There Is Also This Civil War Inside of Me

A Conversation with Zisis Ainalis

- Adam J. Goldwyn

Zisis D. Ainalis was born in Athens in 1982. A poet, translator, and essayist, his work has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Portuguese. He lives and works in Mytilini (Lesbos), where he is a member of the editorial group that publishes the literary magazine North-Northeast. He has published seven books of poetry: Electrography (2006), Fragments (2008), Michalis Tatsis—Holding up the Stake with the Hands (2011), Sheba’s Silence (2011), Mythology (2013), Desert Tales (2017), and Desert Monody (2019).

Adam Goldwyn: In some ways, Desert Monody, your 2019 verse collection, seems to be a continuation of your poetic trajectory. Like Sheba’s Silence, which uses the story of Solomon as a symbol for discussing other more modern problems, this volume also reaches back to the Bible, particularly the exile from Eden and the stories of early Christian desert ascetics. But it also marks a big shift—less political, less overtly concerned with modernity than, for instance, Electrography, and, of course, also in prose. What was the genesis of this volume, and how do you see it fit with what you’ve done before?

Zisis Ainalis: The genesis of Desert Monody lies in a decisive fact of my life: the birth of my first daughter, and it treats in a more or less hidden manner but one theme—paternity. The alterations in one’s consciousness that the birth of a child brings forward, the individual and collective meaning of paternity, and the difficult psychological proceedings that follow—these are the subjects that I wanted to treat. I think that this is a topic somehow neglected in modern literature.