A loss of harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existential situation of modern man, one must live in exile of some sort, wrote Milosz Czeslaw.

In this new poetry book by Manolis Aligizakis, with the evocative title Marginal, the feeling of isolation and exile is repeatedly expressed, which can be caused not only by a disease (COVID) but also by the exiled person’s accent which makes it difficult for him to be understood which surely increases the sense of marginalization such person feels.

This can be seen in poems such as, “On the Ventilator,” which underscores exclusion, a quarantine that can be an exile, like in the poem “Marginal” in which life itself is put in brackets, banished to the margins living in the margins of time and space, outcast, the other.

Zita Muranyi, Hungarian poet, translator