Editorial #1 | Lockdown (EN) | by Dora Psoma

Editorial #1 Lockdown

Written by Dora Psoma

English translation by Stavroula Giaritzidou

Thessaloniki, Greece. 23rd day in lockdown. Today, I left the house undocumented, without having even sent that stupid text message. Not that I consider myself a rebel. It just slipped my mind.

I walked around Navarino Square; the old familiar smell of freshly-baked crêpes had disappeared. I was wearing plaid pajamas and my pink bridal Chuck Taylors, yet no one looked at me funny. I waved at the poet Tellos Filis from afar, and I was just about to run and shake his hand, but such gestures of intimacy are long gone. This absurdity has become our new Covid-19 reality.

Lockdown, lockdown, lockdown: the word kept wailing in my head like a siren. How can anyone digest it? I instantly looked it up in the Macmillan Dictionary on my mobile. It refers to either the confinement of prisoners in their cells or the restricted access to a certain place. Only recently, a new lexical definition was added: “a time when large numbers of people are ordered to stay at home, either most or all of the time.”

I turned at Svolou Str., and slipped in Apellou alley, where a flat burnt down a few days ago. A moment of silence for our two neighbors who lost their lives in the fire. Near “ESPEROS,” Sirakian’s nut store, I stood still in front of a graffiti portrait of Bjork. She returned the gaze, herself behind an iron fence. Lockdown and absurdity. “There’s no logic to human behavior”: I steal one of her lines, and keep walking.

 

Pagan Poetry, Graffiti, Thessaloniki, 2012 by © Wild Drawing, photo: by Dora Psoma

I return home to write the first editorial for “The Translation Project”. The word “lockdown” is piercing my brain, but it won’t get the best of me. These are times of confinement, but words and images can – at least for now – circulate freely. It is our first week on this project. We selected these texts and images, confident that they stand up against the notion of confinement. Our sensibilities and ethics are not on lockdown. And we are certain that other people feel the same way.

Aisha Ahmad and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos are the original writers whose articles we have translated into Greek this week. The translated or adapted versions of the articles are accessible on our website both in written and audio form. 

Apart from words, I also spoke of images that will be hosted at TTP. For the latter, we would like to give warm thanks to the artist Rania Emmanouilidou. Her paintings, though not realistic in style, capture the dystopia we are experiencing with surprising realism. Once we have contemplated them feeling a little uneasy; today we absorb them with relief. They encourage us to face the absurd, and realize its capacity for mirroring reality. Meanwhile, they invite us to re-establish a leisurely pace in appreciating a work of art.

Finally, we feature a new work by Emmanouilidou, which was in fact created during the lockdown. I feel grateful for this painting, for its power to give shape to the absurdity of our times, and cast it aside.

 

 This is a marathon, keep reading.

*The English version of the editorial is dedicated to all my friends who live abroad and whom I miss very very much. Edoardo and Tatiana, Charlotte and Momo, Isa, Elena Z. and my dear brother Dimi, please stay safe! Not even a day goes by that I do not think of you…