Folio

The Stranger

Melissánthi,

translated by

Kathryn Maris

Moonlight cold

and untouchable

like mercury

cascades through

an open window

to the mirror.

Who is staring at me

in the glass

with my own eyes?

How many years

I evaded

their gaze

favoring the darkest,

obscurest waters,

rain-muddled rivers,

the cracking

windowpanes

of fractured sleep.

I heard my footsteps

as though they were

another’s

haunting me no end

in dreams

where I’m lost

in a labyrinth,

chased through sleep

in frenzied circles.

Now the moon wells up—

silvery rivulets

in the mirror.

The stranger emerges

over and over

out of the glass.

The Yale Review · “The Stranger” by Melissánthi, translated by Kathryn Maris

translator’s note

Melissánthi (ca. 1907–1990) was the pen name of the Athenian poet, critic, and translator Hebe Skandaláki, also known as Eve Koúyia- Skandaláki. Her large body of work, admired in its time, is less widely translated than those of her male contemporaries Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. Her early work, which borrowed from symbolism and high modernism, is religious, even mystical. It engaged with something we might today call “integral ecology”—an implicit understanding of the interconnectedness of humanity, ecology, and atrocity—alongside theological ideas around creation and destruction. Sensing that her poetry was out of step with mid-century intellectual culture, she stopped writing for a time and became interested in the writings of Carl Jung. The poems that grew out of this interest, like the one included here, were ontological rather than religious—monologues that grappled with some version of Jung’s shadow aspect of the self.

Melissánthi (ca. 1907–1990) was the pen name of Hebe Skandaláki, also known as Eve Koúyia-Skandaláki, an Athenian poet, translator, and critic.

Kathryn Maris is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The House with Only an Attic and a Basement. She is the poetry editor of AFM.