We all wake up at the same time at home. Breakfast and departure to school. After doing some work outside the home, I return home to start working. My work is lonely. Translation and proofreading of my students’ assignments at Write Workshops. Sometimes I get tired of being alone at home and go to work in a cafe listening to people talking and laughing around me. Noises help me focus. But not today, I don’t have much time. I will work at home. I am translating a new book by Wu Ming, an Italian group of writers best known for the historical novel Ecclesiasticus, which covers the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period in Europe, with special emphasis on Thomas Minster’s peculiar religious movement. Their new book, however, belongs to a newer era, the Italian 70s, and has the strange title “UFO 78”. It was the era of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping, political reshuffling, but also the frenzy of a new generation of people from the secrets of the sky and the observation of “unidentified flying objects.” Reading and translating the book, I think that at all times a person has a need to turn to things that are beyond his limits, to experience reverence for cosmic secrets and the excitement of discovering hidden truth. Where is our reverence going today? What is our deepest search? Can turning to the past give us a clue to a clearer view of the present and the future? I think so because the nature of man and his inner needs always remain the same. That is why I love poetry and the historical novel: they are two high literary genres, thickening the threads of obvious and invisible processes, visible and invisible actions and desires of people, the destinies of human history, intertwined with our ultimate limits and our attempts to rise above them. As an archaeologist stands with excitement in front of a find that will be discovered centuries later, so I feel great excitement when, in a poem or in a historical novel, I bring to light a story, a person, with all desires, dreams. , his frustrations.

We all return home, some earlier, some a little later. We will finally get together, eat, talk about the news of the day, do our homework, watch a movie, take a walk. In the midst of all this, I will need to organize some things to do on the occasion of the release of my new book, Melanie’s historical novel The Greek Slave: texts to be written, some presentations, meetings with reading clubs. . The book is set in the early 19th century, a time when new ideas and hopes for a freer world, as well as wars, injustices, catastrophes and the holocausts, shook the world. The reason for writing the book was the real story of a young psarian slave Garifallia Michalvey, who was freed by a liberal American in Smyrna, brought to America and became a symbol of the Greek struggle. In my book, Carnation travels across the ocean and her fate is inextricably linked with the black slave Josephine. A dark storm of conflict is already raging between those who support slavery and those who fight against it, a confrontation that will come to fruition decades later with the outbreak of the American Civil War. Garifalia and Josephine, so different, but with such common experiences, will embark on an unprecedented adventure, drawing many more people into an unpredictable maelstrom of events. Josephine wants war, Garifalia follows her destiny, all the heroes are acrobats on the threshold of an era of uncertainty. When I was writing the novel and studying the history of that period, I felt that the Greek slaves of the Ottoman Holocaust could “speak” with the slaves of America, they could “speak” to all those who survived and are experiencing the horrors of slavery.

“Sometimes I get tired of being alone at home and go out to work in a coffee shop listening to people talking and laughing around me.”

Time to write. There’s a new writing idea that needs to start to take shape…

Anna Griva’s novel The Greek Slave is published by Melanie.