"Writing things down has made you forget everything.” …“The world was ordered magically before it was ordered socially.” Pauline Melville

To speak about “Greek-Cypriot poetry” as a category is problematic, unless we believe in a facile equivalence between nation, language and culture. It is only a useful category if we probe conjunctures and disjunctures within and outside nationality and locality and explore poetry as an interactive form of agency – a battle of the imagination - between an inert local substance and a volatile form of difference. Literary modernity in Cyprus (and elsewhere) came with the advent of British colonialism that brought the first printing press and first newspaper to the island. Cultural theorists have pointed out history of colonialism and print capitalism is crucial in understanding how the nation “form” has spread and dominated per iodization and universal schemes of identity. The narrator of Pauline Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist Tale (wresting the idea of literature from the exclusivity of writing and seeking magic’s revolt against European rationalism) states: "Writing things down has made you forget everything...all writing is fiction… “the world was ordered magically before it was ordered socially,” perhaps wishing to suggest literature and art as a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. Texts are not only produced orally or in writing, but ritually and ceremonially.

The conservative reterritorialization and overdetermination of ethnic origins in the postcolonial period in Cyprus (and elsewhere) emulates the emergence of European nation-states in the 19th century. Benedict Anderson has pointed out in Imagined Communities that the new 19th century European nationalisms (in contrast to the American creole nationalisms, which sought ways to emphasize their difference from metropolitan Europe), manifested a compulsion toward genealogy through language to give historical depth to their newness. In Cyprus we see this process in the construction of a literary canon by state publications and prizes, translations and anthologies as well as by organizations such as Cyprus PEN. One PEN publication (1983) boldly declares as its title 27 Centuries of Cypriot Poetry, and includes poetry in English translation poetry written in Greek from the Kypria Epi of Stasinos (7th to 8th century BC) to 20th century voices who were no longer living at the time of publication. It introduces some of the finest examples of Greek-Cypriot poetry -- if we are to speak of the construct -- including folk-songs like “Arodaphnousa”, the medieval love poetry in the Italian renaissance tradition, examples of the finest dialect poems such as Demetrios Lipertis’s “Black Eyes” and Vassilis Michaelides’ “The Nereid,” and more recent poetry including one of the most moving poems of war, Pantelis Mechanekos’ “Ode to a Turkish Boy.” One of the problems with the anthology - and many others like it dealing with contemporary and living poets and constructing the idea of (Greek-)Cypriot poetry - is its attempt at a certain self-mystification, Eurocentric design of identity of unbroken tradition, narrowly defined cultural frontiers and unawareness of its own translatability, i.e., the national as ghetto thinking , and the “folk” as state policy. As the canonized and recently deceased Kostas Montis (1914-2004) asks in some of his “Moments”: “Which “state” sirs, which state?/we’re walking on successive piles of states.” and “The flags are very noisy today/perhaps they got them out willy-nilly form their basements/ and they’re cranky.” (my translation).

At this disjuncture of the island’s culture, we would be claimed by the unrecognizable imperative of ‘border thinking,’ departure from the national and arrival to somewhere - wherever that may be - which involves a new poetry and poetics of the image, the imaginary, the imagined as social facts and as political and ethical moves displacing the mono-logic and seeking the dia-logic in translocation and translation. As Lysandros Pitharas says (writing in English) “and I poke my tongue/into the hole of my history/and wriggle my toes in the damp sand, beyond the cafeteria,/and observe that I can’t see this green line, I just can’t see it../

Translation is ultimately to metaphor, to carry across, lay oneself open to surprises, inculpation, contestation - connecting with the creatively effective past(s) and the creatively effective Other and others. Andriana Ierodiaconou says in one of her poems: “Swallows fly to green days directly, without hesitation/we have been walking for years now and the sea has forgotten us and become a word (my translation).“ and in another poem “Just as the ship/we saw on dry land.” If a new discourse it to be found, one might want to look for poetics in disjunctures, rather than continuities – put our tongues in the cracks rather than in periods and authors – insist on the non-linear relationship between departure and arrival so that the arrival is not to a particular end but the process of cultural translatability and memory.

Translation is both practice and metaphor –- it is to metaphor, to be carried across, be remembered by the sea. Ultimately it is an encounter with border thinking, an expansion of the form of the nation through an intimate listening and finding the wave to engulf the (land)scape in an initial and inner diversity that the outer form of the nation excludes. The translational perspective on culture and history exercises a powerful critique towards omnipotent individual textual practices through their deterritorialization by focusing on the tension of borders. Poetry is ultimately found (not lost) in translation, in the thermodynamic energy, the erotics and entropy involved in the lag between the source becoming reception and the reception source. To make oneself subject in discourse is to subject oneself to another non-symmetrical with oneself. As suggested in a poem by Tonis Melas “The Steamer,” (included in the above-mentioned anthology), it is feeling oneself as part of the groan of the steamer traveling on foreign seas. This may be troped as the vibration unfurling in the hollow of one’s body and echoing in the sea.

While we have been engaged in a critique of the nation “form,” as Cyprus moves into the supranational through EU accession, poets are presented with the challenge of seeing through (perhaps by hearing marginal shamanic voices) the hegemony of Eurocentrism and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. We may recall here as a note of conclusion that Comparative Literature, for all its antinationalism and transcultural humanist aspirations, embodies these contradictions in its foundation as a discipline. This is often associated with the Istanbul seminar of the 1930s and 1940s, which included such figures as Leo Spitzer and Eric Auerbach. Auerbach, writing from the borders of Europe, lamented his “Istanbul exile” in his now much discussed after word to his classic Mimesis. It has been pointed out recently by Emily Apter that Auerbach (who unlike his colleague Spitzer did not learn Turkish) found himself in good cosmopolitan company. The after word and its fetish of exile marks a disjuncture in the birth of comparative literature. Paradoxically born of Kemalist nationalism eager to import European cosmopolitan culture, and is in turn marginalized by it – at least as it is articulated in Auerbach’s seminal work. The disjuncture may have an enabling effect for border thinking for those who creatively explore it.