On Chimera by Phoebe Giannisi, translated by Brian Sneeden. New Directions, 2024.

When writing about a book as sprawling and multi-faceted as Phoebe Giannisi's Chimera, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Giannisi herself offers us some useful thoughts on beginnings in "Transhumance I," a poem that appears near the end of the book and is dedicated to her two children. She invokes the Book of Genesis:

i.

In the beginning was the grazing
the pasture, sections of earth gathered extended

suffused from rain and the elements

eaten

by footsteps, the cursive of animals and humans

echoing

the valleys, streams, and summits beyond

brought back voices.

ii.

In the beginning was the field. (73)

Chimera is about grazing and fields, animals and humans. It is also about beginnings, language, the self and the other, wildness and domestication, the individual and the collective, ecology, the history of science, motherhood, theater, technology, myth, migration, the ancient past and the mysterious present. The book is a self-contained universe that explodes across a slim hundred pages, infinitely expanding and complete with its own systems of temporal and relational logic. It is densely layered, making it nearly impossible to perform the kind of neat textual analysis that traditional modes of literary inquiry would ask us to do. Nevertheless, since Chimera begins and ends with etymology, I will begin there as well.

Chimera begins by naming itself, offering us a series of definitions of the word "chimera" as it is used in modern Greek: the mythic she-goat, the hybrid animal, the volcano in Lycia, the self-deluding fantasy, and the botanical graft. Microchimerism—the condition of carrying traces of someone else's DNA, first observed in humans after giving birth—is also defined in the book's early pages, binding the concept of the chimera to the experience of motherhood. At the end of the book, more of the associative wordplay that directs Chimera's movements is revealed in a list of linked definitions: "tragoudia" (tragedy) - "tragoudi" (song) - "tragos" (goat). "Nomad" traces its origins and leaps across a homonym to find itself in a strange relationship to "nomos" (law). Some instances of wordplay in this list appear based on a relatively traditional mode of etymological tracing; while others, including the character "Goatself," play on purely sonic relationships [in Greek, "ego" (I) is homophone to "aigo" (goat)]. Even the Aegean Sea—whose waves ancient Greeks compared to jumping goats—gets its name from the animal.

Giannisi activates her language from its very root, every tendril lit up to reveal all that exists within and around it. Suddenly it's all connected: goat, sea, song, tragedy, Giannisi's story of the goatself ("aigedy"), the chimera. At the same time, these relationships that begin in language come to life within the book itself: animal converges with landscape, human merges with the animals that we use and consume, technologies are absorbed into the bodies and societies that use them, and voices that couldn't possibly inhabit the same place and time suddenly coexist with ease. The chimera, through its many meanings and the associative leaps they invite, generates its own linguistic and mythic orbit. These multiplicities and movements—across land, time, body, and voice—become Chimera's central organizing logic, crossing into and out of each other to produce a hybrid text so finely woven that it's impossible to distinguish its many threads.

Chimera takes as its core material Giannisi's three years of field research with the Vlachs, a nomadic people indigenous to northern Greece and the southern Balkans. Giannisi's interest in their goat herding practices, in particular, thrusts the animal into the poetic and linguistic center of the book. Several Vlach shepherds speak in Chimera, their voices appearing alongside a wide array of others, including a range of philosophers from ancient to modern, mythical characters, various European explorers, a narrator (presumably Giannisi) and their dog, and Giannisi's own mother and children, among many others. And, of course, Goatself, who feels like the poetic heartbeat behind the narrator's more familiar embodied voice. Even when speaking as a "self", Giannisi speaks simultaneously from more than one place.

What happens to a book like this one, so defined by polyphony and border-crossing, when it crosses into a new language? Brian Sneeden's English translation invites new linguistic slippages into Chimera's already slippery lexicon. As I was reading, I couldn't stop thinking about "swallowing" and "swallows", which fly like "flowers/ in the air" through the poem "Hymn to Swallow and Nightingale" (58), and whose return in later pages is a harbinger of spring. As they transition off their mother's milk, goats, like people, begin to chew and swallow and think for themselves: "after weaning/ she ruminates her food/ recalls it back into her mouth/ from the stomach to consider it again" (39). I think again of the many meanings of "swallow" in "Transhumance I," when a Greek idiom is translated in such a way that it reminds me of Kronos—a mythological figure who hears a prophecy that his son will overthrow him, and later tries to eat his infant son, Zeus, but is tricked into eating a stone instead:

–What does God cast down that the earth does not swallow?

...

–You cannot eat a stone, mother says

instead of

you cannot escape your fate (76)

Language does what it always does here, between the "swallow" (the bird) and the "swallow" (of the stone or of roughage): it moves, through clever word choice or happenstance, toward new pastures. Chimera's celebration of this sort of playful linguistic movement lends itself to this kind of reading—a reading in which we find connections everywhere, even where, perhaps, they are not supposed to be. Moving the text from Greek into English not only carries Giannisi's world into a new language; it also pollinates the edges of its own poetic ecosystem, adding Sneeden's English to the book's cast of voices. In the list of voices that appears at the end of Chimera, we find that “you” is included as one of the participants; and while a “you” does speak briefly in the book, the character itself remains ambiguous—it could be anyone—you, me, or someone else altogether. We each write in our own connections, get hung up in our own slippages.

Chimera is an open door that invites the reader into Giannisi's unique polyphonic universe. At the same time, it is also an open wound; a wound inflicted by the pain a mother experiences when separating from their child, whose DNA they will continue to carry forever. Beginning with a single word—"chimera"— Giannisi writes into this wound. The result is a book that is also an ecosystem, full of impossible crossings and alive with unexpected communions.

Fani Avramopoulou is a writer living in Philadelphia with roots in Baltimore and Athens, Greece. She is an editor at Essay Press and a regular contributor to Asymptote's "What's New in Translation" column. She has taught creative writing workshops at Temple University, in middle school classrooms, and in virtual space.