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Eleni Stecopoulos
Post Modern Greek
mother’s agraphon
logo
dia
ameno
agra phone
nekrozoa
nekekrrkkkrya
resurrection sung
snapped cervical
passim
language vaginal
further f u r t h e r f u r t h e r f u r t h e r
Areté cross arrêt
repressed by this continuo/m)ance
expector
bloody exegetic
leeRAAAAASfonvakeeeEeetrhhh
le momo donaki
smyrnic unconscious
haded vowels
rot do you rant
nosography
nostalgie de la boue
autochthonic
autocheir
metonym for suicide
me me autoneis
don’t bother me
PSellism
PPShellenism
half, hachure, hazard, haj
stichos stave
voir dire wired ear
metaforage
the bird’s eye in perpetuo
truck with the dead
didn’t emigrate
not assimilable
from this displacement passport sunken mouth
cheironomia
quarter bleat
scotomantic
darkness derivative
of rust and liver
the agon darkness lights
oneirocritic
apparition in this orphanage
translation
enacting descent
the keel of gesture
dig up the mother
murder
in foundations of the king
my key into dreaming
her error
count and cry
I wrote this piece at a time when I was particularly
interested in etymologies and dictionary play. It is as much a rejection of the
classicist qualification “modern” as it is an imagining of a “postmodern” Greek.
Greek is still conceived of only in terms of antiquity, still read and valued
only as elite jargon, the language of science or philosophy. But abstractions
in one language (logos, aporia, telos, parousia, etc.) are ordinary expression
or demotic in another; koine rather than coin. Denying the coevalness of Greek
denies its multiple lives. A poetics of translation fights such reification,
pulls up the roots. Greek to me here is about reading itself, cipher and cipher,
the foreign(er), Artaud’s ideolect . . . traveling languages.
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