Time Stitches starts with a shape poem:
to al
l those play
ing
hopscotch wi
thin
the gaps οf his
tory
Shape and font are important in this blooming tapestry stitched together of poetic fragments (I hesitate to call all the texts finished poems), culminating in a page-filling cross titled “claidheamh mò,” which apparently is Scots Gaelic for “A sword, too.” Yes, now I see it: the cross that I saw earlier is more like a sword. The contents of that poem talk about men in masks approaching with swords. These must be the reformists who are out to murder the Catholic cardinal who is holding out in his Scottish castle. And those eyes shifting shape? They could be the reader’s eyes, who are “ready for the tournament,” which is presented as a kind of a slide show through history.
The introduction to the book helps a lot to make sense of where and with whom we are seeing in the events. Hang on, here we find a brief anchor in 1919, in which the story is told, in cursive script, by a poor Cypriot boy from the east of Cyprus. According to the book’s introduction, the speaker is the poet’s maternal grandfather.
Then we jump to 1669, and obviously, we are with a totally different speaker. After some further reading, we find some earlier time markers and different locations, such as 1492 and Christopher Columbus’ American landing, and the opposite perspective of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma. The fragments speak of violent encounters between cultures and religions that seem to be inbuilt and expected.
Aside from the shape poems, of which I’m a fan, I admired the gothic enlarged first letter of each poem. Some words are emphasized in gothic script as well. The English translation is published side by side with the Greek original, so a quick comparison convinces us that translator Peter Constantine has done a dexterous job on this.
Some fragments appear on the right side of the page that seem to be reflections by the poet, such as this:
nomads
IV
eternity is a child
playing dice; the child
is king
I found these big thoughts less compelling, even though I appreciated their moments of pause and their invitation for us to think: What is going on here? Are we children playing dice with time or is time playing with us? An interesting clue in all this also the poem, seemingly spoken by the Cypriot boy, but in a more adult, wiser voice, that envisions an armed enemy emerging from time:
we would watch the enemy out
in the depths arriving from their
travels in time with their weapons
With her Cypriot ancestry, Kefala would appreciate the idea of sudden unfriendly invasions, as this Mediterranean island’s history is saturated with them, the last one by Turkey only in the recent past. The eastern side is still occupied by Turkey, which of course sees this differently.
In any case, many Greek Cypriots fled to the west, while Turkey settled their area with Turks from the Turkish mainland. It’s maybe too obvious to point out, but the Greens and Turks also represent different religions, although culturally they might not be so far apart. As the grandfather narrator relates, when he was a boy and Cyprus was still a British colony, the Turks and Greeks had no trouble cohabiting on the island. Soon, though, after the grandfather’s poem about good neighborly relations, we are served a fragment about the Trojan horse.
What the fragment is doing there is a good question, but it’s tempting to read it as a political comment on what happened in Cyprus; which, by the by, also illustrates how our interpretation of current or more recent events is influenced by what we know of history, and vice versa. That surely is one of the main points this book wants to make.
Another theme that runs through the collection is that of victory. Interestingly, the victors of history are not the conquerors who live in gilded pages about their accomplishments, but “some blusters and blunders that / roam as nomads through the / gaps of history.” We aren’t told exactly who or what the nomads are supposed to be. They aren’t just refugees who have to move due to being displaced by war and forced resettlement— or in the case of the grandfather who immigrates in hopes of a better life, but unfortunately on his journey in 1939, just after crossing to Italy, World War II was declared. The nomads are also quite literally the untold defeats of history: “behind our greatest victories / hide our greatest defeats.” The nomads roam the white spaces in history: “where are you now / behind what silence might you be hiding?” The unknowable white silence encompasses the Holocaust, nothing less:
evil
Auschwitz-Birkenau
vast terrain
inarticulately white
and untranslatable
who will light
the night within us?
Gradually, I came to understand that what the poet proposes will fill the gaps is a common language, which is poetry. The poems about the grandfather’s travel plans to England are enlightening. It turns out that his brother-in-law’s invitation to stay with him in the UK is not enough for acceptance. “… he tells me go away / and learn and come / back when you’ve learned good / English.”
Whether poetry, and also love, another floating idea, will work in all cases to distinguish between friend and foe is doubtful, however. If the Spanish conquerors would have spoken native languages, would they have been seen less as “barbarians?” “there was no other solu / tion at hand there was no oth / er choice and they decided to / acquiesce, to welcome the / almighty barbarians.” If we go back to the other instances of violence in the book, a common language does not prevent them. Even the grandfather as a boy already falls victim to a rough prank which gives him a head injury.
In all, there were still loads of questions that remained when I shut the book. I enjoyed the exhilarating experience of having to puzzle together a story and create my own interpretations. With poetic language and rhetoric that are sparse and simple, and easy-to-imagine imagery, the series of intriguing vignettes mix history in a filmic kaleidoscope that made me reflect on humanity’s grandness as well as its pettiness.
Time Stitches is published by Deep Vellum.
JACQUELINE SCHAALJE is a Translation Editor at MAYDAY.
ELENI KEFALA is a poet and academic. She holds an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a BA from the University of Cyprus. Her monograph The Conquered won the 2022 Edmund Keeley Prize. She is also the recipient of the State Prize for Poetry in her home country for the book Time Stitches (available in English from Deep Vellum) and served on the jury of the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
PETER CONSTANTINE is a literary translator and editor, and the director of the Literary Translation Program at the University of Connecticut. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900-2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W.W. Norton published in 2010. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov.