I began writing The King of Sorrow at seventeen and finished it at twenty-five. I then placed it in a box and left it there for over twenty years, before publishing it as part of a poetry collection in Greek. The King of Sorrow is written as a single, sustained voice rather than a sequence of separate poems. More precisely, it is not a poem but a poetic story whose movement does not aim toward resolution, but returns deliberately to the same images, phrases, and emotional states, tracing a circular path. Repetition belongs to the inner structure of the work, not to emphasis or ornament. The English version does not seek to reshape the original Greek work, but to carry its rhythm, weight, and silences into another language.
