetry grapples with immortality. It has almost been imposed upon it. Are you happy that your poems will still be read even when you have departed from this mortal world? Let me state in advance my indifference as to which of my traces will survive, when I shall be compelled to submit to a second mortal world after this one…What comforts you today, amidst humanity’s many problems – which are ever increasing? So far, no comfort has seemed capable of reassuring me. Nor have I received any auspicious sign from distant prophecies. I am simply adding my two cents to the collection organised by faint hope in favour of the instinct for self-preservation. Are dreams old-fashioned after all, Mrs Dimoula? (smiles) Old-fashioned, yes. In the sense that they do not keep the promises they make to our naive slumber or our impoverished desires. What passions do you retain from your youth? Or have they all been ‘covered up’ over the years? You are almost asking me for an autobiography. But that has been taken over by secrecy. Christ lost ‘the delight of his all-holy love’. What have you gained from love? What have I gained? That I welcomed it without asking for a letter of introduction, and that I cared for it when it died… When does love die? That is very simple. It is no riddle at all. Love dies when it dies. We realise it immediately. Immediately! From a profound sadness that replaces that fragile feeling which is love. Are you lost to love? I am lost only to my obedience to my parent, fear. Does love have logic? Love is something completely illogical.Is it also an illusion? It is an illusion. It is also often something false. Love may not exist, but we may think we are in love because it elevates everything – everything soars when this happens; you are no longer earthly, you are heavenly.Is there no happiness in love? Of course there is. When? When you are the one in love and not the other way round, I think that is a state of happiness. Because the happiness of love is what you feel, not what the other person feels. Has it ever made us happy when someone is in love with us but we are completely indifferent to them? Things, you know, are very carefully balanced, with a certain wisdom, so that people can cope with conflicts and disappointments. Are there many such disappointments?Every minute. A minute ago I was different, and that is now contradicted by something else. What are you crying about, Mrs Dimoula? If you mean the reason I am crying, I won’t answer because tears are silent and their cause is introverted.Then how do you define your sensitivity? Where do you find it? I find it where it is called upon to ache. If someone asked you, ‘What kind of life have you lived, Mrs Dimoula?’, what would you answer? What kind of life have I lived? Well, the one that has passed. That is its most poignant feature. Was ‘this destiny of life’ that you have experienced so far a ‘long, tiring journey’? I shall answer that question of yours when I discover whether I am going or coming…What kind of life do you hope to live from now on? I don’t hope for anything. I only wish that certain things would not affect my children – health issues, because there are various such things that pose a threat. Beyond that, I’d like not to realise I’m dying – I wouldn’t want that. For it to happen simply, in my sleep, so that I never find out. What could be more terrifying than never knowing you’ve died! Quietly… Not just quietly. Not knowing that you are dead. Whereas you know when you are alive, that you are living. Is this not the ultimate rebellion of things? Do you still have unanswered ‘whys’?… Many. To which only fate is competent to answer. Which either turns a deaf ear or wonders itself who anointed it as inevitable. The ‘full stop’ at the end of your latest poetry collection suggests a continuation. And something unfinished. What have you not yet finished, Ms Dimoula? What remains unresolved in your life? The unknown remainder of my life, which is still unfolding…

The Greek poet and academic, Kiki Dimoula, on the occasion of the publication of her poetry collection ‘Anon Telia’, gave an in-depth interview to Giorgos Archimandritis for the magazine ‘K’ of the newspaper ‘Kathimerini’, speaking about time, death, love and the prevailing uncertainty. The interview was published on Sunday 6 November and you can read it below: Anapha. A metaphysical punctuation mark, embodying the end in its least definitive form. A punctuation mark synonymous with a temporary pause. On the occasion of her eponymous poetry collection, which encapsulates all the laws of her poetic world and offers a comprehensive portrayal of the human condition, the poet and academic Kiki Dimoula shares with us the thoughts, anxieties and questions of a person faced with the art of poetry and the human condition. Kiki Dimoula, in one of your poems you say: ‘A long, tiring journey / destiny / but the worst thing / is that you don’t know whether you’re going or coming’. Where are you coming from and where are you going? It is said that after this life there is another. I neither believe this, nor does it comfort me. That’s why I say ‘you don’t know’. Are you setting off for the next life, or are you coming from the other one and this is the new one? Destiny is unknown, yet certain at the same time. And I believe this without having any proof or argument. What strikes me, however, is that everything unfolds as if it were premeditated. And it unfolds with such precision that I cannot call it a coincidence. I cannot say ‘it just happened’. I do, of course, consider ‘chance’ to be responsible for many creations; I attach far greater importance to it than to the planned. But in our case, where there is life there is also death. No one will ever change that. Do you believe there is a guiding force? Yes. And it is rhythm. The rhythm of life. I see no other. And I cannot, of course, blame any God. If there were one, and if there is one, I believe he is not as cruel as fate. For fate is cruel. From the moment death is foreseen at a time when you have learnt to live, at a time when you have grown accustomed to this terrible thing, or if you like, this meaningless thing – because in old age life doesn’t have much meaning – yet you prefer it to dying, to heading towards the unknown. But it is not so much that you do not want the unknown. It’s that you don’t want to lose the familiar. Because that is what we have come to know. We came here through life, we didn’t come through death. And that is nature’s great trick: that it sent us here unprepared to face what is to come.Are you afraid of death? I tremble at the thought of it. I really do tremble. Because I know that then none of the things that are happening now will be happening. He is the almighty one, after all, and no one else. Just think that from the moment you are born, you are on the verge of death. Because that is what it is all about. I have not got used to that, and I have not forgiven it. And I am still hungry for life. Perhaps even the fact that I am still writing poems at eighty-five is an expression of this reluctance of mine to die, of my inability to imagine what might exist when a body dies. Because, let’s be honest, what is a soul without a body? Without a body, what is a soul? The body is the soul’s justification for existing. Its justification and its home. Yes. Within this body, it is nurtured and it nurtures. Of course, it’s not impossible that it has created everything in wisdom; I’m not in a position to rule that out. I’m simply not an enthusiastic devotee of all this business and all this uncertainty where you don’t know who our creator is. That is what I would like to know. Unless I shouldn’t or mustn’t know. Ultimately, life itself is cautious towards us. It neither betrays us, nor foretells us anything, nor reveals anything to us. Whatever comes is as if we are experiencing it for the first time, even though we may have lived it before. Does it promise us anything? No. Our desire promises us. Our desire pretends to be the voice of life. Life itself is detached and moral. And not at all a liar. Life makes no promises. We imagine. Life simply exists and lets you see it as you wish. That is why some people are very happy with the way the world is, whilst others are disappointed and unhappy. The point is to analyse and evaluate what cannot be otherwise. That is why we write poems under the illusion that we will change what is happening or describe it in a different way.How certain have you ever felt about poetry? I have never felt certain about anything. Never. Only that I will die. And I consider poetry to be an extremely treacherous and deadly state of affairs. It doesn’t tell you that you’ve been had. It doesn’t tell you that you’ve said this before. It doesn’t tell you that you’re repeating yourself. Nothing. It lures you in, traps you, and you think that this time you’ve said it a bit differently from last time, when in fact you’ve said it exactly the same way.So she’s a bit of a deceiver too, just like life? Yes. We help her with that, of course. We give her a face that the poor thing might not have. Ever since poetry has existed, pretence has existed too. Poetry is a form of acting. You’re playing a part whilst you write; you’re creating certain roles. I can’t think of any other way to explain this persistence or even this ambition – because it promises you that some people will talk about you, that you’ll occupy their minds, that you’ll influence them. But that’s not it. It’s a force I can’t stop. And the fact that I’m still writing is perhaps a desperate move to ward off old age. Because poetry is a way of not understanding time. To spend it, trying to write and thinking that this is ultimately a saving rather than an expense. But isn’t a truth ultimately revealed through this pretence? We don’t know if it’s the truth. It’s another mask. I believe that everything that circulates, everything we present, everything we use, is a mask. What and who we really are, we either do not know or do not want to know. Because poetry, too, is the result of a sense of inadequacy. Why else would you create the world? Because that is what poetry is: you attempt to create a new world. But who will believe in this world, and who will inhabit it? Is it not enough for its creator to inhabit it? Isn’t poetry a way of magnifying life? It is rather an illusion that in this way you are fighting against the death of leaving and being forgotten entirely. Herein lies the delusion: that you will not be forgotten. And so what if someone momentarily remembers the great Tassos Leivaditis, Seferis, Elytis or my own Cavafy, me, my own? What does it change? I know that we each have a different character, which we serve at all costs. So, a person who is pessimistic isn’t just being fussy. It’s their hormones that make them that way. Nor is it because they deserve a different life – they don’t even know what life they want. They are simply born to worry. And they must entrust this worry to something. And they entrust it, I think, to poems. Tell me about the first word of a poem. How important is that first word? That word is ‘You’. ‘You’, my interlocutor or the one I dream of and wish to move or cause pain to. For the target is always the Other. Your ‘I’ cannot be unframed, however much it serves you. Is it possible to want to be alone? Besides, I don’t think the poet himself is in a position to analyse his own poems, because he inevitably becomes too lenient towards them. Although I am happy to decapitate them. The reader, however, I would not want to decapitate them for me. Anyway. There is but one deity here: uncertainty. Not just in the poems. Everywhere. That is the driving force. That is the goddess. She may be a tormenting goddess, but, on the other hand, she lends such charm to that which offers you no certainty, that in the end you love her. She is wise. She protects you from boredom. Because it is a bore to know what will happen. You mustn’t know. Because you can’t explain it? Exactly. That’s why I say ‘the inexplicable silences you / and go on, try to grasp it’. Isn’t that what we do? Don’t we struggle to grasp something that is inexplicable? And the inexplicable hurts you, kills you. All the inexplicable things that happen in our lives, however much they carry the weight and significance of a new garment, are variations. Only death makes a difference. If you think about it, love is also a death – its own – which is bound to happen. So I ask the Almighty, and I ask you too: ‘Why do we die?’. How on earth did this happen? Someone tell me. The agony of death ought not to be part of man’s destiny. And yet it is. It is an agony he has never experienced before. Not even in loves that die. These are grand words. A painful death is merely the end of life. You can recreate love – for love too is artificial; we create it ourselves. But you cannot recreate life. ‘Dreams and love’, however, as you say in one of your poems, are part of this life. They are very fragile, of very short duration. If only life were all love, that is what I wanted. All of life. It would end at some point, of course, but the fleeting nature of our intense moments causes us pain. The possibility of losing them fills us with fear. And I think that, in the end, the way all this is put together, there is a wisdom to it. Because, if it weren’t like that, perhaps weariness would eventually prevail, which now doesn’t have time to take hold. The new being arrives, rested, thirsty to live out this whole lie that is our life. Because it is a lie, a lie that sometimes lasts many years, sometimes few. Of course, if they asked me, would you now like to be reborn and not be entangled in this lie? Now, yes, I wouldn’t, because I am bound to everything that has been. Did you love what has been? Certainly. And first and foremost, my actions. And my actions are that I have given birth to children and raised them as I did. Is there one action of mine I do not love? That I grew up myself. Ultimately, I believe that the only thing that is truly ours, and not entirely so, is ourselves. Ourselves and our mistakes. That is why I say somewhere: ‘Wisdom is not experience; it has simply lost the power to err’. Because when you err, you care about nothing. You dare. But how can I err now? What temptations do I have left to face? The temptation to believe, despite everything, in life. But if I fear death, it is because I believe in it. And ‘I believe’ does not mean ‘I trust it’. It means ‘I love it’. We believe in someone we love. I would like to know, I would like to have seen the face of God. And, you might say, is faith of any value when it is based on certainty? But I cannot understand how anyone can be faithful in the face of uncertainty. Generally, life teaches you to want to put your finger ‘on the pulse’; you didn’t come up with that yourself out of your own imperfections. Life tells you: ‘I want to grasp that which rules over me.’ Because supposedly, the whole of the heavens above is authority. And time? How would you describe your relationship with time today? Bad. Very bad. I don’t look at my watch, but I’ll tell you this. If I had an old watch that was always two seconds slow, I’d wear that one. Precisely because, if you multiply two seconds behind every day, think how much time you gain. Time is something that cannot be gained by any means other than forgetting. Because along with that, you will have forgotten that it is slipping away too. The best method is to forget. If you forget again, you are an empty vessel that doesn’t know what it’s for. That is, things are never just like that and only like that. They are like that and otherwise. And whatever draws you in, the full or the empty. And you’re not to blame for that choice. Nature makes you that way, the thousands of cells that came before, that programmed you, that changed and shaped you. All this mysterious thing. Which we call destiny. And where, let me emphasise again, ‘whether you go or come, you do not know’. And that is far more tiring than the word itself, which is in itself very tiring.