Modern Poetry in Translation (No.3 2025)

Two sections from my fifth book It Reeks of Radio, along with their translations into Greek by Despina Pirketti, are featured in the latest issue of the illustrious UK-based magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. The issue, released late November 2025, bears the title 'The Antidote to Agony: Focus on the Poetry of Greece and Cyprus.'

Modern Poetry in Translation was founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, and for 60 years it has been publishing "the best new poetry, essays and reviews from around the world."

In truth I was somewhat surprised to be invited by guest issue editor, Jessica Sequeira, to feature, as the focus is on translations into English of poetry written in Greek. However, in the issue announcement Jessica writes the following: "Greek poetry, as perhaps all poetry, opens the heart to the beyond, to the liminal condition. The truth is that the idea of a national focus will forever be complicated given that migrants also form part of the tradition of a region, both those entering and those leaving (which is why a poem into Greek is also included, by a Cypriot poet residing in Ireland)."

The national label describing me notwithstanding, I'm tickled by the fact that my entry is the only one running in the opposite direction! Thanks to Jessica for seeking my work out and curating this glorious exception.

Thanks also to Despina for her translation, and for her generous translator's note that accompanies my entry:

In Christodoulos Makris's It Reeks of Radio (2023), there is a line, and a shadow thereof, from the first page in the poem, that brings together much of the poet's ongoing practice—poetry's visual aspect and raw materials, its sound effects and meta-poetic reflections—alongside a brutal intervention on a conventional approach that likes to keep poetry neatly in its lane:

    you are perfectly right in saying

    the documentary and the poetic    cannot mix

As if the strikethrough were not unsettling enough, Makris inserts distance between the two parts of the verse, further undermining the veracity of this statement. He makes a point of blatantly redacting sensitive information throughout. Or he opts for a palimpsest of two separate texts, the bottom one faintly discernible, tracing a double entendre: a Rumanian, partly gypsy female painter living in Paris, is considered for a radio talk on Refugee Year, even as the authorial voice calls for caution in dealing with "the deaf and the mentally deficient".

Can you really render all this into Greek? Oh yes, you can. Makris's fluency in both Greek and English allows him a conscious tolerance for cross-language gambits. Yet what is truly at work here is not bilingualism, but diglossia: Makris has already gleaned—as in intralinguistically translated—the insinuations of forcefully polite ephemera (his own description), rearranging a formal variety of old speech into snapshots that adumbrate ghosts of our digital age—all without adding a single word of his own. I am particularly intrigued by the cultural dynamics at play in the Greek translation of such Cypriot poets who, though native Greek speakers, write in English, embodying a latent bilingualism that can be read as an act of resistance against linguistic homogenisation.

This translation of sections from It Reeks of Radio is part of an ongoing proposal and project by Despina, pre-dating this issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, to translate the entire book for publication in Greek by a Nicosia-based press. More on that, if and when, in due course.

Overall this issue of MPT "features 30 selections of poems translated into English by contemporary poets expanding the linguistic boundaries of Modern Greek, Bulgarian and Arvanitika, reflecting on migrant crossings in the Mediterranean, female friendship, the transcription of orality, imagined plagues, the encounters of bodies, the AIDS pandemic, and artistic ruin, among other themes."

You can find the full list of poets translated for the issue and read Jessica's editorial on the magazine website, where you can also order a copy and/or purchase a subscription.