On Translating Phoebe Giannisi

My introduction to this poetry was a goatskin: a five-foot parchment, on one side of which are handwritten fragments of oral poems, interviews, folk song lyrics, and archives, and on the other a drawn map of central Greece with a curling line of text tracking the seasonal route of an Indigenous Vlach community of goatherders. Phoebe Giannisi’s AIΓΙΣ (“Aegis”) is one of several textile creations involving her poetry, and in places the transparency of the goatskin reveals the text of both sides in a way that embodies Giannisi’s “chimeric poetics,” a multimodal polyphonic process explored in the collection where these two poems appeared: Chimera (Kastaniotis Editions, 2019), the English translation of which is published by New Directions this year.

Not many of Phoebe’s poems seem to exist solely as poems, but as part of broader engagements with other mediums: performance, exhibition, the audio-visual, artifact creation, and more. As a translator, all of this is source text. Not so much the linear process we imagine, of moving from coherence to coherence—from printed page to printed page—but closer to what Karen Emmerich describes when she says “each translator creates her own original.” Other source texts have been: Phoebe and I’s conversations, our walks, usually under the constant megaphone of cicadas, the cities and sites and museums and reading spaces we’ve briefly shared.

One of the chimeras explored in Chimera, in mythologies both personal and official, is motherhood: the goddess Thetis dips her newborn son, Achilles, into the River Styx to protect all but his famous heel where her hand grips: “the place of the mother’s grip/is the mark of death.” Adjacent to the mythical setting is a biological one, where the rumination of goats, their digestive cycle—chewing, swallowing, then recalling food back into the mouth to be reconsidered—begins after weaning: “from the moment of separation/from the mother/they ruminate.” The mother protects, prevents, but incompletely: always the wound of the open world—and thought, language—remains, monstrous. 

It’s such a privilege to get to work with Phoebe and her poetry, and to have had the opportunity to translate these poems.