MELANCHOLY STORY

Written by George Theoharis

Translated from the Greek by Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis)

Narrated by Bill Wolak

Greece

There is a lighthouse on a deserted jetty

and a bench in olive oil green color under it

bitter olive oil green the color of longing

a lonely bench on a lonely jetty

under the most lonely lighthouse in the Universe.

If a desperate man sits on it

he may hear, in the language of the creaking wood

the story of the sparrow that perished

there where the water turns into salt

and of the perch that leaned its colorful body

on the seafloor and died

when they discovered the perfect dead-end

of the love between a bird and a fish.

George Theoharis was born in 1951 in Desfina, Greece. He worked all his life for the chemical industry. He has published five collections of poetry and a book of historical research about the slaughter of the populace of Distomo in 1944; for this book he was awarded the National Literary Award for a Chronicle — Report in the year 2011. Since 2014, he has edited five Poetry Anthologies. He has contributed frequently to the newspaper Book Press. His work has been translated in French, English, German, Spanish, and Albanian. He’s a founding member and manager-editor of Emvolimon, a literary magazine which was awarded the National Literary Award for the year 2014. He took part in the Commission for National Awards for Children’s Literature. He’s a regular member of the National Company of Greek Writers — Poetry Circle.

Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) is a Cretan-Canadian poet and author. He’s the most prolific writer-poet of the Greek diaspora with over 70 books published in more than a dozen different countries and in eleven different languages. He was recently appointed an honorary instructor and fellow of the International Arts Academy, and awarded a Master’s for the Arts in Literature. Born in the village of Kolibari on the island of Crete in 1947, he moved with his family at a young age to Thessaloniki and then to Athens, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Sciences from the Panteion University of Athens. He served in the armed forces for two years and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked as an iron worker, train laborer, taxi driver, and stock broker, and studied English Literature at Simon Fraser University. He has written three novels and numerous collections of poetry. His articles, poems and short stories in Greek and English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, United States, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Australia, Jordan, Serbia and Greece. His poetry has been translated in Romanian, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Serbian, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, languages and has been published in book form or in magazines in various countries. He lives in White Rock, where he spends his time writing, gardening, traveling, and heading Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company which he founded in 2006 with the mission of publishing literary books. His book of translations entitled George Seferis-Collected Poems was shortlisted for the Greek National Literary Awards, the highest literary recognition in Greece. In September 2017 he was awarded the First Poetry Prize of the Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival in Craiova.