Launch reading by Ana Blandiana with her translators Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea
International dual language launch reading by Ana Blandiana with her translators Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea celebrating the publication of Five Books.
What do you think about when you see
An archangel covered with soot?
Pollution in the stratosphere, of course.
And anything else?
That habit angels have of
Sticking their noses into all and sundry.
And anything else?
Stoves that get clogged up in spring
And start to spit out smoke.
And anything else?
Oh, now I’ve got it –
An archangel covered with soot
Could also be one
That’s set itself alight –
Forgetting that angels cannot catch fire.
*
Surmise
Is the flower free
If the date it has to bloom
And the date it will wither,
The perfume
It must give off
And the colour it has to show
Have all been precisely set?
The flower says yes.
And the petals say yes, each one,
And the stamens, and the tiny threads of pollen
And the leaves, and the slender and fragile tower
Of the neck. Yes.
But then, what is freedom? I ask
Somewhat flustered, already surmising the answer.
What a question! Amazed
The angel blinks its petals in reply.
*
Hide-and-Seek †
There go the churches
Gliding across the asphalt
Like sailing ships loaded with horror,
The steeple is the mast
And its sails are swollen
With the constantly
Shifting wind.
So shifting, in fact, that
If you don’t watch out
You could at any moment be run
Over by a church
Gone mad,
Scurrying to its hiding-place.
† Allusion to Ceaușescu’s plan of urban ‘reconstruction’ for Bucharest which implied the destruction of the old centre. Many old churches were dis-placed or demolished. [Tr.]
*
River with One Shore
Death, on whose bank I’m sitting,
Is only a momentary interruption,
Long enough to decide
To step into the ice-cold water
And tread across the slippery rocks
To the other shore.
I’m not afraid of the crossing,
Only of the moment when the bank
I’ve left behind disappears
Downstream as if death were a river
That can only have
A single shore.
*
You Never See the Butterflies
Haven’t you ever noticed how
The butterflies share glances above us?
Or the signs the wind makes
To the grass when we walk by?
If I suddenly turn
The branches are stone-still
And they wait for me to go away.
Have you noticed that the birds are setting?
Have you noticed that the leaves are going out?
Have you noticed the whispers
Growing behind us
Like moss on the north side of trees?
And the silence that meets us everywhere…
They all know something that is hidden from us.
Maybe we’ve been condemned
Maybe there’s a price on our heads.
At night the stars shine nervously
When they hear the rustle of the husks of corn.
Contents List
14 Introduction
Four poems from the journal Amfiteatru (1984)
39 Children’s Crusade
40 I Believe
41 Limitations
42 Everything
Predator Star (1985)
44 Soot
45 White
46 Definition
47 Twins
48 You Move
49 Icon
50 Through the Air
51 He Who Lives
52 Lullaby
53 At the Other End
54 Insomnia Sun
55 Belatedness
56 Inflation of Birds
57 Inward
58 March 25th, 1942
59 If
60 Courage
61 Nec Plus Ultra
62 Amber
63 The Weight of Snow
64 Union
65 Chimes of Ice
66 Shelling
67 How Easy
68 Sky or Earth
69 Exchange
70 On Principle
71 The Spell
73 The Scream
74 Towards the Mountains
75 My Hand
77 Questions
76 The Father
78 Remember
80 Body
81 Wind-blown Star
82 Soothing Song
83 A Blinding Animal
84 41
85 Compromise
86 Continuation
87 Axis
89 Footprints
90 My Eye
91 Outburst
92 Fir Tree Boughs
93 Harvest of Angels
94 The Bell That I Hear
95 Shore
96 Letters
97 Dance
98 Scale with a Single Pan
99 Tale
100 The Number of Birds
101 Wail
102 Surmise
The Architecture of Waves (1990)
105 A Trap
106 Architecture in Motion
107 Signal
108 Earthquake
109 Passage
110 My Forehead
111 The Hour
112 Dies ille, dies irae
113 Cold Casting
114 The Path
115 Tableau
116 Of Love
117 Omphalos
118 Worms on the Move
119 Sleep
120 Subject
121 Unseen
122 Hide-and-Seek
123 A Chain
125 Motionless
126 Refrain
128 Systematisation
130 Nameless (1)
131 Witnesses
132 A Hell
133 Also in a Mirror
134 Full Moon
135 Exasperation
136 Beneath the Insults
137 That Old Point
138 To Strike
139 Gara de Nord
140 Plains
141 The Statues
143 Model
144 In Motion
145 One by One
146 Alone
147 Measure
148 In Its Scabbard
149 Molecules of Calcium
150 The Art of Dying
151 Earthly Sounds
152 Fallen from Heaven
153 Helter-skelter
154 Inscription
155 Head Down
156 Through Non-Being
157 A Straight Line
158 Countdown
159 Loneliness
160 A Less Charged Atmosphere
161 The Tomb Unburied
163 More and More
164 Open Bird
165 From Chaos
166 Torn Void
167 Colosseum
168 Clocks on Rails
169 Like Foam
170 Nameless (2)
171 Charred Remains
172 Nameless (3)
173 Rhetoric
174 Like Waves
175 Clio
176 Glue
177 Thermometer
178 Wooden Language
179 Obsession
180 Ballad
Clock without Hours (2016)
183 White on White
184 Times
185 Nostalgia for Paradise
186 And So on and So on
187 Pause in Writing
188 Heretic
189 From Mirrors
190 Flow
191 One
192 This Beautiful Time
193 At a Pavement Café
194 Disease
195 Transplanted Church
196 In a Wound
197 Different Languages
198 Similarity
199 Green Icon
200 Silent Film
201 I was afraid
202 Nothing Further
203 That Year
204 Always Led
205 Web
206 My Horses
207 Curved Tiles
208 Symposium
209 Joyce’s Tower
210 Interior
211 Trees
212 In the Shade
213 Beneath the Snow
214 Dissolution
215 The Right to Shade
216 The Mirror within the Mirror
217 Facebook
218 Message
219 River with One Shore
220 Sketches
221 Not Afraid of Loneliness
222 Residues
223 A Game
224 Why?
225 Overdose
226 Mândrămărie Blue
227 Parnassus
228 Question
229 Angels in Their Pockets
230 Final Exam
231 Insectarium
232 An Hourglass without Sand
233 Rape
234 Birches
235 Like Birds
236 Between the Seconds
237 Sonnet
238 Clock without Hours
October, November, December (1972)
241 Do you remember the beach?
242 Wait until October comes
243 Bitter Body
244 What Good Is Joy?
245 By the Gliding of the Moon
246 About the Country We Come from
247 I won’t remember any more
248 If we killed one another
250 I fall asleep, you fall asleep
251 Brightness of Death
252 My shadow is afraid
253 The one in me
254 Do I have the right?
255 Swing
256 Alabaster bodies of poplars
257 Two Suns
258 With a Soft Despair
259 While I Talk
260 I Only Have to Wait
261 Mother
262 Light inside Myself
263 Teach Me to Darkly Burn
264 You have no shadow
265 Crowned with poppies
266 You Haven’t Forgotten the Language of Plants
267 Our place
268 You Never See the Butterflies
269 If you don’t want to come back again
270 There was a time when trees had eyes
271 It’s tall and dark in me
272 I was taught
273 Lament in solitude
274 All the Peace in the Universe
275 Among Leaves That Are Almost Cold
276 Couple
278 Without you
279 Why not come back to the trees?
280 You Are the Dream
282 I had just begun to fear
283 Which of Us
284 Sometimes I dream of my body
285 I’m blinkered
286 The fog coming in
287 Alone and Without Any Thoughts
288 Oh Your Body
289 Close your eyes
290 Exile
Variations on a Given Theme (2018)
292 I knew it was just a suit
293 I remember wondering once
294 Between the spirit and the body
295 Lately my life seems like a novel by Agatha Christie
296 Time, at times
297 ‘I have a pact with the mirror,’ you said
298 It’s as though we met in a bubble of soap
299 They sway, they sway
300 If there were microphones in houses
301 Without you
302 When I say, ‘to those in their graves’
303 What if we decided to dream about each other
304 I’m afraid of the darkness
305 I don’t understand
306 ‘Where is the Gentleman?’ the old women asked me
307 What splendour suffering gives us
308 Now I pray to you
309 What is love?
310 It isn’t true that ‘Every Angel terrifies’
311 I suppose you can also see it now
312 I’ve thought about what I’d like to tell you
313 The leaves are falling…
314 Is it easy to be dead?
315 Voices muffled by leaves
316 Everything begins with death
317 ‘I’d like for us to die together’
318 Just as unwritten thoughts
319 I often wonder if what you knew here
320 Why won’t the moon let me sleep?
321 Always
322 In the phone, your photographs from spring
323 Nothing stands still
324 Your smile above the TV
325 Just as somewhere in Africa
326 If you feel forced, as I fear
327 Do you remember when you buried the seeds
328 Sleep is as mysterious as a road
329 There is a law – the Babinet-Mayer law
330 I’m not certain you can hear the sound
331 Why instead of darkness
332 We’re alone
333 I don’t know how to pray
334 Every gesture of mine
335 On holidays I feel you closer
336 When I was small
337 They ring and ring
338 All of the questions
339 I’ve read a lot of books
340 Where are you, really?
341 Where do the hours go?
342 New Year’s Eve
343 Light on light
344 Snow!
345 The life in your diaries
346 Perhaps the word love
347 Into the abyss that suddenly opened in the sky
348 You can only die in the present
349 Our parents and grandparents died
350 Do you understand what it means
352 The Translators
Related Reviews
‘This is a collection that deals with change and its repercussions; the affects that can’t be seen coming and the way that large scale change can utterly de-centralise a person.’ – Matt MacDonald, Glasgow Review of Books [on The Sun of Hereafter]