PASCHALIS NIKOLAOU completed his Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia under an Onassis Foundation scholarship. Articles on aspects of translation studies and especially on the relationship between translation and creative writing have appeared in journals and edited volumes, as well as reviews, translations and poems in The London Magazine, MPT, Notre Dame Review, Parnassus and The Wolf, among others.
With Maria-Venetia Kyritsi he co-edited Translating Selves: Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures (Continuum, 2008) and, with Richard Berengarten, the Selected Poems of Nasos Vayenas (Anvil 2010) – a volume shortlisted for the Criticos Prize.
Paschalis Nikolaou currently lives in Corfu, where he teaches literary translation at the Ionian University.
No, you’re a dark chamber. And in your middle: small rivulets, and those hurried breaths.
The camera’s shutter is no shield. Nor will the winds protect you. The ancient flute has slipped away from these shores, and has now become a massive tunnel underground; a hadron collider. How else, since away from the sea, metaphors can only subside (inland, it is forests that hide and house our desire). Yet under this sun, souls and marble remain immobile, one; just as the three yellow months will always be divided, like the beaks of birds.
August 15: Assumption of Mary. Some of the very first translations, remembered.
And there’s this photograph, of a hillside village in Chios; it was taken during the Middle Ages. Nobody knows how.
Untitled, 2013
On the smallest of islands:
a train station.
Line one goes east, always.
Long ago line two ran into the sea
and now lies submerged –
a double helix of rust and coral.
A blue-green carriage on line three,
has never left the station.
Poetry in this post: © Paschalis Nikolaou
Photo: Aishwarya Subramanyam
Published with the permission of Paschalis Nikolaou