TROY AVENUE 35A

Written by Katerina Gogou

Translated from the Greek by Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis)

Narrated by Kristine Doll

Greece

My house, just like yours

intrudes into the houses of others

since the roads are so narrow

and there are so many people

sometimes I feel we sleep in the same bed

since we are almost glued together

we use the same brush to brush our teeth

and we eat the same food

only when you go

you leave behind your dirty dishes

it can’t be explained otherwise

that the sink is always full

it doesn’t matter though

I do what I can

to show how much I love you

for this I put on the fake mustache

and I go out to the rain with a fan

that your children will laugh

only I beg of you don’t gossip about us

and leave my Myrto alone

she was born the way she looks.

Sad.

 

Katerina Gogou, was born in Athens on June 1, 1940 ,and died  October 3, 1993. She was a poetess, author, and actress. Before her suicide by pill overdose at the age of 53, Gogou appeared in over thirty Greek films.  Her book Three Clicks Left was translated into English in by Jack Hirschman and published by Night Horn Books in San Francisco1983. The Greek version of the same book was first published by Kastantiotis in 1978. Her poetry was known for its rebellious and communist content. As an actress, Gogou was known for lesser roles of rebellious, free spirited women. She won the first women’s award at the Salonica film festival. As a poet, she’s known for her antiestablishment poems and her anarchist ideals. Her poetry is filled with indignation and protest; however, her ideals and her wounded psychological state lead her to suicide at the age of 53.

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, Romania.