Live Encounters Greek Poets & Writers September 2026
Andromache When the Ice Melts, poems by Tasoula Karageorgiou.
Translated from Greek by Aristi Trendel.
Andromache[1] When the Ice Melts
If the ice should melt,
if the birds and forests disappear,
if the earth somewhere dries out and elsewhere floods,
what will truly become
of all that we have loved so much?
What will become of the myths?
Perhaps there will remain, I propose,
mythic forms — holograms —
ethereal visions and ghosts
floating above the ruins of the deserted earth.
Andromache, let’s say, standing upon the walls,
just before receiving her child, smiling through tears.[2]
Andromache in the palace, weeping.
Andromache holding the dead Astyanax.
Andromache afterward, a spear-won spoil
an Anatolian lady, slave and noblewoman
in the palace of Phthia.
Andromache forever majestic, a tri-dimensional image
wandering through the universe, calling to Hector:
“O beloved Hector, O my great love.”
Andromache When the Ice Melts, Kedros, 2024
[1] Andromache: In Greek mythology, the wife of Hector of Troy. After the fall of Troy and the killing of her son Astyanax, she was taken captive by the Greeks.
[2] The phrase “smiling through tears” translates the Homeric phrase δακρυόεν γελάσασα in the original (Iliad VI.442 ff.)
The Maidservant Of Hegeso [1]
And what if the craftsman
shared sorrow fairly between the two figures?
Memory he did not allot between them.
Who knows what became of the little maidservant,
once the earth had, at last, covered Hegeso?
I gaze at the sorrowful face
the knee inclined in submission
the hand holding the jewelry casket
(symbol of the futility of her mistress’s life.)
But even more I linger upon the long-sleeved tunic:
barbarian[2] attire and foreign dress.
(So she came from afar— a bird gone into exile —
and perhaps never returned to her distant homeland.
Now all that remains is the sculpted grief upon her face,
an honor to the fate of humble serving girls.
Like a fifteen-syllable folk verse for the bitterness of exile:
And if exile is death, then the refugee’s lot is Hades.)[3]
Clay Poems, Kedros, 2021
[1] Hegeso: An Athenian noblewoman depicted in a famous 5th-century BCE funerary stele,now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The relief shows Hegeso seated before a maidservant holding a jewelry casket.
[2] In ancient Greek usage, barbarian denoted the foreign or non-Greek other, especially one marked by language and dress.
[3] The final verse evokes the Greek fifteen-syllable folk meter (dekapentasyllabos), traditionally associated with songs of exile, migration, and loss.
© Tasoula Karageorgiou
Tasoula Karageorgiou (Alexandria, Egypt, 1954) is a poet, classicist, translator, and essayist. She studied Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and completed a doctoral dissertation in Classical Philology, supported by a scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY), on Modern Greek translations of Aristophanes. She worked as a philologist and as an advisor to philologists in Greek public secondary education. She has published ten poetry collections, translations of Ancient Greek lyric poets—including Sappho, Erinna, and Anyte—and works of literary criticism and essays. Her poetry has received two prizes from the Academy of Athens, and her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Arabic, German, Romanian, and Italian. Her collection The Metro was also translated into Italian by Gilda Tentorio (Il Metro, 2021). Her translation Anyte of Tegea received the 2026 Greek State Prize for Literary Translation from Ancient Greek into Modern Greek.