MY APPLE GREEN is a poetic exploration of a shocking event that took place in a village in Mani, a century and a half ago. My story was narrated by the musician Dimitra Trypani, who asked me to prepare a text that would interplay with her music in the "sound performance" she was designing.

I tried to think and feel as (perhaps) all the characters involved in the 19th-century drama thought and felt, so distant yet so familiar: the girl who dared to love a foreigner, outside of marriage, her father, her mother, her siblings, the younger brother with his timid denial, her (for just a twenty-four hour) husband, the stranger, the village itself where the drama unfolded.

The micro-community of the Mani village, as organized by its norms and traditions, by its customary or rather "natural" patriarchy, is not exclusively Maniot but also Cretan and from Aitolia – and Irish, for example. Everywhere, the woman "is her father's and her husband's," both property and victim, a machine that silently produces everything, among which are also children.

I decided right from the start to share the narrative among different mouths, in different voices. So that through their dispute, a horror that must be "talked about" might be illustrated more faithfully, perhaps even contained. However, a horror that is very difficult to "discuss." Not to be interpreted, it is an affront to deem its interpretation easy, but at least to be tamed or exorcised. And poetry, always, has a very close relationship with exorcism and sorcery.

PANTELIS BOUKALAS

PANTELIS BOUKALAS was born in 1957 in Lesini of Messolonghi. He graduated from the Dental School of Athens. From 1987 to 1990, he had editorial responsibility for a book review page in the newspaper I Protoi. Since December 1990 and for the next twenty years, he has been editing the bi-weekly book page in Kathimerini, where he writes daily.

He is an editor and publisher's editor. He has been a permanent collaborator of the magazine O Politis (as well as the Biweekly Politis) since 1978 until its ceasing publication. Articles and translations of ancient Greek poems have been published in the magazines I Lexi, To Dentro, Neo Epipedo, Technopegnio, Galera, The Book’s Journal, Poiitiki, Chartis, among others.

Since 1980, he has published poetry books with Agra Publications: Algorythmos, The Excursion of Evdokia, The Panther Within, Signs of Lament, The Seer, Whenever the Plane Tree and Verbs (State Poetry Award 2010), as well as a volume of essays and critical reviews titled Perhaps.

He translated the Hellenistic Epitaph of Adonis by Bion of Smyrna, the poems from the volume Epitaphios logos: Ancient Greek epitaphs and the Symposiastic epigrams from the Palatine Anthology, all published by "Agra." He has also translated Aristophanes' Acharnians for the National Theatre (2005), Aeschylus' Agamemnon for the Agrinio Municipal Regional Theatre (2005), Euripides' The Trojans for the New World Theatre (2010), Euripides' Cyclops and Theocritus' Cyclops for the Athens and Epidaurus Festival (2017), Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae for the Athens and Epidaurus Festival (2018), and Iphigenia in Aulis for the National Theatre of Northern Greece (2019).

His poems have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Polish, English, Albanian, and Arabic. In 2014, as part of the "Greek Poets" series of Kathimerini, he had editorial responsibility for the volumes with the works of K. P. Kavafis, George Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, Andreas Empirikos, and Nikos Engonopoulos (introduction and anthology).

At Agra Publications, in the series "I Take Writing to Write... Essays on Folk Song," his studies When the Verb Becomes a Noun: "I Love" and the Vitality of the Poetic Language of Folk Songs (State Award for Essay-Criticism 2017) and The Blood of Love: Desire and Murder in Folk Poetry have been published, while the third volume of the series, titled Red Lips I Kissed...: The Journey of the Kiss and Love as Excess, is in preparation.

COVER ART: JOSEPH BEUYS, Beak, 1961

AUTHOR PHOTO: Christos Bokoros