I don’t make a distinction among memory, understanding, dream and prophecy.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer interviews Filitsa Sofianou-Mullen about Prophetikon

If you had to describe this book in 30 to 50 words, what would you say?

This book is a book of seeing, of seeing anew events, people, myself. In this way, it is a way of understanding life and the importance of the other and of duality but also of oneness. It is a book of giving a modern twist to old, inescapable myths.

These poems place the reader in particular geographical places – both real and imagined. To what extent are these poems “poems of place” or informed by the place where they were written?

Let me begin by telling you that I have lived for long periods of time in three different countries: Greece, the US and Bulgaria. And I have travelled a lot mostly around Europe. Each place leaves a mark on me, one that has to be recorded somehow. Many times the places blend together in my memory or in my dreams. For example, in the poem “(Kolchis)”, I did have a dream of myself looking at a tree from a window in my university in the US, but it was the same tree that in reality I had seen in a field in a village in Greece. And thus the association with the Jason-like wonderment at where one’s shoes are, where things are, where one belongs. I suppose this blending is natural, at least I accept it as such.
Then, of course, there is my obsession with Greece, the land of my bloodline. It’s not the land of my ancestors because I come from Greeks of the ancient diaspora. All four of my grandparents were refugees from Asia Minor, specifically Istanbul and its environs. They came to Thessaloniki in 1922. My parents were born in Greece, but I was born in Germany, and my son almost born in Bulgaria (where we have been living for the past 10 years). So, Greece is both something relatively new for my family, but also our identity, in that Greekness is both a presence and a longing. And thus it has strong mythical dimensions for me.

So, yes, my poems are redolent of the smells, the sights, the words, the memories of specific places: Patmos, where my husband and I spent our engagement trip; my grandparents’ yard in Kalamaria with the green iron gate and the stoop where I sat with my grandmother, the sea just five blocks from that yard, the church that my mother helped built, the city of Thessaloniki itself with its long history, so modern and so old at once. I cannot escape thinking about places—as we cannot escape living on this earth.

“In this poetic journal, one can discern two exquisitely interlaced voices: the mythical and the mundane. They appear in ever-varying combinations, and the effect is that of the fugue: the repetition and multiplication of motifs leave one with the sense of unity and variety. Without being ostentatiously ornate, Sofianou-Mullen’s poems defy minimalism and, as Keats would put it, ‘surprise by a fine excess.'”

-Lubomir Terziev

Talk about the structure of the book.

I ordered the individual poems chronologically (with only two exceptions: the first and the last pieces). But even at the outset I had determined that they would be 33 in number; then I would stop. And that they would be set in seven mythical days. I know this numerological signification is quite a cliché but setting out like this helped me know that the beginning would have a definite end, that there would be this sense of completion. The poems themselves changed in scope and specificity, from pure imagination to a resurrection of memories, but I see this as a natural evolution of the specific book. Because in my mind prophecy and memory are closely linked, because time is not a continuum but simultaneity differently perceived. At least this is how I approached these concepts in this book.

Why did you choose to include under the poems the dates on which they were written?

The dates are as significant for me as the poems that they generated. Or, perhaps, they are important because these poems were born then. I wanted to remember everything about how these poems came to be—where I was, what time of the day or night it was, what month or day of the month. Perhaps there is some discernible progression of mood from winter to spring in the poems but I had not thought of that before, until now. This was like a poetic journal for me—people write in their journals, why not write in the form and essence of poetry?

Prophetikon seems like a perfect title for this book. How and when did you come up with it? Did you have other titles in the running?

I wrote the first poem in Blagoevgrad—I was on leave from teaching that year and spent most of it in Greece, but came back to Bulgaria for a visit in December. I was sitting in my armchair and was looking at how the evening lights outside reflected on or changed the shadows on the wall and the first poem sprang up. I wrote it down immediately. And I said that this is like a prophecy and promised to continue writing and call the book Prophetikon. Although for a while I contemplated whether the title sounded too pretentious, I stuck with it, primarily because I was writing for myself and did not think into the future of my labor as a printed book.

Were there prophecies that you decided not to include in the book?

No, I had decided to not hold back, to not censor myself (although I was tempted to exclude one of them). Writing this book was the longest streak of intellectual and emotional freedom I have felt so far.

Have any of them come true – in either the physical or emotional sense?

One of them came true in the physical sense. Other poems were less prophecies than visions of how our world (and my personal world) can be interpreted. For example, Greece has experienced many riots over the recent past, so visualizing one more riot is not so difficult. What is significant for me, however, in this case is how to come to terms with the political situation without condemning or disparaging but with understanding. And understanding means creating a prototype that encompasses all possibilities but in a simple way. So, in the case of “(Urban Riot)”, I could sense the uneasiness in the air and could tell there would be more riots because the prototype of riot is out there and is simply fulfilled again and again in linear time.

So, in essence, I don’t make a distinction among memory, understanding, dream and prophecy. Prophecies do not come from a vacuum—for me, prophecy is the interplay of imagination, desire, and understanding. Like a dream. What has already happened is prophecy fulfilled.

I’m curious about the voice of the poems. I find it very impressive. Did it come subconsciously – the rhythm, the abundance of monosyllabic words, the internal rhyme, the inspired use of future tense – or did you consciously adopt this style and edit the poems to achieve a uniform sound?

Indeed, at first the voice came subconsciously, uninhibited, like a necessity from within. This must be what the ancients called the muse, or oestrus, like the sharp unexpected sting of a gadfly. Then slowly the persona started to take shape, in affinity with other seers or poets, mentioned in the introductory piece (Persona). And it eventually emerged as Pythia, the female oracle, but in a modern guise. This transformation of the persona came slowly, but the voice behind it was there from the beginning. As was the internal rhyme and alliteration. My love for monosyllabic words is also natural, primarily because, as a teacher of literature and writing, I am aware of the vastly different connotations that the Germanic and Latinate words have in English. The genre of poetry benefits more from the latter than the former, I think. The future tense was there from the first poem, but in some instances I had to choose between future, past and present, to create an overall mix of time, to indicate the ambivalence of prophecy, or poetry, in relation to this dimension.

One more thing about the voice—to write consistently, with a purpose, I had to enter an emotional, mental world different from my daily activities, and yet in the midst of my daily activities. When I sat down at my computer, early in the morning or late at night, it was like I donned a mantle of otherness, a costume to play a part, but at the same time that was me, that side of me that had these words inside for so long and finally these words had to come out in the open. It was like a sacrament that I performed as I wrote, hence the consistent voice in the book.

What was your editing process for these poems?

My editing was light—a word here and there, at the most an addition of a line, or the elimination of one. I am a great believer in editing (especially academic writing) but also in the pre-editing that happens mentally even before the fingers touch the keyboard or the pen. It happens very often (as it did in this book) that a poem buzzes around my head almost complete for days before I write it down. That’s what I mean by pre-editing—and that’s why I did very little editing at the end. But there was a lot of buzzing in my head, an adrenaline high that kept me awake the night (or in the case of “(Patmos)” the three nights) before a poem was born.

What does it mean to you to have the book in both English and Bulgarian?

I love the Bulgarian language and I wish that I spoke it and wrote it better than I do. I love the sounds, the depth of meaning of the words. Like with any translation I am sure that my poems have been given another life in the amazing translation by Lyubomir Terziev, my friend and colleague. They are, indeed, his poems, too, although he is too humble of a person to accept this. There are also people of Greek descent in Bulgaria who might be intrigued by seeing the work of one more Greek in Bulgarian. One of those people is a third cousin of my father’s who lives in Sofia and to whom I have sent a copy of the book. From a larger perspective, I am honored to have the book available in Bulgarian. In my estimation, Bulgarians are highly cultured and appreciate literature with a sophistication and sincerity that are enviable. I hope my book will bring pleasure and new visions to a Bulgarian audience.

Talk about the experience of having your work translated?

I sat down with Lyubo, my translator, for only a few hours at the beginning of the project and then a little bit at the end for clarifications. This is primarily because I have blind trust in him. He is a poet himself, an admirable one, and a very erudite man with a deep love for the word. I am thankful to him for the long time he spent on my poems and for embracing them with such love. In the end, I consider the dual language edition as our joint project and the Bulgarian version more as his poems than mine.

You write in Greek and English. How do you manage this? Do you have most of what you’ve written in both languages?

I tend to write poetry directly in English and prose in Greek, though this is not always the case. Recently, I have made it a point to turn my most important (to me) pieces in both languages. But this is hard going. The thing is, I am a different person, I have a different voice, in each language. And I am a different person with each thing I sit down to write. This means that at the outset I have to be firm with myself and decide, even if the decision is less conscious, that I will write now in Greek, or in English. Once that is settled, the voice finds itself.

Do you plan to publish this book in Greek, as well?

I am halfway through translating the book in Greek. I have asked a couple of bilingual friends to give a shot at translating a few of the poems, because with each translation another poem comes out, very different from the original. With myself as my own translator, I have the freedom to change each poem to a greater extent, without feeling as bound to the original. Then I will have to see which of the three translations is more pleasing, more nuanced. Yes, this is an opportunity for an experiment, a kind of game for me.

In what language did you write your first poem? What about your latest?

I wrote my first poem in Greek when I was seventeen—my best friend then and I would sit down together in our living room and write as a kind of contest. My second one (or was it the third one) was in English, though. Right after John Lennon got shot and it was a short poem about him. My last poem was in English, again. It’s part of an exciting new project that I started last spring and hope to complete this year.

Have you ever tried writing in Bulgarian?

Not yet, although the idea is intriguing. I believe that when you have less vocabulary in a new language, perhaps the outcome is more unexpected and enjoyable. I will try it to see if this is true.

Prophetikon by Filitsa Sofianou-Mullen is a poetic journal of 33 pieces spread out over seven mythical days of vision and memory. In real time, the book was written in the period December 2011– April 2012. 32 of its 33 entries bear Roman numerals and tentative titles in parentheses, showing thus their connectedness to each other but also their autonomy, thematic and stylistic.

Filitsa Sofianou-Mullen was born in Germany in 1962 and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied English Philology at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and continued her graduate work at Kent State University in Ohio, USA. She has taught at Kent State, at the American College of Thessaloniki (ACT) and for the past ten years at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG). Prophetikon, published by Scalino, is her first book of poetry. Others of her poems have been published in Voices from the Attic (the Creative Society series at ACT, which she co-edited for three years), in Fly in the Head (AUBG’s creative writing magazine), and various online and print series. She writes in Greek and English.