Write to me,
Maria
A bird flies through the garden. I prefer to think it’s a good spirit flitting through the room. A witch, set free.
Daphne comes into the office, rubbing her eyes. Those eyes don’t belong in her face: they’re adult eyes, serious, red, surrounded by wrinkles and folds.
“Don’t do that, sweetheart.”
“Why not? It makes me see colored circles. Do you know any stories about colored circles?”
I tell her whatever comes into my head. That the colored circles are soap bubbles coming from a witch’s mouth, because her little apprentice witch was very mischievous and tricked her into eating a bar of magic soap.
Daphne’s mouth drops open. When she’s surprised, she looks just like her mother. “Soap? That little witch is even naughtier than I am!”
Yes, the apprentice witch is mad at all the other witches, she wants to take away their magic so they turn back into people.
“But won’t she turn back into a person, too?”
Yes, she will. But she’s tired of living in caves and riding on broomsticks, she wants a simple life, a house with a yard, where she can sit on the grass and talk to the goldfish in the pond, and work the simple magic of everyday life — like whistling, for instance.
“And the caves?”
Well, the caves can become museums about magic, where we’ll put broomsticks and magic soap, and when the former witches buy a ticket to go in, they’ll feel a slight dizziness in their heads, but only for an instant, since they will no longer remember the time when they could do anything they wanted.
“How does the story end?”
Oh, but the story doesn’t end. Show me even just one person who will manage in the course of this life to visit all the caves there are.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Translation is always a work of collaboration, but this particular book is the result of a closer collaboration than most. Why I Killed My Best Friend is a coming-of-age tale rooted in a succession of particular historical moments. It is uncannily prescient of the current crisis in Greece, while also hearkening back to a series of earlier crises, from the exile of many Greek citizens during the dictatorship of 1967–1974 to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to the continual, internal ideological crises of the Greek left. The dizzying array of cultural and historical references in the novel kept me running to internet resources, to Greek historians, to countless friends in Greece and elsewhere, and of course to the author herself.
In addition to exchanging any number of email queries and responses, drafts and corrected drafts, Amanda Michalopoulou and I were fortunate to spend a week in residence at Ledig House in fall 2012, in the company of four other translator-author pairs working together in well-fed isolation. I am grateful to D. W. Gibson and the folks at Ledig House for providing this invaluable opportunity, and particularly to the other translators in residence — Neil Blackadder, Lisa Dillman, Tanya Paperny, and Joel Streicker — for the many conversations and inspirations small and large. I am also immensely grateful for Amanda’s close cooperation during that week, and for her eagerness to use this translation as an excuse to revisit and even revise the original itself. (Careful readers familiar with the Greek may notice some larger-scale changes than translators usually allow themselves; these were all made with Amanda’s consent and involvement.) As strange as it may be to dedicate a translation to the author of the original, I would like to dedicate this translation to her.
Other thanks are also in order: to my parents and brother, David, Helen, and Michael Emmerich, faithful readers and supporters of everything I write and do; to Evi Haggipavlu for the many meals and so much else; to Panayiotis Pantzarelas for never tiring of my questions; to Dimitri Gondicas, always. Thanks also to Chad Post at Open Letter for believing in this book, and to Kaija Straumanis for her careful editing. And a very sincere note of gratitude must go to the FRASIS program of the Greek Ministry of Culture, which in this bleak economic moment still believes that the contemporary literature of Greece deserves a chance at life abroad.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of five novels, two short story collections, and a successful series of children’s books. One of Greece’s leading contemporary writers, Michalopoulou has won the country’s highest literary awards, including the Revmata Prize and the Diavazo Award. Her story collection, I’d Like, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.
Karen Emmerich is a translator of Modern Greek poetry and prose. Her recent translations include volumes by Yannis Ritsos, Margarita Karapanou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Miltos Sachtouris. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is on the faculty of the University of Oregon.