The Stranger

Melissánthi (ca. 1907–1990) was the pen name of the Athenian poet, critic, and translator Hebe Skandaláki, also known as Eve Koúyia- Skandaláki. Her large body of work, admired in its time, is less widely translated than those of her male contemporaries Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. Her early work, which borrowed from symbolism and high modernism, is religious, even mystical. It engaged with something we might today call “integral ecology”—an implicit understanding of the interconnectedness of humanity, ecology, and atrocity—alongside theological ideas around creation and destruction. Sensing that her poetry was out of step with mid-century intellectual culture, she stopped writing for a time and became interested in the writings of Carl Jung. The poems that grew out of this interest, like the one included here, were ontological rather than religious—monologues that grappled with some version of Jung’s shadow aspect of the self.