(Mai White – Med, teacher, Western Australia)
Reading Probing the Firmament felt like entering a trilingual corridor of spirit and thought with the interesting combination of Greek, English, and Albanian intertwining in luminous dialogue. As someone born in Vietnam and now living and teaching in Australia, I found myself profoundly moved by the book’s negotiation of meaning across languages and faiths. Sofia Skleida’s original Greek verses are rich with metaphysical cadence and encounter their English transformations through her own rendering and find a second rebirth in Irma Kurti’s Albanian translations. The presence of Kurti’s voice expands the collection beyond linguistic function into a dialogue of sensibilities with a meeting of two women poets across cultures, harmonizing and occasionally diverging in rhythm and tone. Reading these poems was also an act of self-recognition, the tension between native language and adopted tongue, between inherited faith and evolving identity. Each poem offered a different shade of the same question that defines all cross-cultural writing in a way how the soul remains intact when language transforms. As a Vietnamese writer and educator who has long worked to promote literary exchange through The Rhythm of Vietnam and my work with Multicultural Press, I felt this collection speaking directly to that mission.
1/To start, I would like to examine the poems in terms of multilingual poetic tone and cultural mediation. Sofia Skleida’s Probing the Firmament positions itself as a trilingual meditation on human consciousness and spiritual transcendence, mediated through Greek, English, and Albanian. The work’s polyglot presentation is both a challenge and a promise because it seeks to preserve the sonorous, metaphysical quality of the Greek while allowing the English and Albanian versions to circulate within broader linguistic communities. This very ambition exposes the inevitable friction between languages. The Greek originals saturated with rhythm, theological nuance, and classical suggestion often lose their tonal gravity in English. Metaphors flatten into exposition. Irma Kurti’s Albanian translations, by contrast, recover some of the intimacy lost in English, infusing the verses with Mediterranean warmth and tonal immediacy. The triangulation of languages creates a layered dialogue across borders of Greek reason, English abstraction, and Albanian tenderness though not without asymmetry. Rather than harmonizing perfectly, they reverberate against one another revealing how meaning mutates across linguistic boundaries and how translation itself becomes a poetic act of faith rather than fidelity.
In I Miss You and Postscript, the trilingual framework exposes the instability of intimacy when transferred across languages. I Miss You moves with tender repetition, the phrase “You are here but I miss you” circling absence through affirmation. In Greek, the syntax flows with natural cadence, whereas in English the repetitions sound slightly deliberate, like echoes through translation. This slippage enacts the poem’s very theme: the impossibility of complete presence. Postscript, in turn, reflects on disappearance in metaphysical language. The English translation’s clarity contrasts the Greek’s lyrical complexity, transforming a meditation on existence into philosophical prose. The closing lines “But we are not living at the moment? We don’t hope for making things better?” become more interrogative than elegiac, as though the act of translating has stripped the lament to thought. Across these two poems, Skleida and Kurti reveal how meaning shifts from embodied feeling to reflective abstraction, suggesting that translation is both bridge and filter between emotional immediacy and intellectual insight.
I miss you…
You are here but I miss you …
I miss the pulse of your breath
Your life-giving aura that causes storms
The smile of your eyes that delights the inconsolable soul
You are a grain of sand that exists everywhere
In my memory
In my mind
In my sigh
In my optimism
In my grief
In my faith
In my infidelity
In the ascension of the soul
You are my sunrise and my sunset …
(From I MISS YOU)
I notice through the lattice of the mind, of the soul
Mismatched forms sometimes move spasmodically,
sometimes with a strong willpower
Sunlight diffuses and is trapped in a mixture of suspended dust
Sad faces out of nowhere
Disobedient children playing hide and seek in broken yards
A promise, a sky and a postscript at the door:
Don’t look for me,
I don’t exist
In fact, I have never been
and if it happens by mistake
it will be a mistake of the moment
But we are not living at the moment?
We don’t hope for making things better?
What is hope?
Isn’t life aided by the faith, love and wisdom of poetry?
Unbridled thoughts again in the evening …
(from POSTSCRIPT)
2/Moving to the next part, it’s important to mention thematic architecture of probing the soul and the cosmos. The collection’s architecture gestures toward a metaphysical map of the soul’s encounter with the divine. Skleida moves from introspective meditations such as Think… and Diagnosis to cosmic declarations in On the Soul and Axis Mundi, creating an implicit journey from the interior to the transcendent. Thematically, memory and longing link with notions of spiritual awakening and moral renewal. Her preoccupation with the soul’s immortality and the redemptive power of suffering reflects a philosophical continuity with Greek Orthodox mysticism. While the Greek texts often work into measured ambiguity, the English translations lean toward declarative moralism. The reader senses moments of overt abstraction of emotional delicacy conveying deeper significance. Despite this, the trajectory from pain to serenity, from temporal disquiet to metaphysical calm, retains coherence. The collection functions less as a set of isolated lyrics and more as an extended meditation on the human spirit’s negotiation with mortality, love, and divine purpose.
Two poems: Spirituality and On the Soul form the metaphysical nucleus of the collection. Spirituality traces the fragility of existence through paradox, “The impossible of the expected, the suddenly tragic.” The poet articulates fear as awareness of the finite. The imagery of “touching things you left behind” fuses material memory with transcendence, turning grief into contemplation. On the Soul moves further into theological territory. The “unmanned ship” becomes a metaphor for human isolation, also a vessel toward divine direction. The English version renders the tone solemn and devotional, preserving the Greek’s sense of spiritual discipline. Both poems enact Skleida’s central tension between mortality and aspiration. The soul in her cosmology is a living current that negotiates the boundaries between faith and intellect. Through their pairing, the reader witnesses a gradual ascent from fear to purification, a movement emblematic of the book’s cosmic inquiry.
I’m afraid
The impossible of the expected
The suddenly tragic
The possibility of the impossible
The unexpected desolation of our nature
I Touch
things you left behind while struggling to darn your perishable coat
To awaken the wonders of the world
To spread tentacles of compassionate thinking
I hope
in the vindication of incorporeal bodies …
(from SPIRITUALITY)
3/Let us now turn to the next theme that is stylistic and formal choices in English, the poems display a consistent philosophical diction that oscillates between lyrical reflection and didactic assertion. While Skleida’s Greek syntax holds a ritual cadence, the English versions sometimes feel translated rather than organically conceived, particularly in their reliance on repetitive structures and archaic phrasing. Still, certain poems such as Calmness and Divine Waves achieve a meditative rhythm that mirrors scriptural or liturgical chant. The imagery alternates between the corporeal and the ethereal: clouds, dust, blood, and light form a symbolic continuum of transformation. Enjambment is used sparingly, which limits fluidity but reinforces solemnity. There are occasional lapses into prose-like expression, they serve to clarify moral and spiritual reflection rather than weaken it. The English text, while less musical than the Greek, remains faithful to Skleida’s intent, to craft poetry that is both spiritual testimony and intellectual exercise.
I would like to choose two poems for this part. Lovely Contemplation and Axis Mundi exemplify Skleida’s control over philosophical language within verse. Lovely Contemplation begins with the arresting contrast “Orthodox times, Unorthodox challenges,” encapsulating the moral tension between tradition and modernity. The poem unfolds through long syntactic lines that test the border between lyric and meditation. The English version retains the solemnity but introduces a measured rhythm that recalls liturgical chant. Axis Mundi demonstrates an entirely different stylistic register. Its allusions to Dante and Virgil ground the work in classical and theological intertextuality. The English translation, while more prosaic, maintains structural precision: the listing of “continuous concentric circles of self-purification” mirrors the Dantean descent and ascent of consciousness. Both poems reveal Skleida’s stylistic duality, mystical abstraction coexisting with intellectual rigor. Her English diction, though less musical than the Greek, creates a disciplined stillness that invites meditation rather than emotional excess.
Orthodox times
Unorthodox challenges
Souls groan heavily in well-placed heartless bodies
The roles are well done
After all, they train in the vortex of everyday life
Their collars are collared
Where are you? I can’t see you
I address to you
To conceive the perfection of the cosmic optical illusion
Of the original passion that gave life to the dawn of the universe
Eternal unanswered questions
internal monologue expression
Since the potential interlocutor is still dance on the rope…
(from LOVELY CONTEMPLATION)
Herculean task is the struggle of self-knowledge in the noisy cities
The hell of Dante with eloquent lyrics,
sung and artistically imprinted thousands of times
Virgil and Beatrice mark our footprints
in the terrestrial and underground passages
through continuous concentric circles
of self-purification…
In the final analysis
is the least that often saves us from the disaster
We see ourselves in a Platonic reflection
Declining shareholders
Without colors and smells
Clavichords for advantageous sale …
(from AXIS MUNDI)
4/Having established this, we turn to intercultural and feminine perspectives. Skleida’s poetry emerges from a philosophical and pedagogical background that imbues her work with disciplined introspection. The poems articulate a distinctly feminine consciousness grounded in compassion, endurance, and moral clarity. Figures such as the mother, the teacher, and the mystic recur as archetypes of generative power. Parthenon Light stands as a hymn to maternal divinity, blending the sacred and the sensual, while Incorruptible Heart celebrates humility and altruism as ethical virtues rooted in womanhood. These texts situate the female experience within a universal moral framework, yet they retain a Mediterranean sensibility shaped by faith, memory, and cultural continuity. Rather than aligning fully with global feminist poetics, Skleida writes from within the inheritance of Greek orthodoxy and classical humanism. Her vision is not oppositional but reconciliatory: woman as vessel of grace, intellect, and compassion. This cultural rootedness both limits and enriches her universality, making her work a dialogue between the particular and the transcendent.
In Parthenon Light and Night of Luminescence, Skleida crafts a theology of womanhood that bridges Greek myth, Orthodox spirituality, and human empathy. Parthenon Light venerates the maternal figure as both biological and cosmic origin, her life-giving aura merging the sacred and corporeal. The poem’s tone in English is devotional but assertive, locating feminine divinity within everyday endurance. Night of Luminescence reimagines youth and memory through the lens of mentorship and legacy. The poet addresses an absent “you,” likely a student or fellow woman, and transposes the private loss into a cosmic register: “The stars that will shine and send messages of your reciprocal love.” The English text glows with elegiac restraint, transforming grief into gratitude. Together, these poems constitute an intercultural hymn to woman as creator, teacher, and transmitter of moral light, a vision at once Greek in reverence, universal in compassion, and unmistakably feminine in tenderness.
Ηowling wind shakes your soul,
penetrates it
It’s the miracle of divine creation and inspiration
Called maternal instinct
What nourished you
Woman and mother
Tireless companion and nurturer of emotions and rebirth
Fighter of life
Stable companion and sustainable resource of cell replacement
Unforgotten
Glorious and holy
You vibrate our universe
You constructively disturb our thinking
You move our self-reflection
You inspire with modest motives
You give unconditional love
You care bloody wounds
You fill with gold-embroidered stars our daily life
You strengthen the Virgin greatness and compassion …
(from PARTHENON LIGHT)
Our youth is in action tonight
when magically the light of purity adorned our lives
When we were sailing carelessly in abysses of bliss
And whispered, but loudly we were shaking the universe
with our liveliness
I am fascinated, you know, by that innocence
The lovingly attractive rejoicing we felt every time
we splashed in the pool of our childhood memories
And now the separation
The execution,
the cold blood solitary departure
But you are not alone
The course of our frozen thinking follows you
on your transatlantic celestial voyage
The dazzling smiles of the souls you gave life
The glance and smiles of your students
you crowned with inexhaustible knowledge
The stars that will shine and send messages of your reciprocal love
The eternal firmament of the earth
that will send over your humanitarian greatness …
To you our beloved …
(from NIGHT OF LUMINESCENCE)
5/Within the landscape of contemporary European multilingual poetry, Skleida’s work occupies a distinct space. It resists the fragmentation and irony characteristic of postmodern verse, returning instead to unity, clarity, and ethical purpose. The trilingual format situates her alongside writers who embrace linguistic multiplicity as a mode of cultural diplomacy. Yet her poetic stance is more metaphysical than experimental. She aligns less with eco-poetry or diasporic poetics and more with a renewed spiritual humanism that recalls Ritsos and Elytis while extending beyond national identity. The fact that Probing the Firmament is self-published through Youcanprint both underscores its independence and complicates its academic reception. It positions the work in a borderless literary space, where scholarly visibility depends on linguistic accessibility rather than institutional endorsement. Still, the collection’s intellectual rigor and moral vision earn it a legitimate place in discussions of twenty-first century European spiritual poetry.
Diagnosis and Contemporary Man situate Skleida within a European moral and philosophical lineage that resists fragmentation. Diagnosis transforms the metaphor of illness into a study of spiritual contagion. The imagery of “bleeding performed with a sacred ritual” merges body and faith, reminiscent of Eastern Christian mysticism. Its closing plea, “Save, Lord, your people,” reintroduces communal salvation into private suffering. Contemporary Man, by contrast, operates as a secular catechism. Through anaphoric antitheses “Good or evil, ignorant or knowledgeable, atheist or godly”, the poem maps the ethical confusion of postmodern subjectivity. The English version sustains rhythm through balance rather than melody, revealing moral inquiry stripped of ornament. Together, these works resist the irony dominating contemporary European verse, reaffirming poetry’s role as philosophical witness. Skleida’s engagement with both confession and critique positions her not as avant-garde but as a custodian of moral clarity in a fragmented age.
You surprised me …
your look
your shadow
The one that has been following me for so many years
It lurks my steps
my every thought
Enters my every cell to remind me of your strong being
Bleeding is performed with a sacred ritual
Invisible but visible in the eyes of the soul
Intangible, but the essence a constant pilgrim
Lustful, but denied as a preservation of the inner healing
Recurrence is not provided by the prescription
Save, Lord, your people …
(from DIAGNOSIS)
Internally I meditate
Synonymous and antonymous searches and existential dilemmas …
The modern man,
great teacher Socrates,
is in truth
the only animal, which ponders, judges,
observe very carefully or is out of date?
Uncertain or sure?
Good or evil
Charlatan or honest
Ignorant or knowledgeable
Atheist or godly
Innocent or guilty
Demure or shameless
Ethereal or chameleon
Sensitive or unmoved
Inglorious or glorified
Steadfast or unstable
Unscrupulous or temperate
Babbler or discreet
Arrogant or humble
Immoral or moral
Unacceptable or receptive
Unarmed or in good faith
Unconscious or compassionate
Respectable or pathetic
Late lamented or forgotten
Indigenous or foreigner
Unpatriotic or patriotic
I hear you whisper bitterly:
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing”
“Unknown, indeed, are the counsels of our Lord!”
(from CONTEMPORARY MAN)
6/Shifting our attention to the next aspect of poetic sequencing and thematic progression. The structural progression of the collection invites reading as an allegorical pilgrimage. Beginning with introspection in Think… and Diagnosis, the poems ascend through stages of emotional and metaphysical awakening toward transcendence in Destiny, On the Soul, and Curriculum Vitae. This sequence mirrors the rhythm of spiritual initiation: recognition, purification, illumination, and union. The recurrence of English titles such as Calmness, Divine Waves, Timeless, and Incorruptible Heart forms a lexicon of transcendence that underlines the book’s spiritual aspiration. While not every poem seamlessly advances this journey, occasional thematic repetitions dilute the cumulative power, the overall design reveals a sustained commitment to moral evolution. The arrangement achieves an equilibrium between personal revelation and cosmic vision, transforming private reflection into collective prayer. Each poem thus becomes both a fragment and a reflection of an evolving philosophical totality.
7/The mythopoetic register of Probing the Firmament derives from Skleida’s deep engagement with Hellenic symbolism and metaphysical allegory. Terms such as Parthenon Light, Axis Mundi, and New Creation anchor her poetry in a continuum that fuses classical, Christian, and universal myth. Her symbolic language oscillates between abstraction and embodiment, between the sacred geometry of the cosmos and the intimate textures of human emotion. In Bleed and Lovely Contemplation, visceral imagery of blood, memory, and divine revelation intertwine, bridging corporeal suffering and spiritual insight. The English versions convey these ideas with clarity, though they occasionally flatten the incantatory density of the Greek. Even so, Skleida’s symbolic lexicon remains coherent: light, soul, and heart operate as recurring emblems of transcendence. Her mythic sensibility situates the human within a cosmological order, reaffirming poetry as the means through which thought, language, and faith converge. In this, Probing the Firmament achieves its most profound claim, to make multilingualism not a translation of words, but of spirit.
By the end of Probing the Firmament, I realized that Skleida and Kurti together have created a poetic dialogue and a form of spiritual cartography for every translation becomes an act of renewal. Their collaboration keeps linguistic difference and allows the reader to sense how emotion and faith can survive movement between tongues. Across its seven layers of reflection from metaphysical inquiry and feminine consciousness to mythopoetic transcendence the book invites us to experience translation itself as devotion. My own reading shaped by the distance between Vietnam and Australia became a conversation with their triadic world. Through this encounter, I understood more deeply that the task of poetry, like that of teaching or translation, is to keep meaning alive as it crosses boundaries. The trilingual resonance of Skleida’s vision and Kurti’s interpretation reaffirms my long-held belief that literature communicates and redeems. In that sense, Probing the Firmament feels like both a gift and a reminder that to read across languages is to rediscover the shared breath of humanity.
