Stylianos Charkianakis, the poet, theologian and hierarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Australia, was fluent in many languages and had a powerful voice when he spoke in the public sphere, and yet there were elements from his past he was unable to express because they were incomprehensible and untranslatable to himself. Beyond personal sorrow, loss and traumatic memories of World War II, he also experienced what many migrant writers before him had faced – aphasia which literally means the loss of the power of comprehension of the spoken or written language. Aphasia is both a metaphor for not being able to use words to express a thought and a historiographic phenomenon that relates to the way Greek language texts could not be understood because the power to comprehend the Greek language had been lost, as researched by Sneja Gunew (1982; 1992; 1994), Anna Couani (1991) and Con Castan (1988; 1991). In Australia, he eventually published some of his poems in bilingual form, maintaining the voice of his homeland but offering a translated English version as well to share them with non-Greek-speaking readers. Poetry allowed him to overcome his own aphasia, as it gave him a language that enabled him to express ‘all those riddles which had terrified him’. It gave words to the silence that had muted him, given the symbolic and paramythic language he used was not his own but had pre-existed him. By drawing on the language of his people, who had gone through similar life struggles and had survived, he could articulate his own mixed responses in a veiled way. So even though he was attuned to Western thinking, given he was trained in Western philosophy and literature, aesthetically and spiritually he was drawn to the earthly wisdom of the peasant people with their cultural symbols, rhythms and aphorisms. By transforming the oral tradition in his poetry, he was able to reach a wide readership, celebrating in his own language while fulfilling his inner need to speak in his own voice and the voice of his people, with confidence.