MOODS & WOMEN & MEN & ONCE AGAIN MOODS

An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Erotic Poetry

Selector and Hobbyist: Ruxandra Cesereanu

Branching-out Foreword: MARGENTO

MOODS & WOMEN & MEN & ONCE AGAIN MOODS
An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Erotic Poetry

Selector and Hobbyist: Ruxandra Cesereanu

Branching-out Foreword: MARGENTO

2014
 CONTENTS

Editor’s Note
Erotic, erratic, heretic… Foreword by MARGENTO

I. SONGS OF SONGS
Alexandru Mușina
Magda Cârneci
Liviu Antonesei
Teodor Dună
Cosmin Perța

II. DISCONTINUOUS BLUES

Angela Marinescu
Marian Drăghici
Romulus Bucur
Simona Popescu
Ștefan Manasia
Doina Ioanid
Iulian Fruntașu

III. SEMIOTICS OF EROS

Emilian Galaicu-Păun
Marta Petreu
Floarea Țuțuianu
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 Daniela Crăsnaru
Nicolae Coande
MARGENTO
Adela Greceanu
Miruna Vlada

IV. ERUPTIVE MYTHOLOGIES

Nora Iuga
Octavian Soviany
O. Nimigean
Radu Andriescu
Adrian Sângeorzan
Claudiu Komartin

V. LITTLE ENDLESS SUAVITIES

Adrian Popescu
Gabriel Chifu
Lucian Vasiliu
Nichita Danilov
Carmen Firan
Letiția Ilea
Mihai Ignat

VI. ANECDOTAL FIELDS AND PLAYGROUNDS

Emil Brumaru
Mircea Dinescu
Daniela Crăsnaru
Nichita Danilov
Mihail Vakulovski
Rodica Drăghincescu

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 VII. BRAVE INSOLENCES
Mihail Gălățanu
Dan Coman
Elena Vlădăreanu
Michel Martin

VIII. CYNICISM AND NEUROSIS

Ion Mureșan
Ruxandra Cesereanu
Daniel Bănulescu
Robert Șerban
Dan Sociu
Marius Conkan

IX. ADDENDUM WITH BUTTERFLIES

Șerban Foarță

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 Editor’s Note

The poems selected in this anthology (proposed as distinctive, provocative, extravagant, and
exotic) were chosen by a poet, not a literary critic. I want to be very clear on this point. In the more
than 20 years since the Romanian revolution of December, 1989, I have read over five hundred
volumes of poetry. I have read none of these books with the eyes of a literary critic, but rather
with the eyes of a fellow poet (a fellow poetess, if you will). I proceeded in the same way with this
anthology. In other words, I solicited poets for this anthology by instinct, not only when their
poems spoke to my poetic sensibilities, but also when they shouted out against them (I solicited
over seventy poets out of which forty eight responded). In this way, without renouncing my own
poetics, I hope to also represent fervent readers of Romanian poetry of every type, style, and fashion.
Of course, these poems are bound together by one central theme: love, the erotic, the sensual, etc.
Above all, I hope the American readers will be satisfied by my aesthetic choices and fully sated by
the poetic carnival offered in this book.

Ruxandra Cesereanu

(translated by Martin Woodside)

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 Erotic, erratic, heretic…

Erotic, erratic, heretic, that is what Romanian poetry is like. Madly erotic, yes, but in a way
that questions the meaning of life and history, and voices inescapable obsessions with death and a
secret order of the world. Wildly erratic indeed, but at the same time aware and allusive of various
patterns and established modes and traditions. Heretic in the most brazen and ultimate fashions
possible alright, but—in a literature whose early modern age started with a localized and folksy yet
theologically (“almost”) canonical verse translation of the Psalms—with a tacit and serene acceptance
of the historically pervasive Orthodoxy and a surrounding traditional culture of what Mircea Eliade
once termed “cosmic Christianity.”
If American poetry is elegiacally integrative or elegiacally ironic, Romanian poetry is an
inconsistent elegy for nobo(dad)dy and anybody, and an ironical lament for a community that has
never integrated itself into itself; if British poetry is metaphysical in melancholy and paradoxical (both
domestic and cosmic) ways, Romanian poetry is notoriously (anti)metaphysical by means of paradoxes
(and oxymorons) that speak of an immediate cosmos and an always foreign home; if French poetry
is, sometimes at the same time, jaded and empyrean, Romanian poetry is happy in hell and blasé in
paradise; if Italian poetry is hymnal, mystical, and painfully nostalgic, Romanian poetry misses a place
it actually never knew, with a mysticism that craves and can’t help prosaicness (while its songs of this
world always bear a touch of the angelic); if Spanish poetry is a folk chant with history as its backdrop,
in Romanian poetry, folklore is the permanent backdrop that frames and finally swallows history.
A poetry whose beginnings certain classic (the colossus G. Călinescu included) and contemporary
Romanian historians of literature would date, at least symbolically, back to Ovid—who spent the last
years of his life as an exile on the Black Sea shore among the Dacian Getae, and wrote there his famous
Tristia (which included a couple of poems, meanwhile lost, in the language of the locals)—has borne
throughout its history a sense of banishment, and also, to quote Eliade again, of the “terror of history.”
But along with all that, it has also manifested an apparently inconsistent, if not cacophonic and anyway
mordent kind of humor uncannily entwined with an Edenic spirit celebrating the simple pleasures of
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life. The combination made those “simple” pleasures every now and then reach extremes of Dionysian
ecstatic drunkenness and delirious “derangements of the senses.”
Such a deeply blended paradigm appears to be informed with geminated genes—the elegies of
banishment, as well as the balance of the satire-like persiflage would be part of the Latin DNA, whereas
the “terror of history” as well as the crazy, absurd, and carnivalesque laughter (along the road of worldly
excess) would stem from the Dacian/Thracian roots and the profuse Slavic and Levantine influences.
Even if the contradictions and paradoxes arising from such ethno-psychological stereotypes have
been brilliantly “uncovered” and analyzed by contemporary literary historians and critics, such as
Antonio Patraș—as in his recent revisiting of modernist critic Eugen Lovinescu’s oeuvre—the resulting
renegotiations of those common places reexamine the terms but acknowledge the importance of their
equation for our representation of our own cultural identity.
That complex legacy has recurrently generated a sense of nostalgia for the lost capital of the
empire—the Rome of the Romantics who deplored our decay or the Constantinople of the mystical
regionalists who heralded our (possible?) historical mission as “Byzantium after Byzantium”—or a
sense of marginalization and estrangement from the metropolis, say the Paris of our avant-gardists
and modernists, the cultural and literary capital of the 19th and early 20th centuries that they (Brancusi
and Tristan Tzara, and later on Ionesco and E.M. Cioran, among the most famous ones) eventually
invaded and reshaped with their demotic accent and their “primitive” or “cynically absurd” vision. It
was poetry’s job to reflect the covetousness and frustration of such generations and to enact the epic
of their survival or demise, of their impudent prophecies or whispered resignation, of their glorious
conquests or underground retreat and resistance, always in a frantic multifaceted confrontation or
flirtation with other cultures. Those “duels” and “dances” of mutual influences have spawned a pattern
which I would call “cultural eroticism.” Our interaction with other cultures (near us or, more often,
distant in time or space but symbolically so closely related to our own representation or expectations
of ourselves) has always come with such an emergency and fusion of metaphysics and physicality,
of the fantastic and the bodily, that our world has always “felt” strongly and ultimately erotic, and it
therefore “necessitated” a pregnantly erotic poetry. And conversely, as a great number of poems in this
anthology actually prove, Romanian erotic poetry cannot but be at the same time political, historical,
and inter/transcultural, and therefore, “culturally erotic.”
In contemporary times, during the communist nightmare and the still lingering post-communist
convalescence, the sense of banishment has been even more internalized and poetry has itself become
an oasis for writers and audiences alike, united in their perception of themselves as exiles in their own
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country and culture, to visit and live a secret life in. The poetry of both those who chose to stand up
against the regime and consequently spent up to decades in concentration camps or utter isolation and
those who went with the flow (but still avoided writing “socialist realism” poetry or complying—too
explicitly…—with the communist party line) has been a refuge where what was forbidden or censored
could be, allusively or not, uttered, and thus heard by at least a part of the general public. Some of the
poems in this anthology still bear testimony of those times, while others copiously take advantage of
being able to say or even scream what has been hardly ever possible to even whisper for decades.
Part of those territories recaptured by poetry after 1989 is not only the explicitly political, but also
the explicitly erotic. Alexandru Muşina (who opens the first section—“Songs of Songs”—within the
thematic and stylistic array in this anthology which the preface shall also follow below), the lamented
poet who passed away not long after the manuscript of this book was completed, was one of the
leading figures of the Generation 80, and also a prestigious essay writer and Creative Writing Professor
with an indelible influence on quite a number of representatives of the younger generation, presents
the American reader with two of his most moving erotic elegies. The vanity-of-vanities motif echoed
ominously by a title like “Niniveh” fuses explicit yet tender sexuality with a haunting even if self-
ironically qualified lament for oneself: “My sex entering amicable/ to yours. The scent of your skin,
baby-skin/ […] Hopelessly: your hand in my hand, your eyes/ close to mine, closing in…” Echoes
of the Sapphic (and then universal) refrain “(Maidenly things) Never again will I come to you, never
will I come” along with Rossetti’s Dantean epigraph “O ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!” and her
own lyric “A silent heart whose silence loves and longs;/ The silence of a heart which sang its songs”
accommodate the (post-)Romantic fascination with the exotic (the “Quinquireme of Nineveh from
distant Ophir” of Masefield, maybe) as one of Muşina’s trademarks is the overlapping of the erotic and
the exotic: “It will never enter, as you are farther/ Away than Nineveh and Babylon, than Fo-Tzien and
Cartagena,/ Than Tenochtitlan and Samara, than Ophir and Ultima Thule,/ Farther away than the air
surrounding me/ Than the blood throbbing in my temples,/ Than my utterly powerless hand, than my
sex/ Which can no longer even dream of you.”
Besides being an established poet, Magda Cârneci is also a well renowned art critic and cultural
ambassador. In her poetics she advocates for a comprehensive yet alternative trans-emotional and
trans-rational logic that will lead us, across the “verbal phantasmagorias” to our integral being—with
its conjoined sensorial and emotional, biological and spiritual, rational and mystical sides—and the
radiant thought thereof, going at the same time inwards and outwards, to resonate with the “cosmic
assonances.” And indeed, in her “Love Stories,” eroticism is both bodily and mystical, sexual and
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alchemical, intimate and cosmic: “The yellow angel enters the blue angel./ An azure flash! Oh, the
froth of light, the starry lace!/ […] The empress goes to her red and green/ emperor. To suck in the
drop. The drop of gold. Redemption.” Such mellifluous ethereal “assonances” will need their fleshier
counterparts, though, as the helter-skelter of worldly impudent “consonances” pile up in Joycean
catalogs of othernesses, “Nickel faucet, living spasmodic rope, corydalis root, flaming sword, rattlesnake,
bejeweled pouch, nickel-pickle, goddess’s trombone, cuckoo eggs packed in sacks, Tom Thumb,
spiky fig, soft dangerous jewel, John Thomas, little clapper, tassel, bulldozer, sweet tuber, ironsmith’s
hammer, dibble, cosmic thruster. Uh huh!” that will open the way for the ultimate fulfillment of the
self—“Scarified light in the dark,/ taking a leap into nothingness,/ this act into myself, this act into
yourself—/ you make me cosmic.”
Liviu Antonesei is a multivalent personality, extremely active as a major literary magazine
editor, poetry critic, political columnist, social sciences academic, and tireless blogger, storming
the Romanian social and literary life on so many fronts that people sometimes tend to forget he is
primarily a poet, and one of the most gifted that Romania has at present. I am one of the lucky
aficionados who is trusted every summer with the poems he writes—when he finally allows himself a
getaway from the hustle and the bustle of our crazed politics and he travels south to the Aegean, the
Mediterranean, or even beyond—all of them incredibly mellifluous sonatas (at times in classic Greco-
Latin meter, at others in irregular meter and rhyme) of love and nature that enthrall the reader with
their serene intensities: “She is more beautiful than death/ and her song has no end—/ we sink deeply,
luminescent/ is the night’s breadth/ as time ceaselessly and forever stopped.// She has a thousand pairs
of legs/ with a deep grotto, clearing and forest/ in the middle of each set./ But I, one by one, will pass/
in the sea, immersed in the rhythm.”
Teodor Dună is already a unique voice among the younger poets, but the editor did a great job
placing him next to the established Antonesei, with whose conquering marine visions now he seems
so consonant, although his scope ranges more in the soft expressionist spectrum: “as the salt murmurs
in the sea, so does your heart/ you take me in your arms, tell me we are equally cold,/ […] this night is
too ancient, you say” or “in sickness you move slowly like in a woman/ and your body is bent forward/
as if it did not know how to make its way/ through the fog. and you hear the wings/ ever closer,
beating against the skin as the skin/ settles over you like the first snow of winter.”
One encounters in such poems an absorbent Whitmanesque obsession with sea and death, only
that unlike the most central American poet, the Romanians internalize, swallow, inhale all as part of
their own inner “seascapes” and sometimes even their physiologies. Poets throughout this book and,
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as a matter of fact, throughout Romanian literature, tend in various contexts to ingest vast vistas, huge
political and historical dramatic events, other people’s lives or even bodies and beings, with a reflex so
relevant for a culture that has survived under so many oppressive circumstances and still couldn’t and
wouldn’t give up its inborn wild creativity and spiritual intensity.
Cosmin Perţa, a young poet the same age as Dună, is adept at writing poems and books that
will progress even after their being written and thus always remain open, sometimes even untitled
(there is yet no indication though of his awareness of Geoffrey Hill’s Without Title collection or any
apparent connection to that), literal “opere aperte” the poet will refuse to provide any categorical or
pigeonholing construct for. One of his peers once portrayed him as a Godless author of jeremiads, and
indeed, the Shulamith in the poems selected here, a lover somewhat contaminated with the temptress-
like side of Salome (“And now I reflect on beheading”), partakes in a mystical erotic union imbued
with poetically pagan and animistic prophecies: “And from now on, Sulamita,/ Only with the voice of
songbirds,/ Only with the voice of fish,/ Will our tongue speak.”
Angela Marinescu, a poet whose tongue has and will always speak, has been one of the most
important and most influential woman writers of Romania over the past 40 years. Her radicalism
permeated everything in her poetry, from the imagery and diction which besieged the literature with
an unprecedented neo-expressionist and ruthless physio-mythological feminism, to her conceptual
intolerance of clichés and stuffiness, and her facetiously ingenuous but in fact scathing (self-)ironies.
In time, her fierceness has made more and more room for the unpredictable complexities and surging
undercurrents that had always been there but were ignored by our calloused perception. And that is
how, unlike many of her abundant followers, Marinescu has maintained a freshness that affords her
the beautiful surprises, variations and switchbacks that have always jazzed her songs up, as indeed
is the case with the poems that open the “Discontinuous Blues” section of this anthology as well: “I
realize how pithless the madness/ of having skipped books/ skipped years during which I was nearly
sane, although I wasn’t,/ skipped any gesture of politeness so precise that I could have/ translated it
into erotic sign language/ or the other way round.”
Marian Drăghici, widely known as a major literary magazine editor, critic, and poetry scene
chronicler, is a poet of inexhaustible imagination, but also a seasoned writer who knows so much
better than just that, and thus masterfully bridles his imaginative drive to obtain even more ample,
powerful, vivid, “oneiric realistic” images that can swerve anytime so graciously from the cynically
comic to the heretically liturgical and from lyrical empathy to surreal and absurd inconsistencies or
mock trivialities. He can brilliantly fake the ingenuity of telling you a story/allegory “exactly as in
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fairy-tales or in poetry” but then end everything up with a smashing blow: “That is how I conquered
the empire: through the act,” which utterly breaks the conventions of allegory by redefining poetry as
“act” and not trope. But still the poet’s playful demon undermines even this apex of revolt, since the
act is (just?) that of intercourse.
While Drăghici jocosely argues with Beckett—“Perhaps nevertheless there is/ something more
real than nothingness, Mr. Beckett…,” most likely alluding to the phrase in Murphy, “Naught is more
real [than nothing],” which actually can be read both as “nothing is more real than nothing[ness]” as well
as “[at least] zero is more real than nothing”—Romulus Bucur playfully distorts and deflates oriental
philosophies: “you remember a friend having/ told you your karma/ gets entangled with that of every
woman/ you ejaculated into/ you’re thinking at/ all your partners/ and their partners/ and further their
partners/ it amounts to/ a whole www of sexual organs/ which you reduce decidedly/ to the world of
personal ads/ coffee drunk together…” Romanian poets do that “by nature,” engaging in dialogs with
both Eastern and Western cultures in ways that are either ironical or prophetic, or both. If the cliché
about Romanian culture being a bridge between the East and the West still holds, the poetry bridge
definitely turns out to be a really wobbly jute-rope one, hanging over the deep precipices of versatile
multiple identities and multicultural (sometimes even transcultural) approaches.
On the other hand, the red thread throughout this anthology being, as already stated above, a strong
penchant for absorbing and internalizing the large landscapes of history onto a personal/physiological level,
one of its most pungent realizations is again to be found in Bucur’s pieces: “my love is a tiny plant/ come up
from a drop of semen/ having landed into your womb/ it can grow too in a plastic cup/ with seaside sand/
[…] perhaps this is a way of offering you/ earth & water/ an empty beach at sunset”…
Among the freshest and at the same time most sophisticated poets and writers of the past two
decades in Romania and Europe in general, Simona Popescu defies all categorization in the most
seducing and convincing fashion possible. Although she made her debut as part of the Brașov Circle
she went on as a one-of-a-kind poet with no full-time allegiances; and although an established
academic, essayist, and critic, she has always preferred to challenge and subvert intellectual and
cultural assumptions in a more genuine and audacious manner than any actual outsider. Top of the
bill at international poetry festivals, when at home she lives a rather quiet withdrawn life, trusting only
the most persistent interviewers with her laconic corrosive comments, while silently producing some
of the most wittily playful and shrewdly learned literature of our time.
A mainstream maverick, therefore, Simona Popescu can write about love (as in “In Reply to the Old
Rogue”) while charmingly arguing with a silent but familiar old knave, a conflation of several poetic father
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figures—of which the explicitly mentioned “maître Pound” is most likely no more than a rather facetious
evasion (“old rogue style”…) and in fact an opportunity to follow the literary threesome pattern—and various
archetypal characters, Romanian and not only, as one may very well hear Falstaff in there interjecting all
the time “I will be cheater to them both,” “I am a rogue, if I were not…” or “a tame cheater, i’/ faith.” From
the old rogue, her poetry moves on to the ephebe and thus presents us with one of the most accomplished
portraits in contemporary poetry, an intersection of Greco-Latin references, Romanian grim realities,
modern music, erotic allurement or “deviation” fused with scathing ironies, classic and modern cadences,
and above all a madrigal of protean imagery and psychologies: “You’ll be away tomorrow […]/ They’ll drill
you/ almost kill you,/ you, lazy one, will learn about virtus and labor./ They’ll make a man out of you and
then/ you’ll be chased by Priapus in the fall of his life/ and by stupid languid wives…”
A young poet whose preferences fuse the grunge spirit with the Egyptian Patericon and whose
poetics is a poem-as-nature-even-in-the-messy-HUD kind of one is Ştefan Manasia, who combines
lyrical genuineness and withdrawal with an euphoric will to integrate everything and everybody, “them
agile and polite shop-clerk girls” included. An eastern swarthy Snow White thus becomes a teenage
Gypsy prostitute whose reversed-fairy-tale-like world with its graphic and crude details generates a
re-coloring/racialization not only of society, but of the universe and its cycles as well: “in her hut under
the bridge/ come day the night still lingers on the walls/ cockroaches are the souls of each/ one who’d
come drunk to do it anal.”
Doina Ioanid is the most consistent and established advocate and practitioner of the prose poem
among contemporary Romanian poets, as she deems the subgenre “the most suitable way of expression”
and the best way to prove that every single person is a “living chronicle” of their times, a poetics whose
predecessors she herself identifies as being Marc Chagall and the great Romanian postmodern poet
Mircea Ivănescu. Her mélanges of tender yet sometimes surreal testimonies and sentimental tableaus
of the quotidian have fascinated and circulated among younger readers in samizdat long before their
actual publication. A poetry that explores so shrewdly a woman’s inner labyrinthine life would interest
so much the more the Western reader as it unexpectedly echoes the worlds revolving “like ancient
women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots” of the Eliotesque “Preludes”: “We’ll go on loving each other,
until our skin falls apart, until we dwindle to gnomes good to frighten the children. Until our hearts
burst and shrink to scarlet hot lumps, tumbling forever all over the world, gathering grasses, lost
gestures and all sorts of debris.”
Iulian Fruntaşu, a renowned Moldovan statesman and politician who has also held important
positions in certain European organizations, writes an erotic poetry that is scarred by historical and
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political memories (the poet has also authored an Ethnic and Political History of Bessarabia) in which
love is at times a momentary escape from the demons without and within, and at others itself a most
serious menace: “I was telling you about love which lives inside us like/ a fox in the lair,/ sleeping,
though when it wakes, bites and licks the reddish blood.”
Another poet from the Republic of Moldova is Emilian Galaicu-Păun, a fascinating figure with
an impressive bio-bibliography, who opens the “Semiotics of Eros” section with one of his overwhelming
and unmistakable poetic cannonades. Galaicu-Păun works with the language on levels that enmesh
politics, history, and eroticism within vortexes of sprawling lines that both unmask and encode social
and psychological complexities: “the birthmark/ in the form of a tank along the flesh inside her shank
[…]/she wears the two/ wars—the left with the waricose vein! —through the very heart of town, graceful
and indifferent to time’s passing—zebra crosswalk of/ white days and black—under the oblique fire of
men’s glances”… A feisty Beat-like gusto (with a French poetry connoisseur’s accent and most subtle
preoccupation with form) is punctured by sardonic post-Soviet humor while feverish heresies are
qualified by postmodern self-reflexivity: “And then, after he enters under her skin, it comes about that,
in the tank/ along the inside her shank, the engines start, the pistons thrust, he shoots, aiming at her sex/
(the poem of the immaculate conception tears itself/ from the lips: “open me!”)”
A paroxysm of the “world under the skin” motif is reached by Marta Petreu in her own
“semiotic” poems. An ice age of painful intellectual self-awareness—as the poet is also one of our best
essayists and at the same time a shrewd thinker and a uniquely diligent literary history researcher—
surrounds haunting existentialist and political anxieties along with harsh post-feminist and Freudian
indeterminacies—“Under my skin I wear a snowfall infinitely divisible like amoebas in rut/ Oho. Self-
fear. The worn-out skin tight like a shirt of chain mail/ Under my epidermis I wear my memory
the carbon black the eternal slime/ Yes, I wear myself under my skin”—landmarked by exquisite
unforgettable lines: “My insomnia is the snow dazzling in the sun.” A 50-years-after “Lady Lazarus,”
therefore, yet one who doesn’t eat men like air any longer, but who believes she can be brought back to
life and even dressed up by her lover and… by literature: “…glue the sentences to my skin/ write with
saliva if you have to yes write with your tongue/ write a letter a book a plea:/ this will be my dress//
Marta’s everyday dress.”
Floarea Ţuţuianu is both an established painter and a poet who values similar themes in the
two arts she practices but develops them divergently—the “fish woman” in her verse, for instance, a
correlative for psychological and erotic intricacies and contradictions, actually corresponds to her
fine art’s explorations of a quite extraneous motif, the ancient mystical symbol of Christianity and
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of the Savior’s acronym, ichtys, “the fish.” Her poetry has been seen as an inheritor of the viscerality
and the self-immolation scenarios in Marta Petreu’s verse, with also a strong eroticism that has in
time acquired more and more mystical nuances. The “texistence” thereof involves a realism of the
words performing as well as a crude diction swinging between a questionable worldly soteriology
and tormented sexuality: “Oh with eternal sadness penetrated her Oh in the fiery zero/ between two
words—(w)hole(ly)/ (and could not save himself)// As the text kept throbbing/ holy wholly holey
holy/ the body withdrew exhausted from between the words”…
Daniela Crăsnaru, a very active liberal politician and Member of Parliament who also served
as Program Manager of the prestigious Accademia di Romania in Rome, and primarily a poet who won
the highest literary distinctions in Romania and a number of major ones abroad (including a Rockefeller
Foundation award), writes a poetry that is far from sounding as thundering and conquering as her impressive
bio. Her delicate and airy love elegies mourn not only the loss of a lover or a romance, but in doing so, they
actually touch a much deeper root of darkness, a nexus of estrangement from this world and nostalgia for the
next, even a Sapphic (as well as Romantic) desire to drown and disappear completely in the river of death. A
poet who deplores her own inability “to recognize anymore in any word/ a pseudonym of God” will surely
court the existential abyss: “I’ll behave like a whore/ when they appear,/ the consummate cavaliers./ The
sleep, the abyss,/ the sublime darkness./ What passionate lovers/ they will be”…
Nicolae Coande, a poetry reviewer, journalist, theater literary manager, and tireless player on
the scene of domestic and regional literary events, writes a poetry that tackles provincialism with
a mock-prophetic, post-Beatnik bathos that bathes in the wild imagery of a feignedly mythical
and humorously cosmopolitan yet profane City of Craiova. As a pervasive and conquering theme,
eroticism, while never parting with history or politics, ranges from tenderness to cynicism (“I reek
of being”), from the contemplative to the feverish (“I picture myself to be an artist,/ taken by colors
redolent of clotted blood”), from metaphysical dissuasion to cultural critique (“some day we will have/
to redefine what means common”). When all such intricacies are exhausted, the poet affords at last
the genuine lyricism that has always been closest to his heart: “Narrow soles, the snow in the courtyard
shows you were here/ last night,/ your bared shoulders lighting an empire,/ drawers filled with small
kisses wrapped carefully,/ the cracked moon/ spills in the bed I cannot sleep in”…
MARGENTO (Chris Tanasescu’s pen-name) has been credited by critics for his compositional
and erudite polyphonies as well as somewhat of an ear for sounds and rhythms (in both his published
work and his performances). Here at least, the polyphonies sound more like a squabble, “shut up,
please talk, but only to me you are/ the organ I taste the world with…” while his potential euphonies
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and cadences are actually multiple clashes and short-circuits of various appropriations, which come
along the lines of his aesthetics and practice of the graph-poem: “let the water/ suck me in and carry
me away/ into your liver, decompose there/ and get you drunk with my worst fears pregnant/ from
Radu Gyr’s last line of prison/ poetry howling in my scars...”
Adela Greceanu is a remarkably active radio hostess and literary reviewer, and a young poet
copiously praised by our critics and already translated into an impressive number of languages. A poetics
of simplicity and the “natural” allows her to attain such a non-postmodernist clarity and directness that
her lines were sometimes simply compared to the verses of the “Song of Songs.” In addition to that, the
graceful poet has a genuine gift for and no fear of the immediately mysterious and the quotidian with
its ever possible leap into the parallel universe “round the corner,” and therefore she inherits from Gellu
Naum the perpetual openness towards the actual experience of the miraculous, but in a way she has
uniquely translated into a feminine para-ethereal if elemental eroticism and motherliness. “I wake up
at night in the rhythm between writing and living. Hearing the rhythm, he/ comes to me./ He says I
don’t need calcium three times a day, I need to be happy. […]// Sometimes his face can be seen through
my skin. As one time, looking in the mirror,/ I had his smile, his entire look from one morning in the
woods.// I feel you golden inside me. You are the weightless fruit of my womb. Yet I am beyond woman,
and no longer exist for sadness and fear.”
Miruna Vlada has been praised as one of the most powerful while at the same time least ostensibly
shocking poets of the Generation 2000. A writer who enumerates among her guiding masters big names
like Angela Marinescu, Nora Iuga, and Octavian Soviany knows how to assess her own evolution from
the explosions and corrosion of her debut to the soft music of embraces, memories, and erotic-tears-or-
perspiration related fluencies of her more recent verse. Her obsessive inner physiologic explorations fuse
love, societal taboos, and symbolic expressionist metamorphoses: “in a world in which fences/ are higher
than houses/ flesh means more than my heart// come out of me/ go to the window/ dive/ come back/
you’ll only find the breath with woman stains/ as if my body got caught in my eyeteeth/ as if my lungs
were the house of our love/ and the fences were you and I too”…
Nora Iuga is the seasoned poet that exercises the strongest fascination among the young and
younger Romanian poets with her untempered voice and non-conformist stances (“I don’t allow
myself any scruples when I write” she said in a recent interview), her conquering charm, humor,
vitality, and wildness (“I have never made any compromises, not even with the Father, the Son, or
the Holy Ghost”…), her unparalleled international experience and career as a poet, translator, and
novelist, and most of it all, with her always unpredictable poetic freshness. While in the 1970’s she
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was labeled, along with the major poet Gellu Naum, our (other) first true surrealist, and she is now
described by German and western criticism as the last living European surrealist, she herself described
her style in the early 2000s as a surrealism of her own, practiced on her own. Her transgressions
actually invite the strangeness needed for a wider perception of eroticism, loneliness, and sentimental
histories (“and you’d lift the night from your eyes a little/ sam did you pay the electric bill you asked/
you were chaste and I sweet-talked you/ I was taken by your darkness/ I wallowed in it…”), while her
deceitfully childish and simplistic playfulness in fact camouflages and domesticates an unappeased
prophetism, as the following lines for instance can be read as a shrewdly “harmless” miniaturized
(but still insidiously homoerotic) version of Whitman’s famous stanza “Dazzling and tremendous how
quick the sun-rise would kill me/ […]/ My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,/ With the twirl
of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds”: “just as a candle wants/ to be stuck into
funeral bread/ I am an excited sam/ minodora is too small a bait/ for so big a fish/ my tongue stretches
long/ it outlines on the windowpane/ two tits like two altars”…
If Iuga is the successful cosmopolitan maverick that many younger poets would dream to
identify with, Octavian Soviany has been an eminence working on the fringes of the Generation 80
that through his more recent theory, criticism, and allegiances (coming in the footsteps of the late
outstanding theorist and critic Marin Mincu, but not only) has become in his turn an exotic father
figure to the Generation 2000. An exquisite mannerist and formalist working in the line of Leonid
Dimov and other earlier oneiric, modernist and symbolist masters, Soviany has himself at times
evolved towards more open forms suitable to existential testimony and confession, while at others
also remaining the flawless troubadour and rococo courtier he has always been. He thus proves
himself to be a true chameleon absorbing suggestions from the younger ones he has actually for
long assessed and influenced, while nevertheless knowing when and how to remain “himself ” or,
to the extent to which that is ever possible, “the same.” A Nabokovian middle-aged speaker tells us
an enthralling love story that merges nostalgia, angst, and politics while compellingly addressing,
portraying, paraphrasing, and even quoting a younger woman poet: “Outside/ bulldozers were tearing
down/ bucharest, poet ioan es pop was erecting/ people’s palace,/ while my blood fluttered/ over
construction sites/ like a ragged flag,/ since I was a man/ almost in his old age,/ his prostate enlarged/
entertaining suicidal thoughts./ And I couldn’t presage your lips,/ Your breasts hadn’t started/ to perk
through/ your schoolgirl clothes yet”...
O. Nimigean has loomed larger and larger over the past two decades as a nonconformist and
formally experimental poet, tireless and uncompromising critic, and a both sophisticated and strongly
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realist fiction writer whose latest novel, Rădăcina de bucsau (And Juniper Root for their Meat) is
already seen as a major literary work of our times. He is present here with two prose poetry gems
in which he typically and subtly conjuncts concerns of poetics with domestic catalogs shrouded in
the apparent ease of lovers’ teasing, quips, and cuddling. The editor sensibly placed him right after
Soviany, for the latter’s textualist “apocalypse of the text” is in its turn ultimately deconstructed here
with mordantly deceitful and self-effacing ingenuity: “I’ve told you the story as to a proper little girl
sitting on her grandfather’s knees, first of the book of paper, then of the book of spoken words, and
finally, stumbling at the threshold, the real book. A cluttered story that you’ll remember mostly for my
hesitations, my stuttering, my muddled silence.” Nimigean’s both compelling and discreet alternative
is an updated modernist and existentialist “thing in itself ” that has absorbed and assimilated the
“poison” of postmodernism’s indeterminacies to the extent to which the verse can echo and translate
(and Nimigean is a master of such transhistorical and transcultural dialogs) so significantly Whitman’s
famous prophetic stance of “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I
contain multitudes.)”: “Am I being ridiculous?/ Who cares? I can refrain from invoking synchronicities
and coincidences.”
Radu Andriescu’s is one of the most salient poetries in our contemporary literature, written by an
erudite scholar and essayist who knows how not to be pretentious while organically and convincingly
interweaving high with popular and media culture, literary and art history with intimate memories
and scenes of private life, social critique with personal frustrations and deep fears. Andriescu has an
unmistakable softly purring lyricism with, once in a while, unexpected fits and starts that combine
diary-like notes and news or strange fact tidbits with benign sui generis “heathen” rituals and good-
natured profanities. Poststructuralist textualism is not undermined like in Nimigean by the “worldly
metaphysics” of the sentimentally ineffable but by the “complacencies of the peignoir,” the easy chagrin,
and, one of Andriescu’s trademarks, by playing with contexts and characters whose fluid features and
personalities fuse or disintegrate mysteriously, peacefully, in a smooth “Shivaist” manner: “Anyhow,
Una Miruna is a myriad of/ mistresses hidden in preface/ and in postface. The text itself is just/
stuffing. Still not mad at me, Dulce?”…
Adrian Sângeorzan—who is actually the originator of the idea of this anthology he once playfully
suggested to the editor—is a poet and fiction writer who lives in the US, where he works as an obstetrician.
Andrei Codrescu praised him for creating a Romanian Holden Caulfield while a number of Romanian
critics and writers also honored him for writing one of the best childhood novels in all of our literature.
To the American reader he may sound once in a while very much like Albert Goldbarth, and although
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he might not have Goldbarth’s expansiveness and diversity, he shares the quirkiness and humor, the
unexpected turns circumscribing certain obsessions, sometimes even quite the same obsessions, as one
reads about “Love, sex and death, those three Graces fondling in their block of marble/ Long before
the first stroke of the chisel” in Sângeorzan, and “Why can’t we// be honest?—every poem is “Sex.” (Or
“Death”)” or “the block of perfect marble/ that was sculpted into Galatea’s shape, and then translated//
into life […] seemingly/ (in our later language)…” in Goldbarth’s latest collection. The Romanian does
not employ the American’s plethora of popular culture enormities and Sci-Fi surreal melodramas, but
he does have the same knack for ancient cultures dressed into humorous or cruel or apparently empty
allegories. “It’s your entire fault, you the discoverer of my brain/ Archeological relic buried in lava of lust/
As that petrified dog in Pompeii tied to the brothel’s door when Vesuvius erupted./ Those people knew
everything about sex. It was there behind the door/ Bringing good luck and ready to hold your hat./
Priapus was weighing his sex for gold”…
Claudiu Komartin is the most tireless leader and animator of the Generation 2000, for which
he —along with the widely praised Radu Vancu—provided a crucial part of the poetics as well as some
of the most vivid arenas for expression—the internationally known magazine Poesis International, as
well as Max Blecher Press and the Max Blecher Institute Reading Series. But as soon as he established
himself as a most vocal mouthpiece and awarded representative of his generation, Komartin’s interests
and allegiances actually proved much wider, working as editor and publisher with poets from all
generations and schools not only in Romania but throughout Europe and beyond (and being by far
the most active poet of his generation at festivals and readings abroad). His poetry itself testifies for
such rare openness, only not in a kaleidoscopic or cameleon’s manner, but by borrowing from the
many voices he has heard just the notes and nuances he needs in weaving his own obsessive suites.
Labeled by critics as a “miserabilist”/“post-expressionist” he actually has a deeply erotic sense of life to
the extent to which, somewhat in keeping with his Italian masters, Quasimodo and Pasolini, eroticism
reaches prophecy, now veering into ruthless political sarcasm and then back into sensual confession
and lament. Under a bitter playfulness and (in his more felicitous choices, mock) sentimentality,
Komartin hides an oppressive apocalyptic vision, which once in a while blows out into striking “post-
historic” images and disconsolate dirges.
Adrian Popescu who opens the “Little Endless Suavities” section, is one of the most if not the
most important poet of the Transylvanian literary circle he and a few other writers started around
Echinox magazine in the late 1960s in Cluj, and one of the major poets of postwar Romania. A
consistent mannerist of his own unmistakable manner, an impeccable formalist who indefatigably
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renegotiates form, and a great artist of melancholy—features that may very well remind the American
reader of David Baker and his uniquely subtle eclogues and elegies—the poet has a pervasive nostalgia
for paradise (he actually once famously wrote “I am certain there’s a heaven since I have recollections of
that place”), and a subdued ardency he is able to imprint even on “trivial” subjects such as the mountain
raspberry and a fly he encountered in the deserted Colosseum in Rome. The first poem included
here presents one with a Romanian lilting and rather fantastic if modernity-ridden Milton, while the
second one exquisitely echoes, among other things, the language and the rhythms of Eminescu’s “Ode
in Ancient Meter.” The melancholy mood and the corrosive skepticism subtly contrasts though the
haunting painful passion in our classic’s lyric: “One thousand blackbirds sing in the oak tree by the
pool,/ I squint in vain, I cannot see them,/ it is not I for whom they sing, another season’s sun roars in/
the brittle glistening leaves.// The places where you burnt in my candle-lamp embrace I revisit,/ on a
path that once took us to an earthly sinful heaven;/ Upon return four men walk against me,/ somber
and sturdy, carrying huge wire coils on their shoulders.”
Gabriel Chifu, who started in the mid-70s as a poet and a highly esteemed literary editor, has
been seen as a precursor of the Generation 80, but his strong lyrical purpose and his openness towards
an animist transcendence make him a more particular case than just that. As lamented film and literary
critic Alex Leo Şerban once put it, Chifu “is too much of a human to stay simply human,” by which he
alluded to the plenitude and enthousiasmos the poet experiences while immersed in nature and the world,
and to the kind of worldly mysticism he reaches, not as in Adrian Popescu’s case by dint of melancholy
and nostalgia for paradise, but by a ceaseless and insatiable involvement and industriousness. In a
fashion somewhat contrary to his praised novels (where rough realism is irrepressibly punctured by the
fantastic), in his verse the intimately lyrical is invaded by the political, but only to make it stronger and
more contagious, thus composing a jaded love song that still subtly echoes and deconstructs a famous
erotic paean by the major neo-modernist of the 60s and the 70s, Nichita Stănescu: “she was a young
willow, blown by the wind,/ which made her wavy and musical,/ […]/ whereas I felt hulking,/ an iron
and steel complex/ from the age of triumphant socialism,/ a rusty and forsaken hunk o’ junk,/ a sweaty
snoring rattletrap./ But she didn’t see me that way and was so deadly into/ pulling the beds together.”
Lucian Vasiliu, a popular figure of Moldavian poetry and an active museum manager, literary
readings host, and editor of the legendary Dacia literară of Iași, is a poet that swings between the
hermetically hieratic and the playfully heretic, with both the extremes stitched together by a cult for the
memorable metaphor. Such live discordance has proved more than appealing to the critics as well as his
wider readership that has faithfully followed for decades the (mock) narcissistic lyrical elegance and his
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gentle pensive ironies, along with his charming public presence. His “philosophical eroticism”—a quaint
fusion of Leibnizian monadology and erotic alchemy—has been labeled as anachronistic (a description
he himself happily embraced), yet not in the sense of passé, but rather vintage chic and capable of
resuscitating the true spirit of poetry with its “old” charm, dedication, and power to move people: “Your
name was Beatrice—/ you were beautiful and dangerous/ like a sentence from Nietzsche…” or “Unlike
the others,/ the real,/ she never spoke a word –/ I was predestined/ to her silence.”
Nichita Danilov is a unique figure among the poets of the Generation 80, as from his first
publication to this day he chose to swim against the tide, writing a unique kind of poetry that has
not bothered to adjust to whatever was or may become fashionable or mainstream. He mesmerized
his readers from the very start with puzzling repetitive scenes and with mechanically performed,
sometimes absurd rituals that involved mystery and nihilism, initiation and derision. A somber Slavic
sense of the abyss seemed to have been forcefully translated into the language of Romanian mockery,
skepticism, and the absurdist carnivalesque. As is often the case with even gifted poets, from a point
onwards uniqueness of style verges on empty mannerism and resistance to common places begets
personal clichés, but Danilov shrewdly switched to fiction and wrote a number of well received novels
of political and multilayered histories and parables, which, as acknowledged by a mainstream critic
like Alex Ştefănescu, has lately brought a breath of fresh air into his verse as well.
Nichita Danilov and Daniela Crăsnaru are the only poets present in more than one section of
this anthology. In “Little Endless Suavities,” Danilov is included with one of his repetitive enigmatic
hymns—“And your breasts are smoke and thighs/ and your arms that hold me now/ are made of
smoke.// And like smoke you enfold me/ and like smoke you sadden me and break me down…”—
while in “Anecdotic Fields and Playgrounds” a Kharms or Hurmuz-like avant-gardist scene ends up in
an almost Dadaist blowing up of language and philosophy: “Then love becomes/ an end in itself/ and
itself itself/ like a snail/ crawls from its shell.”
Carmen Firan, a Romanian New-Yorker who writes poetry, fiction, drama, and children’s books
and whose story-telling gifts made Andrei Codrescu recommend her as a Chekhov of Queens and a
sorceress of the Carpathians, is a poet praised in many countries and languages and an active editor and
translator. Her versatile verse can evoke a realist scene and then submerge it in serial metaphors that
gradually corrode everything thus producing an unexpected design that reunite private and urban life,
and allegorical histories along with adventures in a brave new world. A poetics of the interior becomes
one of innermost life and reflection, where eroticism gets dramatized in pleas and exhortations—“love
me now/ we are so very much alone/ our bodies vibrate within silent walls/ we are so very much alone/
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and the made-up drama we play out/ reveals to you what I don’t know at all” or “you if you chose me/
[…]/ stop the grass from growing/ rejuvenation is humiliating”…
Letiţia Ilea is a Professor of French from Cluj whose poetry has been translated, very well
received, and awarded in France. She has been compared to our symbolist and modernist classic Bacovia
(whose sore voice and angst she has translated to the concerns of the young generation of poets while
she also maintained those traditional suggestions), being nowadays considered the most important
young follower of the classic in terms of recuperating and developing what is genuinely typical of the
most depressed and depressive poetry in our literature. Besides, unlike many other young writers, she
does not practice a radical breakaway from or “fracture” with earlier established styles in writing, but
manages to accommodate influences ranging from the abovementioned master to Nichita Stănescu
and to Generation 80 and weave them all into a surprisingly smooth and unpretentious tapestry of her
own. “it was not even certain/ if she had ever met him/ or simply put together memories/ such as the
first winter// of her cactus existence/ which had forgotten to bloom/ such as the first prey taken// in
her den-less/ she-wolf life// he was a bit of a cactus flower.”
Mihai Ignat has been praised for being a unique case among the young poets of genuine, erotic, “almost
feminine” sensibility expressed in a poetry that concatenates metaphors of hurt love and estrangement to
the point where the deceitful serial developments actually spin off, flagrantly threatening to break the
poem and the conventions related to the speaker’s coherent psychology totally apart. As an experienced
playwright and recipient of important national and international distinctions, Ignat knows how to clash
and branch the voice of his already well-renowned favorite persona, Klein (the German meaning of the
name alluding to the self-assumed pettiness and irrelevance of a contemporary man’s life), with memories,
frustrations, absurd or even ridiculous jokes, obsessive and yet delicate and vulnerable eroticism, etc. His
poetry reminds one of another contemporary poet of a similar age and also present in this anthology,
Robert Şerban. Unlike the latter, though, Ignat’s poems are less compressed and the feelings less visceral, as
his sentimentality is more about, as a reviewer once put it, “splendor within cruelty.” “Pale, barely unveiled/
from her frail sleep/ by the sound of the six/ touches// […]// I don’t know more atrocious an image/ than
his tongue/ entering/ through her lips.” On the other hand, Ignat shares an inclination towards joking and
versatile unexpected excurses with another significant poet in this anthology, Nicolae Coande, only that,
while the former can turn his bathos into absurdist or just whimsical humor, the latter even in doing so
manages or at least affects to convey something deadly serious about the human condition.
Romanian poets have inherited, though, from classics like Ovid, not only the sense of
estrangement and the sadness of being an exile in this world, but also the mock didacticism, the
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blasé off-hand craftsmanship, and the tender cynicism of Ars Amatoria. Emil Brumaru is Romanian
literature’s living classic and undisputed champion of explicit erotic poetry who is at the same time
an unparalleled craftsman and a refined erudite weaver of allusions and dictions. Still, although
virtually everybody has agreed for decades over his specialized supremacy in the trade, the criticism
has been extremely diverse and sometimes even contradictory in interpreting the specific poetics and
realizations thereof. Certain authors have provided “proofs” of the poet’s inextinguishable sensual zest
and unquenchable thirst for details and nuances, while others have said that quintessentially Brumaru
actually is a restrained, delicate, and definitely not obscene voice (a case particularly made by Bogdan
Crețu), and still others—most notably established senior critic Gheorghe Grigurcu—have spoken of a
detestable self that the poet shuns by creating a rich and capricious pageant of personae, as well as by
embracing the carnivalesque extremes of pornography and scatological reversal of (poetic) etiquette
and hierarchies. When applying Grigurcu’s reading we can indeed identify psychoanalytically
compensatory developments such as in evoking Apollinaire’s famous lover Lou, “If Lou’s vagina sang
Apollinaire to her,/ Tamáriushka, what should I croon to you?” along with a typically profanatory and/
or ornamental treatment of religious symbols and imagery “And shelter me with your naked body, like
at the fair,/ My sad soul, life consumed in sins and sweet sighs./ Let me pray to the icon of flesh, your
ass, where/ It is slandered in jest by your sister thighs.”
Mircea Dinescu, the enfant terrible of the early ’70s, the literary and political dissident of the
late ’80s, the fervent columnist, scathing satirist, and editor of the ’90s, and the past years’ large estate,
vineyard, and more recently, restaurant owner, has been missed and even gently scolded by the audience
and the literary connoisseurs for not dedicating enough time to writing poetry over the past two decades
or so. Yet even with just a couple of new collections in quite a long period of time, the poet remains a
powerful presence reservedly praised by reviewers and still extolled by long time aficionados and blurb
writers. Dinescu impressed from the very beginning with a uniquely feisty vigor and a courage to be
sparkly confessional and socially straightforward in an age when sophisticated evasion and abstruse
introspective visionarism were the order of the day in poetry, and the most praisable manner to avoid
both practicing socialist realism and addressing the actual ­political realities of the moment. His often
memorable musical and pungent lines, either in a Villon‑like alert balladesque manner or spurting
more-elegant-than-Esenin’s edgy resolutions, have ranged, with their agile, ambushing metaphors,
from meridional eroticism to strong and/or carnivalesquely funny political allegories to the variegated
songs of this world. Such tours de force fuse something of the classic Anton Pann’s lay playful spells
with Brumaru’s mastery of the language: “I’m waiting for you like the cheapest flirt/ to decypher your
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last work under your skirt/ with a small mirror, or, for a subtler thrill/ I’ll use the old Methodius of
Cyril/ or touch it like a blind man reading braille,/ a peasant sowing maize out of his pail,/ who sticks
his plow in the fresh earth with pride/ and asks the plot of land to be his bride.”
Mihail Vakulovski is one of the most active, prolific, and versatile representatives of the
Bessarabian contingent of writers that have become more and more active in Romanian letters since
the collapse of the USSR and the gradual post-communist return of (the Republic of) Moldova to the
Romanian speaking culture and community. His brother, Alexandru, is also a highly esteemed poet
included in a number of major international anthologies, and together they have edited for more than a
decade the strongly influential e-zine Tiuk!, a widely followed forum for mainly new writers’ literature
and criticism that also publishes significant contributions from senior established authors. Besides
working as editor-in-chief for Tiuk!, Mihail Vakulovski contributes reviews, translations, and original
work to a significant number of other literary publications and also participates in events in Chişinău
as well as throughout Romania and abroad, giving readings and launching his or others’ books and
animating the literary scene of so many places and diverse orientations. As a poet, Vakulovski evokes
teenage or college years’ memories in a way that projects personal frustrations, stale romances or
chagrins, and misfit or rebel’s histories on the wider screen of post-soviet and contemporary (end of)
world history: “your tits like three stupid hedgehogs/ when you said/ but I don’t love you/ it sounded
really weird much like the Amore more ore re line on that soldier’s/ lips/ and we left for Belgrade left
for Bagdad/ left for Stalingrad/ simply had to leave for Stalin’s city/ while I loved you madly/ we made
love over the phone/ did it through the holes…”
Rodica Drăghincescu is a poet and international literary editor, translator, and journalist who
lives in France and has published a number of bilingual Romanian-French collections, while also
indefatigably presenting the Francophone world with contemporary Romanian writers in translation.
As Nora Iuga once put it, her poetry „slaps your face,” being uniquely merciless especially to itself.
Poet, publisher, and critic Nicolae Tzone also wrote about Draghincescu’s intransigence and aggressive
intelligence that, among other women poets of the generation ’90, recuperates the “erotocentrism” of
classic avant-garde poets like Geo Bogza and Saşa Pană from the early 20th century. Her poetry indeed
translates that into a feminine sensibility as she actually mainly recycles especially Gellu Naum’s oneiric
fluencies and metamorphic imageries that manage to mesmerize the reader with a strange irrepressible
music while also inserting in the text multilayered cross-cultural references and a sharp (meta)political
critique. While in fact Draghincescu has not covered all of Naum’s complexities, which very well
may be not part of her purpose, her gift really entices the audience with the remarkable features her
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reviewers praised in her, as well as with a unique shrewdness in analyzing couple relationships and
amplifying her analyses with the best contoured new surrealist props possible: “…there were too many
kinds of trains/ good bad brazen blasé/ ready to rummage through my pockets/ ready to take me to a
movie/ (the title was THE BRIDE’S BEDCHAMBER)/ after it got dark THE GROOM/ (he was sort of
squishy) turned into a pie poetically related/ to the clocks…”
Praised by the critics as a Paganini of the Romanian language and a lyric geyser, while also
accused of suspicious profusion and dispersion or of using cheap (mainly pornographic) tricks and
committing national symbol profanation once too many, Mihail Gălăţanu is one of the most gifted,
masterful, and chameleonic poets and fiction writers that emerged in the late 1980s. He is a mystic
poet writing ineffable chants that most of the times spontaneously include the quotidian and the
instinctual, bittersweet testimonies of individual frustration along with metaphysical metaphors, as
well as “shocking” and “horrible” profanities and pornography (with among the most “outrageous” ones
those where the motherland is depicted as a famous porn star or where love making is metaphorically
blended with images of political prisoners being tortured by the communists). “Gladly I’d emigrate/
to the united states/ of your legs. The prenuptial canada/ of your calves/ covered decently by a maple
leaf./ The tropical mexico of your knees, the florida of your sphincters, the torrid/ trinidad-tobago
between your legs. Gladly I’d lick/ panama hanging in the fringes of your clitoris…”
Dan Coman was praised over his seven-years-ago first collection for his visionary and ­prophetic
stamina by an enthused Emilian Galaicu-Păun heralding the advent of a “Coman decade,” while
Soviany actually wrote, on the contrary, about the mechanical poetry of a half tragic half grotesque
mime clown drawing and assuming pregnant caricatures of ludic disgust and Bacovian jadedness.
His verse purports a self-ironical egomania and fake messianic afflatus counterpointed by either sharp
self-dismissals or by a net of neo-expressionist images that trouble the surface of a deceitful serenity
with a nagging angst tirelessly glistening from the deep—“Throughout July my penis disappears,
red‑faced/ I’m forced to tell my girl that throughout this month/ my penis retires into a long and
arduous meditation.// in fact as soon as July starts// my penis in its solitude nestles/ in Ms. Fandiana`s
vagina./ It’s an ancient place here, rich and roomy, a place, as one might say, full/ to the brim, tranquil
and green.” In a style very much like the one of Daniel Bănulescu, Coman adopts stances or statements
that may sound grandomaniac or boisterously goliardic, but he also knows how to undermine all that
by always catching a glimpse of what lurks out (or in) there in the dark.
Elena Vlădăreanu has been for the past ten years at the forefront of the generation 2000, writing,
as British editor and translator David Morley once put it, an original poetry of “warm atrocities.” She
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combines explicit sex scenes with oppressive memories while the drab routine of everyday life poisons
the personae with a compulsory sense of vacuity and senselessness, in a poetry where an insidious
frigidity unmasks the nothingness behind both the allegedly sophisticated and the predictably
plain and flat. The poet is also a very successful radio literary and cultural show hostess, and that
professional experience has gradually percolated into her verse infusing it with pungent snippets that
she sometimes tries to integrate in her discourse or she just splashes here and there in a fashion that
is neither modernistically parodic nor pastiche-like, but rather illustrative of a poetics that embraces
the naked fact at the expense of “literature:” “shouldn’t have shouldn’t have shouldn’t have my mind
murmurs/ endlessly his sex had the color of ripe corn/ and the grimy room in ferentari stank like wet
dog/ in marta meszaros’s movie nothing had happened/ just the blank frames and silences rolling into
the theater/ like ice balls through the empty seats/ […]/ i saw him with a beautiful woman and i felt
nothing/ his hand burrowed between my thighs and i felt nothing/ a huge oppressive bird had wedged
itself between us…”
Michel Martin is a young poet from Braşov who now lives in London. In his/her manifesto, the
poet defines poetry as “hunger and discordance, an instant radiant perpendicular on the nervures of
your thought.” With a typical confidence (s)he (a female poet embracing a male persona) introduces
himself as neither a man nor a woman, but an “attack,” while Ruxandra Cesereanu has presented h(er/)
im as a poet who recalibrates the world by means of either “puzzling transparencies” or “ironically
smoothed down obscurities.” Martin’s post-surrealism is indeed one that, unlike the traditional school,
unveils the deepest loci in the unconscious not in order to celebrate and employ them as esoteric
guidance throughout the process of writing poetry, but to expose the reader to the most “dangerous”
and defamiliarizing strangeness; when that does not result in mere youthful épater les bourgeois, it can
produce such enthralling lines: “my power comes from a Japanese gardenia it suffuses/ an entire room
of sylphlike london maidens and a couple of blast furnaces I’m your/ husband you’re a man […]/ I’m
everybody’s dream I’ll never give birth/ I’m in each marriage as the longest absence/ the clock ticking
in your eardrum…”
The “Cynicism and Neurosis” section is opened by Ion Mureşan, one of the most important voices
of the Generation ’80 or even, to some, the greatest poet in the movement, or rather the period, since
his style is so unlike what is usually perceived as typical of that generation’s poetry: postmodernism,
irony and pastiche, cross-textualism and erudite references, etc. Mureşan’s is a poetry of visions,
of prophetic alcoholic deliriums and semi-oneiric explorations and failures, where the oxymoronic
fusion of single-minded somberness and unpredictably versatile ironies is not “postmodern,” but rather
29
post‑expressionist and in any way not a result of any experimentalism or detachment, but the correlative
of a consistent cultivation of practices and states of mind conducive to experiencing “the beyond.” “One
of them, the one with a mauve hedgehog on his head, says,/ ‘Did’ya see that dirty old man, how he pawed
her under the table/ and how he made her head spin with Plato’s gibberish?’/ […]// My god, I saw only
the sidewalk, it moved,/ it rose above me, it wrapped me around like a wet blanket./ Then buildings
upside-down./ A dark puddle covered me like a pillow over my ears./ Hush-a-bye in a field of flowers!”
Ruxandra Cesereanu is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, academic, and researcher, who, among
other things, is also the only writer in Cluj conducting poetry, fiction, and even psychedelic music
workshops on a regular basis. She is also well known to the Anglophone poetry audience through
her four collections (including one written together with Andrei Codrescu) and selected poems
translated and published in the US, as well as from being included in the acclaimed anthology New
European Poets. Her poetry has actually been widely translated and included in publications in the US
and throughout Europe. While major names in contemporary Romanian verse have an established
reputation—in fact not always backed up by everything they write—for exploring the beyond,
Cesereanu is a poet consistently and effectively preoccupied with that, as she clearly states in her post-
surrealist “Delirionism” manifesto: “…[D]elirionism is technical but also a state close to trance; it is a
schism but also a breach that connects with the circuits of the world, precisely by means of scission,
fragmentation, rupture. […] The trance—so dear to delirionism and myself—utilizes precisely this: it
offers communion and communication with a something else from Beyond.” (trans. Alistair Ian Blyth)
The communion with the beyond is revealed and operates on cross-cultural, bodily, and heretically
mystical levels, as the “crusader woman” persona takes the language by storm with neo-expressionist
physiologies and cruelly questioned identities: “your throat’s a pipe through which my womanly life
flows like a creek/ the jugular’s the red sea that i cross on my knees/ […]/ other times i paint my lips
with honey and then let you bite them/ before i drink coffee like a psalm…”
Daniel Bănulescu was born in the early ‘60s when, as a reviewer once funnily put it, ‘since the
population of the earth had gone above 4 billion people and God needed a “mega-prophet,” He created
Bănulescu’. This was more than just a joke, since it hinted at the writer’s success both as a poet and a fiction
writer, as well as at his typical (self-)ironical grandiloquent and prophetic language, titles, and stances.
His poetry and fiction have been described as a Don Juan’s number, magical and farcical, sounding
indeed like a mix of most sincere confessions and hot air, of encomion and “don’t let me lead you on”
kind of refrains. “Inventive, bizarre, and aggressive,” as a critic once described him, he is recipient of
an impressive number of relevant and major national and European awards and grants for a work that
30
keeps surprising its readers with a freshness and versatility overcoming even his well-renowned Dali‑like
grandeur and mock boundless vainglory: “Without you days pass like a procession of farts dragged
onward by/ elephants/ Skies split little by little and crack/ […]/Your beauty has a death’s head between
two lips/ But your beauty holds it so tight no one wants to take the trouble/ Your buttocks bring me a
desert-like atmosphere/ That could transform me into a prophet.”
Robert Şerban is one of the most popular, active, and chic young poets of Romania, who not
only knows how to write a poetry that has been characterized as “artistically intelligent” and received
a huge number of major awards, but is also a charismatic TV star in Timişoara and a spontaneously
personable “man in the street.” His poems are short and “humble”—never pretending they will
change the life of the world (of letters) or anything else whatsoever—and apparently written in a
very brief moment of respite, since their simplicity and directness may sound like a… “this is just
to say” note on the fridge. In fact, the poet’s voice gets stronger page after page and the images and
the “passing” thoughts linger indefinitely in the reader’s mind, as Şerban, while being schematically
confessional, actually explores and employs the areas of collective mentalities where the proverbs, the
wisdom sayings, and the popular jokes are created. In that he resembles another young but already
major poet—Constantin Acosmei—the difference being that the latter is consistently dark (even when
humorous) and his poetics, although probably the most “destructive” and “anti-poetic” we have, is
one of obsessive and infinitesimal convergence, while Robert Şerban may digress and embrace the
quotidian per se, for he professes a rather fuzzy poetics of soft articulation and captatio benevolentiae.
He thus manages, as writer and critic Felix Nicolau once shrewdly put it, to be “straightforward and
allusive at the same time”: “your mouth separates/ my good flesh from bad/ like a plane/ cutting the
wood that holds/ the door into slices.”
Dan Sociu has been praised as the truly great revelation of the Generation 2000 and its genuine
“rock star”—although, as critic Doris Mironescu once noticed, he barely seems to mumble his lines like
a taciturn that found himself talking to himself just out of the blue—who is able to express originally
and humorously the preoccupations and obsessions that in other peers have become mere clichés
and drab lamentation. Also a translator of Seamus Heaney, Charles Bukowski, and e.e. cummings,
Sociu has meanwhile switched mainly to fiction writing, his well-received novels being noted, among
other things, for a certain inherent poetical distinction. In truth, the poetry proper came from the
beginning with its own heavy loads of prosaicness and disseminated biographical flashes that rendered
it both rugged and seductive, as the author followed Machado’s famous imperative of inventing a poet
first, one who, while discovering his personal voice, also shrewdly borrowed some of the fancy, jaded
31
“tender-heart-under-the-hard-shell” features of his international role-models: “One night my wife
and I carried/ ten bucketfuls of shit—/ I think we haven’t spent such a good time/ with each other
since ’98:/ we were vomiting and laughing,/ laughing and vomiting/ —that day we swore/ never to eat
again—/ between the dogs driven mad by the stench,/ between the guinea hens, in the darkness of the
flowering apricot trees,/ the lantern light cut her legs/ gross in my father-in-law’s trousers…”
Marius Conkan is a talented and sophisticated poet, whose debut collection of now and then
self-titled “emo-poems,” from 2009, met a good reception for its psychoanalytically cathartic “fictional
bedlam” and, as Ruxandra Cesereanu once put it, for its “straightjacket poems.” He is actually author of
two collections and has also composed together with the latter writer an experimental “novel-poem,” a
story about two children creating alternative worlds to escape from the harsh reality of an orphanage.
His diction may sometimes be punk-rock indeed, but in most of the cases there is a filigree of learned
punning or smoldering prophecy to it, as in the profane “jo(a)na(h) your head the size of a matchbox
knocks against my head. I will be dizzy for a year. jo(a)na(h) all the angels cannot hide in the vagina”
or the esoterically mesmerizing “god-fearing man wouldn’t you like a woman with vicious thighs to
fuck you. yes god-fearing man I would like it above all if your mystified mind died under the stone.”
The addendum, an epistolary “novel” of poems in (or some rearranged as) prose on butterflies
represents a remarkably salient counterpoint to many of the poems in the anthology, and so much the
more to the “bad,” “apocalyptic,” and profane concluding ones. Such stark contrast actually reflects on
both those poems and the addendum, all of which thus gaining an even stronger profile of their own. The
author of this final part is a poet behind whose name Emilian Galaicu-Păun once suspected might hide
a whole institute of philology and poetics—Șerban Foarță. And Galaicu-Păun was actually right, Foarță
has the erudition and the craftsmanship of a whole institute of poets and littérateurs, but he is at the same
time just one single person—himself. This playful, elegant, and seemingly “harmless” piece itself stands
proof of the subtlety and vigor of a unique master, as the poet, a formidable connoisseur of European
literature in general and of the French one in particular, arrays a sequence of references from French
classics—with just a “few small” personal touches—that in fact gradually acquires, as it unfurls before
our eyes, the fluency of a consistent auctorial project. It is that particular consistency, together with the
charming verisimilitude of belle époque drawing-room pastime and letter writing what really renders
the piece remarkably relevant to the anthology as a whole. Alphonse de Lamartine’s “Papillon,” “Naître
avec le printemps, mourir avec les roses/ Sur l’aile du zéphyr nager dans un ciel pur [etc.]” was for instance
initially quoted by Foarță in his own Romanian translation, and then quoted again, for this anthology, in
his and two other writers’ rather free rendition into English of that “original translation,” which actually
32
revisits the itinerary of Romanian poetry from its early modern profuse French influences to its early
20th century modernist abstract structures and esoteric sounds, to its contemporary deep Anglicization
(or rather Americanization) and internationalization, slowly gaining impetus and triggering an ever
amplified “butterfly effect” very much like the one in chaos theory.
And just like in the latter, certain apparently easily understandable and “simple” (poetic)
phenomena finally amount to huge (again, apparently) unpredictable consequences as the poet puts
together a short anthology of his own, a sort of imago of this book as a whole and, at the same time,
an allegory of his—and the other poets’—correspondence with the editor, the “Madame” that collects
“butterflies” and “letters” of both paradisiacal ambrosia and, what now?, cyanide!, both old and
new, both deeply personal and, as being revived from various local insect collections into the world
insectaria, more and more widely communal.

—MARGENTO
Saigon – Paris – Ottawa, 2012-13

33
I. SONGS OF SONGS
ALEXANDRU MUȘINA

WITHIN THE AFTERNOON

 
Should I enter, floating through the window
And put my cold hand onto your belly…
In sleep, of course, only in sleep:
Only there you are alone the summer, when it’s hot
And outside the leaves have swollen.

When I begin to float, at first 2-3 centimeters

Above the asphalt, then above the green fence
and over the morello tree in front of your apartment block.

With hands cold and thin I would open the air like a quilt
Like a transparent vulva
But warm, warm and wet… With my head
Glowing faintly, like a billiard ball, in the afternoon light
I’d steal through your window.

My cold, cold hand would fix on your belly.

While I, eyes closed, would wait for you to quiver,
To whisper something in your sleep, to cover me
With your palm small and warm, warm.
I would wait motionless. Indefinitely.
I would wait before waking.
 
(Translated by Martin Woodside and Tania Muşina)

37
 NINEVEH
 
My sex entering amicable
to yours. The scent of your skin, baby-skin
The blue veins on your temples, the moles on your neck,
Suddenly your lips redden, breath quickening,
Your lovely breath:
The air blown out, warm, from your lungs
wrapping me in a thin breeze.
 
Farther away than Nineveh and Babylon,
More inaccessible than Ophir and Palmyra!
Hopelessly, hopelessly, hopelessly...  
Hopelessly: your hand in my hand, your eyes
close to mine, closing in, my chest pressed
against your hot and drenched breasts. Hopelessly: my tongue
On your shoulder blades, the taste of almonds, hopelessly
That afternoon, that afternoon...
 
Farther away than the Precambrian Era, than
The Jurassic and the Triassic, than the brontosaurus, the trilobites, the coelenterates,
Farther away than the door that will never open,
Farther away than the phone that will never ring.
 
Farther away and still farther that afternoon,
In which I’ll slowly melt, bit by bit,
Watching your naked back as it arches, golden fuzz on the back your neck,
In which I’ll decompose hopelessly
to dream the curling hairs of your sex.
 
38
 Which my sex will never enter,
Neither sad, nor happy, neither humble, nor furious,
Neither tired, nor shining at the promise
Of a blonde, blue-eyed dynasty.
 
It will never enter, ’cause farther
Are you than Nineveh and Babylon, than Fo-Tzien and Cartagena,
Than Tenochtitlan and Samara, than Ophir and Ultima Thule,
Farther you are than the air surrounding me
Than the blood throbbing in my temples,
Than my completely powerless hand, than my sex
Who can’t even dream of you.
 
(Translated by Martin Woodside and Tania Muşina)

39
MAGDA CÂRNECI

LOVE STORIES
(fragments)

Taste the shell, taste the shell! Ooh la la! Soft and bland is the taste of the alluring medusa. Bite,
bite lips, pomegranate, pineapple. Suck in, swallow. Open clams line the shores. Enter the lukewarm
water, allow yourself gradually to drown. You taste me, I savor you. You swallow me, I gulp you down
greedily. Your knife thrusts into the waves.
I am sea spume billowed on the shore. Ooh la la!

Oh, no. Oh, yes. Come. Oh, no, no. Oh, yes, yes. Come. Come.
Red pointed tongue. Warm, hot, hotter. Like so.
Butterfly, pigeon, turtle dove. Deeper.
Goat, dog, bull. Like so. Deeper. Deeper.
Mole, snake, turtle, stingray.
Red tongue, hot tidal wave. Good. Good. Like so.
Burning pole, devastating waterfall, honey avalanche,
you destroy me, you liquefy me.
Oh, no, oh yes, come. Oh, no, oh yes, oh yes, come, come,
red tongue, enter, hot vestibule, red-hot iron stairs,
heated gems, doors, incandescent instruments,
deep, deeper, on the purple, the carpet of the abyss.
Like so. The throne room. Red. Purple. Incandescent. Like so.
I slide, slide, become liquefied. Oh. Yes, slowly, long, slow,
sweet, lazy, moist, warm, fiery hot, hot.
The throne. Oh, the throne. The golden throne, deep. Good.
Good. I see it, see it! Golden. Golden!
Come. Deep. I cannot touch it! Come. Golden. I cannot touch it!
Incandescent.
The golden throne, I cannot have it! Help me, help me,
40
butterfly, pigeon, turtle dove.
Mole, goat, snake, stingray, help me, help me!
I cannot.

Nickel faucet, living spasmodic rope, corydalis root, flaming sword, rattlesnake, bejeweled pouch,
nickel-pickle, goddess’s trombone, cuckoo eggs packed in sacks, Tom Thumb, spiky fig, soft dangerous
jewel, John Thomas, little clapper, tassel, bulldozer, sweet tuber, ironsmith’s hammer, dibble, cosmic
thruster. Uh huh!

The yellow angel enters the blue angel.

An azure flash! Oh, the froth of light, the starry lace!
He fills her crystal glass with hot, superhot dynamite
and seals himself deeply inside. A red, burning filament
slowly making room, downwards, pushing to the core,
Making room, room, room, then depositing
himself in the sanctuary. A drop.
She awaits him behind a small golden door lined with moist purple.
Reddish, bluish dewy purple!
Oh, velvet fire, sweet abyss, undulating sea of plush fur,
veiled devouring silk, smothering avalanche of cotton candy,
corrugated fold to the other world, fleshy sky of the deep.
He knocks and knocks softly, softly, then harder and harder.
Meanwhile he forgets his way. He knocks, keeps on knocking.
Nobody replies, nothing. He knocks, pounds. And forgets everything.
Falls. Collapses. Is lost. 
Blind, surrounded by terrifying magnetic darkness.    
Feels just the scorching heat. Fire. 
Meltdown. Disaster. He gives up the ghost.
There on the threshold.
It’s only then that the blue angel opens up
her delicious and beautiful palate and explodes.
What rainbows, flowery vibrations, spewing fountains!
41
What a golden flash, what froth of light, what starry lace!
She goes to the angel. The empress goes to her red and green
emperor. To suck in the drop. The drop of gold. Redemption.

To be in me,
warm breath,
hot whirlpool in a forgotten cavern,
to know my inner form,
to make me feel a circular vault, a holy cathedral.
Scarified light in the dark,
taking a leap into nothingness,
this act into myself, this act into yourself—
you make me cosmic.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Magda Cârneci)

42
LIVIU ANTONESEI

ON THE ANNIVERSARY

She appears every night

with steaming arms and flaming lips
the sound of the world’s bell, blue
each night
as we spread out soberly on the grass.

Night fills the golden skin

cool night
in my flaming arms she’s shaken
a thousand barbarian kisses shut tight
and I feel out of my mind again.

In her ravine a spasmodic throbbing

beneath my never-ending touch a scar—
an infinite rhythm, queer
and melodic
conducted by love’s single star.

She appears every morning

with sweet eyes like a flaming beacon
while I am swallowed gently
recoiling
I tremble all over, hear
my teeth chattering.

She is more beautiful than death

and her song has no end—
43
we sink deeply, luminescent
is the night’s breadth
as time ceaselessly and forever stopped.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Martin Woodside)

44
 MARCH OF THE SWEET RAVINE

She has a thousand pairs of legs

with a deep grotto, clearing and forest
in the middle of each set.
But I, one by one, will pass
in the sea, immersed in the rhythm.

She has mountains and valleys, staggering peaks,

smooth silk fields.
I wander like that crazy Jew
climbing and sliding
the proprietor of a million thighs.

She is all grotto, a valley enflamed—

like a defeated pasha, there you remain
like an elephant, like a serpent.
The untouchable is touched again
my soul hovering over the water’s surface.

You can’t lose her in oblivion,

in the memory you can’t kill—
one by one, I pass them still
a thousand pairs of legs.
The night is deep, with translucent eons.

She has a thousand pairs of legs,

rounded peaks and valleys,
silk fields that never end—
I spin like mad in endless circles.
45
You can’t lose her in oblivion,
in the memory you can’t kill—
you dive deeply in that grotto
as into the vast stomach of the whale.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Martin Woodside)

46
TEODOR DUNĂ

AS THE SALT MURMURS IN THE SEA

as the salt murmurs in the sea, so does your heart

you take me in your arms, tell me we are equally cold,
meaning the cold is for both of us.
we almost touch, you show me your wounds, so well-nursed,
you’ve taken such good care of them,
you’ve tamed and groomed them,
they resemble pets—and we gaze at each other as through overturned bottles.

you rest your wounds next to me

and rested we carry entire banquets.

this night is too ancient, you say.

and your hands seem to offer handfuls
of frozen birds—you ask me
to dress you in wild vine,
I cannot, I tell you,
I show you how rooted we are the long rest that remains.

I very nearly take you in my arms,

I very nearly recoil from your wounds.
and we gaze at each other, how else but through overturned bottles.
not a word from our lips.
and as the salt murmurs in the seas, so does your heart.

(Translated by Martin Woodside, Alina-Olimpia Miron, and Monica Rusu)

47
 THE FLOATING

from now on we are just two holes, my love, you wear

an evening dress and I carry you over
these fields of roses. you want only to float.
this silence makes you more beautiful than ever.
I usher you among the may flowers.
and look, all this silence that kiss pressed on living flesh.

but long awaited is this love and all ours.

we merely float over these fields of roses.
only some rotted. the others grow wild
and in our embrace the hands become soft,
brittle. with every touch our fingers wipe out slowly.
you should know we won’t return.
it’s only a pause between the rains, my love,
from now on we are just two holes.
Simply step on me and I will open beneath your soles.

we’ll be half naked, half in darkness,

and at your edge, I will speak to you through the silence of our hands
a dead man’s love for his dead beloved.

(Translated by Martin Woodside, Alina-Olimpia Miron and Monica Rusu)

48
 in sickness you move slowly like in a woman

your body glides in those gestures, in her cold hand

reeking of the outdoors,
covering you up with the blanket, resting her hand on your forehead
and with all your body’s warmth
lying in wait for the lingering descent of her hair.

in sickness you move slowly like in a woman

and your body is bent forward
as if it did not know how to make its way
through the fog. and you hear the wings
ever closer, beating against the skin as the skin
settles over you like the first snow of winter,
as though falling into
oblivion rushing towards you.

it was hot
and she was sailing into the night.

(Translated by Martin Woodside, Alina-Olimpia Miron and Monica Rusu)

49
COSMIN PERȚA

A POEM MUCH TOO SHORT

And now I reflect on beheading,

something that could happen to anyone,
in any reality.

Near her ebony hair, Sulamita, near her thighs,

the moist young water lily will open wide
and the honey, Sulamita, from now on the honey
will trickle down the streets of the kingdom.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ruxandra Cesereanu)

50
 THIRD POEM ALSO TOO SHORT

You, Sulamita, you’re dressed in the swaddling of a shroud

And I undress you with my teeth,
You, Sulamita, you’re dressed in sweet smelling hemp
And I deflower you with my hands.

Winter is gone, Sulamita,

From now on, red currant blossoms will appear as a blessing,
Red currants will be a carpet at our feet,
From now on, Sulamita, spring
Will show itself from the top of the ears
And settle itself on the tongue,
And from now on, Sulamita,
Only with the voice of songbirds,
Only with the voice of fish,
Will our tongue speak.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ruxandra Cesereanu)

51
II. DISCONTINOUS BLUES
ANGELA MARINESCU

BLUES
[PAPER SMELL IMPREGNATED BLUES]

Got the paper smell impregnated blues

of Paco de Lucia’s guitar and of
your power to hide behind that circus-clown’s mask
I can feel for sure what I’m up to right now
no more and no less
at a steady yet ill-boding pace
of most sophisticated carnal pleasures when
your chest hair, its scent
blended with cigarette smoke
gave me an unspeakable intoxication of the senses,
while sliding, carefully, down the middle line,
I mean the brown line of your belly,
I could have reached a hole, a lake, a fountain,
but ran instead into a tower upside down by nature,
so frequently encountered and yet so hard
to predict how hard, that I choked.
I pet your head, your hands and even the long and soft soles of your feet,
I pet your house, your colorless flower,
almost black in the window box,
your pale gaze like a sick man who doesn’t know just how sick he really is,
and I pet them painlessly, thriftily, unenviously
although I may actually fall short of all of the above
except some kind of care that may replace
the defying feeling of desire
the passion of what’s left after a house fire,
the roughness of intercourse, for they say sex
is rough
55
and even this far-away edge of the world, so forsaken for at least a century
from now, if not forever.
Oh, and your rooster treads with my feet,
and your trumpet is played by my lips,
and your lovers make love to you with my hands.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Magda Crețu)

56
 BLUES
[IN ABYSMAL PAIN I RELIVE MY PURSUITS]

In abysmal pain I relive my pursuits,

the way I tried to escape my parents and sister, my friends since
they expected me to be less dependent,
less passionate,
and, perhaps, more decorous, considerate, fond
of gentle and gluttonous old men.
the divine light shining on top of the hills
whenever I looked
obsessively, and gloomed by an ever exacerbated
liveliness similar to that of all
the diseased, still spins around my waistline
which even now I bear
well, and at ease.
and the rusty color, similar to the one of the blood
on the movie stars’ lips,
of the leaves fallen to the ground
in genuinely strange whirls
reminds me of your strong hands
which would hold tight
my way too thin, way too senseless ankles and thighs.
I wanted to be the nun inside the murderous whore
who writes perfect pages
paying no thought to the wicked fruit of glory, and also
the floozy who can summon erotic mists from the mind
of any mother superior in a monastery,
a settlement full
of mountain wildflowers or from a village incomparably less known
57
than a child’s soul.
and when I think of all the beauty
that meanwhile feels like a knife
turned in the wound letting out
blood-cleansed words,
I realize how pithless the madness
of having skipped books
skipped years during which I was nearly sane, although I wasn’t,
skipped any gesture of politeness so precise that I could have
translated it into erotic sign language
or the other way round.
(Translated by MARGENTO and Magda Crețu)

58
MARIAN DRĂGHICI

THE GAME OF BILLIARDS IN THE RUSSIAN FOREST

Without complicity
even without your knowledge
through adoration I have possessed you night after night (yes, adoration)
and occasionally in the daytime too if I happened
to drink
to blow it up at a booze
at a time when drinks sink like water and,
if you slide under the table it means your choose
to commit suicide.

But I loved you most through images of flesh and blood, a rogue –
like for instance on one night in the winter of this year
playing an endless game of billiards with Yasmina
Sorotchina, at a hunting lodge
in the Russian forest. Exactly as in fairy-tales or in poetry
outside the birch-trees were creaking with the frost
under bluish stars, naked
very much as naked Yasmina sang and smiled as if beau-
tified
with the vodka
with orgasmic snare—I don’t know if

in the pause between the rounds

throwing a log into the fire
with the grace of her race
she brought about a stronger twinkle—after impact—
in the eyes of the stuffed animals
59
in that, nevertheless intimate, bedroom.
That is how I conquered the empire: through the act.
(Translated by Andrei Bantaș)

60
 SOMETHING MORE REAL THAN NOTHINGNESS

Perhaps nevertheless there is

something more real than nothingness, Mr.Beckett,
the love of a woman who no longer is
(death has not separated us, nor has oblivion)
and whom you suddenly miss so much that
you’d rather leave the earth

you’d rather leave the earth

but the times has not come yet It is enough to say
perhaps I shall soon see your face, my beloved,
as so many times I have faced death
on the firing and shooting days of the revolt
while wondering in the streets hoping to find you again
yes I will find you again
somewhere far away in the evening after death
by a small fire of dry sticks by the spring
absolutely hidden from people protected from them
absolutely protected from wild beasts
only with the twinkle of the stars above and in your movements
with the grace
of original nakedness.

(Translated by Andrei Bantaș)

61
ROMULUS BUCUR

DITTY

my love is a tiny plant

come up from a drop of semen
having landed into your womb
it can grow too in a plastic cup
with seaside sand
watered also with
seawater
perhaps this is a way of offering you
earth & water
an empty beach at sunset
on which (I dream) we’re walking
hand in hand until we get lost
in the meantime love grew up
and can take care
of itself

(Translated by Romulus Bucur)

62
 ***

she’s caressing you with infinite

tenderness smiles mysteriously
making lazy moves
in the morning’s warm light
as if swimming in honey
I’m now exploring a new dimension
my sexuality
I’m sampling you
I like wearing your t-shirt I thus borrow
your smell
you’ve shown her your erogenous areas
she didn’t (find them out)
(Damn I think I love you)
you remember a friend having
told you your karma
gets entangled with that of every woman
you ejaculated into
you’re thinking at
all your partners
and their partners
and further their partners it amounts to
a whole www of sexual organs
which you reduce decidedly
to the world of sentimental ads
coffee drunk together
baby footwear a cushion thrown at one’s head
and so on

(Translated by Romulus Bucur)

63
SIMONA POPESCU

IN REPLY TO THE OLD ROGUE

“Write about love, why don’t you write about love?”

asked the old rogue.
The old rogue has written a lot about love,
he has always written about
his love for one woman and then for another and then another.
Has he ever encountered love, that old rogue?
What is love?
What would the old rogue say, the one who always writes about
his new, always unhappy love?
Is unhappiness love, old rogue?
Does love last until the ode is finished? Or the cycle of poems?

Listen old rogue, love has been good to me.

Good love is not good for literature.

Shall I intone hymns to my man, the one and only?

So that you’ll hear them, old rogue?
Why would we want you to hear them, old rogue?

Do you recall those three poets and their “love

poetry“ that maître Ezra Pound once wrote about?

Candidia has taken a new lover

And three poets are gone into mourning,
The first has written a long elegy to “Chloris.”
To “Chloris chaste and cold,” his “only Chloris”.
The second has written a sonnet
64
 upon the mutability of woman,
And the third writes an epigram to Candidia.

What I’d tell you right now, old rogue, about love
is only
that it is
something
those three poets could
not write about.

(Translated by MARGENTO)

65
 EPHEBE WITH CYPRIPEDIUM

Sweet ephebe, dear good friend,

shall I compare thee to what?
There’s nothing to be measured against your cleanly beauty
and no filly
could in any way compete with you. That’s why I find
to be around you
while all you do is loaf in your own world
laughing and waving those fingers lightly
as if playing an invisible syrinx oh so good to seek. You pamper yourself
and then stare in the air just
like a smooth statue; you start to dance in the half light
all by yourself, like a… cynaedus
or a bird in love.
You can’t be touched by either men or women
and everything around you feels so rude.
I watch you with a thoughtless mind
just as one day I watched the pure
and mild concupiscence of a plant bearing
a name so funny, and yet so ethereal –
the femininely virile cypripedium
lost somewhere in a flower
shop window.

Dance, my dear friend! A stroboscope

divides you like a ghost. That is your beauty
manifold (an 18-year old—I keep recalling—Shiva).
You’ll be away tomorrow.
Your long and fragrant hair will pile up on some grimy concrete floor
66
your locks will meet a barber’s greasy hand
some brutish drill instructor will surely give you hell,
some old doctor will take time weighing,
groping you on the sly,
some stocky soldiers will tap you on the shoulder.
They’ll drill you
almost kill you,
you, lazy one, will learn about virtus and labor.
They’ll make a man out of you and then
you’ll be chased by Priapus in the fall of his life
and by stupid languid wives…

Now you look like a dancing shadow

a filigree hidden in a Fauvist painting.
I would just wrap you up in a song
and forget you.

Let me think of you as the boy who

on a smoky day was reading much too serenely
while a distant bossa nova rhythm was playing
something by Charles d’Orléans
(“Le monde est ennuyé de moy
   Et moy pareillement lui“
well, who knows?)

Dear good friend,

neither boy nor girl,
Endymion
whom I lock in my mind
to stare at you
67
at your pure beauty
thoughtless
as if in a flower shop window.

In a mute, convoluted song I’d wrap you up

and thus forget you.

(Translated by MARGENTO)

68
ȘTEFAN MANASIA

LITTLE GYPSY GIRL POEM

wooden beads around her much too slender neck. she prances between bags swollen like bellies.
the armpit glares in the toxic sun. she drags around her bags full of phantasms under the city’s
locusts. manasia sees her and thinks, as usually, about angels.

her arms are blackened by the sun,

made of scorched earth.
through her eyes a death idol watches one,
violent, miraculous.

i bet she gets kissed only by mouths

reeking under the influence.
i bet her breast gets ripped by sixteen-
karat gold teeth.

in her hut under the bridge

come day the night still lingers on the walls
cockroaches are the souls of each
one who’d come drunk to do it anal.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Ioana Cosma)

69
 WHEN YOU GET

when YOU get

home the moon sticks
hieroglyphs onto your face

when YOU
carry horribly heavy bags
back home

and behind you

the firm turns on its neon lights
the company owner
tells the doorman
bye and leaves

when YOU get back home again

bags heavy
soul empty
and mean
like a coltsfoot flower

paralyzed by nervousness
I forget to kiss
your hand

I even forget to unzip

the zipper of your tall boots
I forget to take your black overcoat
and hang it in the rack
70
cannibal & rather handsome
I stayed home waiting for
you a whole afternoon

just as others waited

on a grassy bank for the death
of the one they had always hated
(a father or maybe a mother)
what do we care

smiling
all along
in a darwinian & convenient manner
trying to unzip
the zipper
that wouldn’t come down

for just as others once passed their sins

through the needle’s eye,
so we will smuggle our own lives -
I whispered to you.
and then, my girl, then I would sing to you again:

when YOU get back home again

bags heavy
soul empty
and mean
like a coltsfoot flower

(Translated by MARGENTO and Ioana Cosma)

71
DOINA IOANID

IT’S HIGH TIME YOU WORE EARINGS

(fragments)

I am waiting for you in the park in a medley of young moms and children and grannies and
cyclists; waiting for you as flat as a drawing. A girl orbits a ring and unfolds in its shimmering waters.
A fragile silhouette between two tramway cars. By degrees I am losing my substance—can’t even match
that of coffee and milk. Still, you turn up on time, picking your way past all those strutting women,
propelled by their beauty, past magnificent babies, and come to a stop right before me. You bring me
stiletto shoes and teach me to walk without twisting my ankles. My tender-boned ankles which you’re
following blindly and don’t even try to escape the fine mesh of my stockings. You’re allowing my voice
and my scars and the daft things I say to seduce you. You tell me you’re plastered, but as yet I don’t know
what that means. Plastered, but I ain’t touched no drop. And you’re crushing my fingers.

The houses and asphalt were wet with the frost of October. Passersby in their trench coats
had flocked to the café attempting escape in their coffees, the blues and the white flesh of women.
Glinting cigarette cases tucked into black garters would snap now and again while smoke languidly
licked the thighs of the women and fanned out all over their heavy-eyed faces. You and I, in the thick
of the crowd, unravelling between us the glimmer of mohair pullovers, the sluggish gestures of our
peeling the plaster off walls. Acquiring the bodies from the milky white light. The yeast-like whiff
was hovering over the waiter’s brass knobs. Enjoying the day’s weariness. One next to the other. Our
touching thighs drifting into the distance like streamlined canoes.

March has only just started, but I am already preparing for spring. I’ve stripped down to a
flimsy dress freely allowing your every wish through. And today I am frivolous Kiki for you, dancing
at the Bal Nègre. No gesture is ridiculous enough or too indecent. Nor can the rain, just beginning to
fall, prevent me from whirling around you like a dazed dragonfly.

There was a time I thought it a light matter to grab up my things and move out. A last-resort
gesture deferred every time. Till I wound up as a bale stuffed full of old rags, random memories and
72
all sorts of texts. It was all I could do to balance myself. And—as if that hadn’t been already enough—
everything seemed to be clinging to me: snatches of conversations, labels, recipes, cut-out newspaper
scraps. Even the fibres unseen in the reinforced concrete of the block had shot out towards me twining
around my wrists and my ankles. My smothered body had run out of the strength it took to shake itself
free. And it’s simply amazing how you could reach my skin and managed to remove layer after layer,
stripping me down to my scream.

Walking across the field under the sweltering sun. I’m resting my cheek on your arm. Truth to
tell, I’m not all that exhausted, but I’m only pretending, so that I can sniff at your scent under the blue
sky. The cicadas are chirping. Soles inflamed with the heat, we’re tenderer still than the clover we’re
treading. There’s nothing we can reach for apart from the thoughts haunting us and these our bodies
searching for each other all the time—though they appear to have learned each other by heart. We’ve
made it to the river at last. Soles plunged in cold water, thoughts no longer stampede (could be they
are running downstream in the distance).

We’ll go on loving each other, until our skin falls apart, until we dwindle to gnomes good to
frighten the children. Until our hearts burst and shrink to scarlet hot lumps, tumbling forever all over
the world, gathering grasses, lost gestures and all sorts of debris.

(Translated by Florin Bican)

73
IULIAN FRUNTAȘU

********
*****

in a harsh winter
such a blizzard that I couldn’t see
the houses across the street
their outline, uncertain
love without words without
hello or good-bye
only the wood cracking in the stove
Jan Garbarek and Ustad Fateh Ali Khan
with Ragas&Sagas

the bottle of wine on the floor and our clothes

tired
in bed
I made out nothing but your silhouette
the sensation of a happy delusion
as if I were invincible
at the far limits of sleep, of death
with a hand on your white abdomen
and with another

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Iulian Fruntașu)

74
 THE POEM OF THE ATTIC

the movements searing sliding into different parts

the stains on the bed linen drove aunt Vera nuts
walking half-naked through the neighborhood
mumbling furiously
fuckers, insane fuckers, when the hell will they die

I was telling you about love which lives inside us like

a fox in the lair,
sleeping, though when it wakes, bites and licks the reddish blood
and our bodies roll from night to night
like aunt Vera’s water-melons on the asphalt below
she is old and fat an old woman who pees standing up
I remember her shouting
Where are you little devil? When will ya mother take ya for good
and going behind the house to the shed where they made plum brandy
drip-dropping
filling the paunchy, or, if you prefer, sulky jars

but I was telling you about the love which lives inside us
like Russian dolls never-ending nesting one inside the other and so very beautiful—
when other movements sear and slide into different parts
your mouth will be a reddish attic stretching to smile

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Iulian Fruntașu)

75
III. SEMIOTICS OF EROS
EMILIAN GALAICU-Păun

THE POEM OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

singularly alone in the night when she spreads open her legs, one more without beginning and end
than the other, like two world
wars—transcribed between them those twenty-one years of his when he entered her, the interwar
period, he cuts the precise measure of her gait, the line of the thigh, the bird in space of air in the emp-
tiness between
the legs, as, with a german das ewig weibliche, his french pronunciation
gets polished (chercher la femme)—a comparison which will be of inspiration to him owing to the birthmark
in the form of a tank along the flesh inside her shank, its barrel pointed straight up, aiming at her sex
(a story of gesture: a hand applied to the belly of the young
math teacher exactly at lesson time when, dividing it in two,
a column of soviet tanks had entered the village, so as to
safeguard her pregnancy/the fetus in the maternal turret of cha(i)r twitching for the first time at her
touch,
she who, at the blackboard, a stick of chalk between her fingers—herself as if coated with lime—
explains: “two parallel lines never intersec...”)
in her maidenhood, the girl curses damn my mama’s birth/prays O Lord,
Mother of God. she lets her name be tanka even though it’s mary. in the name of The Holy Virgin, she
wears the two
wars—the left with the waricose vein!—through the very heart of town, graceful and indifferent to
time’s passing—zebra crosswalk of
white days and black—under the oblique fire of men’s glances—my mama always said, “from cat
and man you must separate yourself upon your entrance, otherwise you can’t escape either”—as if
crossing
a minefield without a map, closed within her own shell—tank-woman from birth—like a goddess
robed in armor. iron-
clad by her mama’s birth! carelessly as if her mother had never been pregnant with her nor
the Virgin Mary with the One born but not conceived (a story of love: how the emptiness
between his legs took as wife her emptiness, mistress of all, in the sense that like attracts like).
history proceeds with a woman’s gait; in ’89, on the 7th of November, during
the military parade, bedded beneath the tanks, beside the hundred others taken in the carriage

79
of the officer ulysses spending himself according to his (how many?) horsepower up to his epaulettes:
“this man treads lightly, not f...!”;
raised upright in ’91, at the same time as the state, golem inscribed/traced with
a finger in the dust, fitted solely for the name “(w)(o)rm”; so as not to see
the mark of the beast? the warix? on the legs, black earth clinging to boots drawn up
over the eyes (Requiescat in pace!); on the roads (not a road leads to rome
except via albania!) in recent years; in-gathered
with knees drawn up to the mouth, as if rocking a pair of twins just torn away from her nipples.
in her power—conception; only writing has been granted for his handiwork.
And then, after he enters under her skin, it comes about that, in the tank
along the inside her shank, the engines start, the pistons thrust, he shoots, aiming at her sex
(the poem of the immaculate conception tears itself

from the lips: “open me!”)

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cârstea)

80
MARTA PETREU

HUNTING IN THE SNOW

Father, I say:
my men—the living and the dead—hunt me

the living and the dead surround me

they sniff my black armpits my insomnia my weeping
Listen carefully to me:
today (today only) I’m the prize game
the flesh painted with wild poppies
today I’m the trophy in a collar paraded with great pomp all the world over

Yes. Under my skin I wear

a polar winter immense violet snowflakes
Under my skin I wear a snowfall infinitely divisible like amoebas in rut
Oho. Self-fear. The worn-out skin tight like a shirt of chain mail
Under my epidermis I wear my memory the carbon black the eternal slime
Yes, I wear myself under my skin

and I say to myself: there’s no point there’s no point there’s no point

There’s no point to loving them: they crush the wild honey out of the new honeycombs
they suck the warm bloody marrow from the bone
they babble swallow snarl sleep
Who knows how to resist?
Oho. They gouge the skin cut the wild beast’s mane gorge on the flesh to the bare bone
(I love you—I’ve been told. I suppose it might be true,
But self-fear oho fear that unique identity of mine remains
forevermore within me)

81
Father
I’m your still living body
And I dwell dead center in the target
They: your hunters in the snow
meat-eaters on this fast-day
your beaters your crack shots

Disguised in a bride’s chemise my body inhabits the heart of the circle

I’m not in love: I don’t love them they don’t love me

I want to hide

Oho. This famished pack has driven me inside myself again

my knees drawn up to my chin I await them
I lie. I lie to myself that it’s I who am the hunter
not the winter trophy the honey sleeping in sweet honeycombs the flesh
blooming into huge wild poppies indecent like a man’s severed head
I fantasize that I’m the hunter
not the delicate neck adorned with a studded choker

My insomnia is the snow dazzling in the sun

my memory—a scaly skin cracked and tight
a shirt of mail

Yes. Oxidized metal worn under my skin directly on the flesh

Father: the living and the dead hunt me
This I know: my body will betray me

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Liviu Bleoca)

82
 MARTA’S EVERYDAY DRESS

Look for me. It’s morning in the world

The earth
and a sadness as heavy as the earth weigh down upon me
With your bare hands with a shovel with oars please remove from me
the six feet of earth
the six feet of sadness
the six feet of cotton print of my holiday dress

For together they crush me and suffocate me

Lift me up in your arms—in the world it’s morning—bring me forth into the light
wash me with warm water
just as they wash
the newborn and the dead

Yes. Look for me. I need you. Glue words one to another
make sentences glue the sentences to my skin
write with saliva if you have to yes write with your tongue
write a letter a book a plea:
this will be my dress

Marta’s everyday dress

Hold me in your arms embrace me twist me up like a rag doll

for both of us it’s late it’s so very late we sit here at the edge
yes give me this second chance:

perhaps like Lazarus I shall rise again and live

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Christina Zarifopol-Illias)

83
FLOAREA ȚUȚUIANU

SEXY(OXY)MORON

In the beginning she was a woman with legs on her shoulders

She took his head in her hands and flipped him upside-down
took his lips with her fingers then blew kisses
and thrust her tongue into his ears until
steaming him up—words were loosed

Her body winked at him with an interior eye

Oh he watched her through verses Oh passed her from light

to thought’s shadow Oh fixed her between his eyelashes and
Oh with eternal sadness penetrated her Oh in the fiery zero
between two words—(w)hole(ly)
(and could not save himself)

As the text kept throbbing

holy    wholly    holey    holy
the body withdrew exhausted from between the words

In the end he was a man with head fallen

silent in a perfect tongue

they had heaven on their soles and the taste of earth on their tongue

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti)

84
 THE ONE WHO

The cage of my ribs

is the perfect glass case for him to look out of
and in his turn be looked at (people see him now living, now dying)

He is the first among men

to reach me with his mind walking on water

My breasts are in his hands

and with my breasts he’s dividing the waters from dry land, the word from the sign

I have for him (stored away safely) this great void in my stomach –
the lump in his throat as he sees me depart or come back

For better and for worse he’s my fish run aground

entering me good measure at first running over pressed down

(Translated by Florin Bican)

85
DANIELA CRĂSNARU

WITHOUT EQUAL1

I can no longer wait for you.

There’s no more time.
I’ll behave like a whore
when they appear,
the consummate cavaliers.
The sleep, the abyss,
the sublime darkness.
What passionate lovers
they will be. Without equal.
Without equal their embrace,
a perfect mixture
of ferocity and grace.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Daniela Crăsnaru)

1. “Without Equal” from Sea-Level Zero, translation copyright 1999 by Adam J. Sorkin, BOA Editions, Ltd.,
www.boaeditions.org.
86
NICOLAE COANDE

NARROW SOLES

Narrow soles, the snow in the courtyard shows you were here
last night,
your bared shoulders lighting an empire,
drawers filled with small kisses wrapped carefully,
the cracked moon
spills over the bed I cannot sleep in
preoccupied with unraveling the body, its philosophical ways
and its delicate contortions,
you can’t sink twice in the same waters
of the same woman,
you can’t think the same way about two ghosts,
narrow soles invade the sheets, the writing and something that
cannot be fully named in this poem.
Isn’t it odd to write about you while being read
by three women
none knowing the other?
Would you call this the absent trinity?
I shall abandon any pretense to call it at all.
The book writes itself,
infamy falls asleep beneath small footsteps in the snow
while hands search for you in a silver bowl
turned over.

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Lia Elena Boangiu)

87
 THE BRIDGE

The most beautiful Russian girl in the world lives in Germany

tucked in a safe with a Cyrillic cipher. The Germans still bang their heads
against a wall over it. Even so, her hands weave a bridge to me, her blue eyes
break the code that holds her hostage. The sapphire holds its breath
awhile. An epidemic of kisses.
Her mouth drinks in the white wine left in a glass on Böll’s veranda,
in forests where the bear cuts honey with a crosscut saw,
those hands still search for me, as on New Year’s Eve, 2004,
when I went through three endings and as many rebirths.
Solzhenitsyn regards us pensively from a photograph: our Russian comrades
remain the world’s most prodigious drinkers.
She is Rasputin’s woman, but can’t forget me. Her heart
is the grass in which reindeers graze
then eaten in the finest restaurants in Paris.
The art, of course, is to bind together three countries that can’t stand each other.
Her dancing lights up the hidden warheads in Siberia, but her hands
quickly choke everything. For her it’s winter, when the meteorites fell.
For an entire night I watched her smoking and singing
for two years. A Bundeskanzlerin with Romanian moving
in her hips,
her back the bow dropped from Rostropovich’s hand
in a room where the heart listens back turned hears how
the Baikal’s sphincter begets crises in Asia.
I sit in a cellar and write how I can miss
a bridge
the Volga beneath and a ship pulled downstream by two tiny breasts.

(Translated by MARGENTO, Martin Woodside, and Lia Elena Boangiu)

88
MARGENTO

Oral Sex between Times and Places

Look these words are my fingers

take them in your mouth

kissing your hand is never enough enough

though to turn you into my second tongue

shut up, please talk, but only to me you are

the organ I taste the world with

you watch the moon and I swallow its salt cracker

you scorch my kiss and the sun sets deep behind my lungs…

there’s not much time left, faster!, since we are the future
history of parallel universes’ inter

sections so hard to keep secret with all them researchers into it

that know everything about us do they? what we do in our home

let me tell you no let me do it it’s 10

to the minus seventeenth power of a second of the big

bang their gang don’t know about the rest

is common knowledge listen that will be our second

coming our instant multiple climax for our whole

families to join remember my grandpa a refugee

89
 from Bessarabia fleeing from his Soviet pursuers
still had to stop by a cousin’s wedding party to wolf

down some lamb chops guzzle some red wine then rush off we’ll catch
him (what about the others yes what about them) there when we’re done

running up and down each other’s

hungry chattery body for good. Oh yeah, you believe that.

(Translated by MARGENTO)

90
 The Sparta of Love

To see or rather to be seen said Ovid about the ladies going to the
theater and thus he saw the end of his career; at a quarry… somewhere in
eastern Romania; deported far enough not to be heard from ever again just
another traveler in the Danube—Black Sea Canal hard labor camp

like harmony in music; there is a dark

sea buried under certain people’s skin; maybe yours too; I’ll wait for  the
low tide and let the water suck me in and carry me away into your liver,
decompose there and get you drunk with my worst fears, pregnant
from Radu Gyr’s last line of prison poetry howling in my scars... I’ll carve
my monastery into your Mount Venus to hover like a hermit intruder over
the wooden faces over the dim aisle between the screeching hemispheres
of your brain cells

inscrutable labor that reconciles

most dangerous elements clinging together in one secret society… Not I,

not I, but the keen wind that blows through me, blowing the new direction in
the world politics… that subterranean wind strong enough to carry a
mountain away and leave behind a singed bottom of half-hell will birth
us both again. You’ll shed Gellu Naum’s snake skin and coil like a fresh artery around the
fountain of my heart. We’re there now, aren’t we ready for

the heresy in our eyes

(Translated by MARGENTO)

91
Adela Greceanu

Understanding straight from the heart

- fragments -

(…)
Together we climbed a narrow staircase, to a garden. Me first. I raised my arms and opened the wings
of my garments. “How beautifully you climb!”
I fill myself with thick golden perfume. Viscid light pours out the sides of my mouth. Light works at
me, weaves me into thousands of fine threads. Fluttering like foliage
penetrated by the sun. As if I held rays.
His eyes are blue like the sky reflecting the earth.
That first evening he offered me a tab of chewing gum: “Will you have dinner with me?”
(…)
I wake up at night in the rhythm between writing and living. Hearing the rhythm, he
comes to me.
He says I don’t need calcium three times a day, I need to be happy.
(…)
I have the reactions of a young beast unaccustomed to womanly refinements. My anger is clean and
healthy. I show him. Those women who tell him they don’t mind, who pretend to accept anything,
do so only to keep him. In fact, they don’t accept and don’t understand anything and so it begins, a
demonstration of feminine malignancy.
I take the bracelet off my hand to put it around my ankle. Too tight. I try
to cover my ankle with my hand. There’s space left for a finger. They say the man
who can cover all of a woman’s ankle is her ideal mate. I recall what I can catch with my fingers.

Sometimes, when I go to a terrace with greenery all around, the air becomes as it was
when we met.
As the blood from one body is replaced with the blood of another.
I’m through with fear and its fears.
Sometimes his face can be seen through my skin. As one time, looking in the mirror,
92
I had his smile, his entire look from one morning in the woods.
I feel you golden inside me. You are the weightless fruit of my womb. Yet I am beyond woman, and no
longer exist for sadness and fear.
(…)
We’ll find a bicycle to carry us on the sea. Its wheels will roll over the waters and, from time to time,
they’ll dig a hollow.
(…)
The woman inside me does not sleep. She can turn into a beast for she is cunning. And she can steal
my art to satisfy her vanity.
(…)
I wish we shared the same love as between men.
I’ve had several ways of crying. One performed by the woman with horns. I’ve learnt to recognize it.
That one, I don’t take too seriously. I behave like a strong man
who knows that crying, if taken seriously, will seek revenge.
I carry within me the name I would have if born as a boy.
He tells me sometimes “hey, old man!”
I’ve started feeling what he feels. I saw a blond woman and felt how
he would have liked her. And I liked her too.
This double feeling infuriated me.
I’m as watchful as his heart.

(…)
Sometimes he opens like a peach of flesh, oozing blood and nerves.
(…)
When I think of you, I fill myself with honey. I know how you feel me. I am water that finds you, soaks
you and drains you with flux and reflux.
Under its skin the earth has something that feels the water reaching it. Under my flesh there is some-
thing that lets me feel what your blood feels caressing my flesh. There
I am your twin.
When our mixed waters rest, one can see warm-blooded fish, well fed, floating
close to the surface.
From now on everything I eat is sweet and fluid, first soaked in thick saliva.
93
(…)
Burn your lusts so your soul remains pure, dry, without its slippery oils. I begin
to taste with his taste.
When I write, I push the film with the end of the pencil the light sheath surrounding me like carbon
paper. So the imprint of my breath becomes visible.

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Adrian Urmanov)

94
MIRUNA VLADA

PLEURA

„I was the ozone of his feeble lungs”

(Queen Mary of Romania—The Story of My Life)

my breath tenderly stripped off my trachea

with no spine with not even the colour of living through things
sluggishly drips down the back of your neck you gulp down

an amnesiac love causes our nails

to stop growing
sends our veins throbbing wildly

your pleurae snap open

forgive me
my love shot from the hips
it was like a stone for your lungs
take the other stone off me
tuck it into your white pleurae
plant it into my womb like a skinned foetus

your breath has the strong hips of a woman. It gives birth to me.

my pleura an eyelid of death

drips
I am the sweat the suffocation
I strip off my fevers just like a bride

95
suffer me to dip your lungs into the Jordan
you need to survive
we need to love our cross
allow the pleura to make us into scar tissue
allow love to heal us from begging

in a world in which fences

are higher than houses
flesh means more than my heart

come out of me
go to the window
dive
come back
you’ll only find the breath with woman stains
as if my body got caught in my eyeteeth
as if my lungs were the house of our love
and the fences were you and I too
“under your pleura air creaks like an orphanage door
we are also the children forgiveness the mothers
they’re bound to imagine their breasts
reminiscent of swallow nests”

donate your lungs now to the church in your neighbourhood

(Translated by Florin Bican)

96
 LYCRA

shed next to the bed the black lycra tights

preserving still intact the sly mould of the toes
the reinforced dome of the heel
it is femininity itself that hugs the thighs
these thighs may well hide some murder
a twitch of the transparent thread connecting
his heart to my legs

the night stuffed into its lycra tights

the clock’s ticking away in the night stuffed into the black circles spreading all over the face
the skin-coloured tights
like a pile of steaming hormones
still keeping murderously intact
the shape of the toes and the heels
black tights are the circles under the morning’s eyes greedily placed by the bed

the stomach’s woman, hunger itself

I cannot forget the puddles the merry-go-round

the world is small and green
we hold each other’s hands tightly
the people around us slowly undress
they take off their mouths
they cut off their kisses
I’m having my first bath in hot water
someone is wringing me dry howling with laughter

the liquefied scream tangles up into knots

sounds are clinging like lint to the clothes to the skin
97
we hold each other’s hands tightly go round each other
your mechanical looks are slicing me up
next to the bed tights are wriggling
I swallow a kiss slice I swallow the tights

it’s never over when we want it to be over

it’s over when we’re born
women don’t hear these words
they do not discern the shameless stench of lycra tights
violence resides within me like a livid blue child

it’s mind-blowing the shape of the thighs inside lycra tights

a tenebrous nest a nest of oblivion
and the hole-ridden chest pocket
an enormous sore eating away at whatever
clusters of sins are the hairclips in her golden-blond hair
(the total poem beyond the accuracy of language
hangs blocked in the larynx)

the black lycra skin you are shedding

as you gape with each howl
next to the bed of the ones feeding you
I am resting my voice against the wound
seared but slightly I’m enjoying myself
I cannot forget the disgust with which you cried in my womb—not getting dry

it isn’t the dead I am writing about but the oozing desire

on one leg chastity with one eye plucked out on the other—the black lycra temptation
giggling like mad

(Translated by Florin Bican)

98
IV. ERUPTIVE MYTHOLOGIES
NORA IUGA

SAM DID YOU PAY THE ELECTRIC BILL YOU ASKED

minodora do you remember

how you’d peck my hump in the mornings
inside you could hear the nile murmuring
the palm trees and small yellow vipers
like ladies’ garters
and the voice of ramses
freshly arisen from sleep
when he’d just dreamt about you
in his triangular skivvies
where god’s eye was blinking
do you remember how we’d walk together to work
we’d eat pretzels with sesame seeds
and you’d lift the night from your eyes a little
sam did you pay the electric bill you asked
you were chaste and I sweet-talked you
I was taken by your darkness
I wallowed in it
until I reached that alternate hemisphere
where twenty little boys waited
sharpened their pencils
and wanted to know what ramses was up to
I replied he’s on the phone

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti)

101
 MINODORA IS A SMALL BAIT

on the street wet by dogs

linden trees scatter their bloom
a bus with humpbacks passes
my finger wants to poke into
my neighbor’s hump
just as a candle wants
to be stuck into funeral bread
I am an excited sam
minodora is too small a bait
for so big a fish
my tongue stretches long
it outlines on the windowpane
two tits like two altars
then the green fly comes
taps me on the shoulder and says
sam my dear fellow come along with me
to the spider web
we’ll swing like gods

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti)

102
OCTAVIAN SOVIANY

AUGUST 17th 1986. LOVE SONG

When you were born

I was almost
an old man.
I arranged
beer bottle caps to form
constellations.
Maps
of all the constellations.

When you took

your first breath
I was holding despair
in my lap. Despair bore
ceauşescu’s face.
It was a fat old busybody
with ceauşescu’s face.

Then you learned

to walk. You took a few steps
towards me revealing
a gap between the veins
and a metal splinter in your
femur. Your death was hidden in there.

In those days we never spoke

you would just send me
your drawings
103
full of butterflies and
kittens. O
nly once
did you draw,
in clumsy lines,
a boy’s sex.

Outside
bulldozers were tearing down
bucharest, poet ioan es pop was erecting
the people’s palace,
while my blood fluttered
over construction sites
like a ragged flag,
since I was a man
almost in old age,
his prostate enlarged
entertaining suicidal thoughts.
And I couldn’t presage your lips,
Your breasts hadn’t started
to perk through
your schoolgirl clothes yet.
Still
sometimes I could hear your breath
penetrating the frozen windows,
blazing sharp red leaves
on my chest
and then I would tell myself:
only desire and death
bear such leaves.

104
At first
you permeated my words.
I would talk
to your sounds. I would hum
silly songs.
I would form
the clumsy shape
of a boy’s sex
with my beer corks. I would
look into the mirror
and wait for your features
to subdue
my own.

On the street
everyone
bore ceauşescu’s face.
They sang
patriotic songs.
Even the drunkards from the city’s outskirts
sang
patriotic songs.

In those days bucharest

was called ceaushima.
It looked like
a common grave,
and a tired man
growing old
had started
to appear in your dreams
a flimsy book
105
under his arm and a bit of
ash
on the lapel of his coat.
You would drag out
the earth from his mouth
with your tubby pampered
child fingers.

It was
the yellow earth of
ceauşima with
its sour carrion-like
stench.

Then everything
went turbid.
For instance, I remember
your father
(a man still young,
and very vivacious)
and my father
(who, under the earth,
had grown
grass on his chest)
shaking hands,
a bit embarrassed, over a table
in a restaurant.
I remember the purple cable cars
passing only at nighttime
between our foreheads. And I remember
your first period. Your life as a woman
was beginning like a dictatorship
106
in an exotic country
where trees
bear sharp red leaves.

At that moment my blood streamed

towards you like a
ragged flag.

I was nearly
an old man
who, after having awaited
ceauşescu’s fall,
was only looking forward
to his death.
A tired man
who from one week to the next
and from one month to the next
resembled ceauşescu more and more.

(Translated by MARGENTO, Raluca Tanasescu, and Alina Olimpia Miron)

107
O. NIMIGEAN

GYPO

I don’t want to mislead you, Gypo, flapping my lips blah-blah-blah! I’d be ashamed to. I don’t
want you to become my imaginary muse who evaporates when the book’s finished. I’ve told you the
story as to a proper little girl sitting on her grandfather’s knees, first of the book of paper, then of the
book of spoken words, and finally, stumbling at the threshold, the real book. A cluttered story that
you’ll remember mostly for my hesitations, my stuttering, my muddled silence. And the fact that,
unconsciously, but not unwillingly, I’d keep squeezing you more tightly around the waist. If you’re a
little nervous, it’s all right, you’ve begun to understand. You yourself started to write, without realizing
it, with the hardened nipples of your breasts, with your weightless hands, those of a healer, with your
wet lips, with your thick black hair, with the figure of a black woman, back arched, ready to jump, with
the occult memory of an African Eve. I remembered that your grandmother had drowned, young and
drunk, somewhere in a lake near Botoșani, the last bacchante in Dionysius’s procession. Something of
her madness must have come down to you. Otherwise you wouldn’t catch McFerrin’s rhythms on the
fly. You wouldn’t be both so grave and ethereal, sensual and graceful, explosive and tender. Otherwise
you couldn’t do a split howling with laughter.
Am I being ridiculous?
Who cares? I can refrain from invoking synchronicities and coincidences. Haven’t you, like a
priestess, pushing away my too insistent hands, recited verses from the pathology of the eye? Wasn’t
it something like an exorcism of the sight demons, didn’t we drive away the cryptococcosis and the
Touton giant cells? Haven’t we thus made ready to see clearly far into the distance, beyond everything
that can be seen? It’s there—I now can add—that the book I didn’t manage to tell you about happens.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

108
 /I CAN SEE YOU VERY CLEARLY…/

I can see you very clearly. I can see you even when you return exhausted from your hospital
shift, your face sallow, splotched, parchment-like. With the small eyes of a shriveled geisha. When
you sit at the kitchen table and seem more shrunken than an aged granny. When you’re frightened of
moles and melanoma. When you sit, preoccupied, at the edge of the couch and say, with your mean
voice, “Beat it, leave me alone!” When you’re full of longing and burst into tears. Not even I can really
understand what’s going on, but somehow you’re dearer to me. I feel like tucking you under the quilt,
up to your chin, going bzzz-bzzz with my finger on your lips, as to a child. I become the accomplice of
the plush chimpanzee beside the TV set, I implore help from the diminutive penates of the house, scat-
tered in drawers and wardrobes, on shelves, on the rug, on the balcony: the Lancôme dressing case, the
small icon with Agios Spiridon, the red silk globes, the miniature ceramic jugs, like thimbles, even the
cloth hanging of Che that we used to make fun of, repeating, “Be realistic, do the impossible!“
In the afternoons when you let me in on your sorrows, I caress you deeply, my hands hanging
down, useless, but light and warm. Never will you be closer to me. Never will you be gentler—always
the sick kitten purring in my heart.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

109
RADU ANDRIESCU

SHIVA’S NéGRESSES

Une Étoile caresse le sein

d’une négresse (peinture-poème)
—Joan Miró, 1938

These Négresses, God forgive them… I think they were

Afro-disiac. For I began thinking lustily,
sinfully, of you. Una
Miruna and Mucho Maas. I bought a lottery
ticket—may the Gods smile upon us, for once! Could you help me
with something really important? Please check
if there’s something on language poetry or some poets
I could list for you in an e-mail,
in the library or on LION. I need to give a human,
personal face to a rather mechanical chapter in
my Ph.D. thesis. Otherwise, I’m not publishing
the book. Could you help me, my Dulce de Leche?
Would you mind doing that? Yesterday I found out
that couples communicate 29 minutes a week,
on average. Less than two hours
per month. If I think about it,
about how much time we spend chatting on the net, I believe we have
a major advantage over other couples. Are we
a couple? What are we, Dulce de Leche? I also found out—
on Discovery Channel again, where the half-learned latch on to their facts—
there’s a closet at the British Museum
named by the Victorians Secretum.
Hidden in the closet are pornographic figurines
110
from antiquity. The voice-over told about
how the Establishment feared the effects
pornography could have on the ordinary
state of affairs. No innuendo here, OK? Nothing about
our own agreement on the Status Quo. This is just
what the commentary said.
Among the figurines is a well-hung
Priapus. As if that weren’t enough, like the peasant
in old Creangă’s story, this Priapus carries with him a bundle
of healthy spare cocks
over his shoulder. The closet’s open
to the public now. Well, in theory. That is, you have
to make a formal request, to explain who you are and why
you need access to the closet. You go there
with an attendant who keeps an eye on you at all times. Dulce,
if we go to London, would you like to visit
the Secretum with me? You see, there’s something about
those Afro Négresses. I also learned
about Shiva. This God is nothing but
an enormous tumescent cock. He has a circular
queen, in the center of which
he rules like a king. Once a year, in some Indian
communities, this God is anointed
with milk, cream, butter and other products of the Sacred
Cow. The entire community gathers round
to lubricate the cylindrical bronze
icon. After the ritual
is completed, Shiva makes love for a hundred
years with his Queen. The Christian church,
on the other hand, started
to officiate the rite of marriage only in the 16th century.
Until then, every union of one male
111
with one female was cause enough for perpetual
damnation. In the 12th century, a certain
Pope decided by decree that it wasn’t allowed to marry relatives,
even if they were as distant as eleven times removed.
Can you imagine the dilemma in a country town
or small burg? Besides, the voice-over added, the position
was clearly prescribed. The missionary. Never,
but never, could the woman
be on top! It was a matter of
hierarchy. The emancipation of women, in the West,
appears to have come about at the court of an Aquitaine
queen. L’amour courtois, platonic,
meant the elevation of the Lady to the center
of a universe until then macho, and also—or, rather, chiefly—
to the raisin-dry bosom
of the church. However, the transition from paganism
to Christianity meant a transition from a cult of love
to a cult of violence and subjugation. Enough of that.
Dulce de Leche Aquitaine, I hope you’ll never have to suffer
oppression or violence. I told you, these Afro-Négresses make you—
make me—horny with lame fears, even though they’re dietetic, fat-free,
butterless. If I were with you
every single minute, I’d propose
a playful plan: sweet,
phthisical cuddlings.
Still, from time to time, one
of us would scribble the other missives at midnight
or midday, mid-summer or mid-
winter, most discreetly. No commentary
on the missives would be allowed. Thus,
we would share our lovers and never get
stuck in a cliché. One of my neighbors is getting ready
112
for a barbeque. I hate grilled meat, but I melt off
when it comes to rituals. This is why I love to scent
Miruna, who shouldn’t care about illicit chewing gums
to smell as good as it gets. Dulce de Leche, could you forgive me
for this tectonic wave of love, like a stifling shroud
or auroral diaper? Jeezus—I’ve finally
discovered how to communicate 29 hours a day
with another being. Not a mere 29 minutes
a week, in one-syllable words. You’ll go to the library
and send me brief messages, that’s how it is.
There’s no choice. I’ll respond with short, awkward
words. I’ll be misunderstood. Must nerves bristle out
of the wiring? Anyhow, Una Miruna is a myriad of
mistresses hidden in preface
and in postface. The text itself is just
stuffing. Still not mad at me, Dulce?
Lady de Leche? To make myself perfectly
understood, the text is a convention
that eludes the essential.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

113
ADRIAN SÂNGEORZAN

ADULTERY

As I close my eyes at night and cross to the other side

You get out of bed like a sleep walker
And cheat me with whomever you run into.
Today with the custom officer I try to bargain for a while
Tomorrow with the river under the bridge
Or even with a man who doesn’t resemble me at all.

In dreams everything is permitted and you have no limitations.

I’m angry as a wine taster who turns into a drunk.
At 3 in the morning I wake up in a sweat turned on completely
Because crossing to the other side is the strongest aphrodisiac.
Love, sex and death, those three Graces fondling in their block of marble
Long before the first stroke of the chisel.

I stretch my hand toward your side of the bed

And there you are warm like Venus de Milo
The one with her hands gone fumbling over the Rubicon.

(Translated by Adrian Sângeorzan and Maurice Edwards)

114
 POMPEII

It’s your entire fault, you the discoverer of my brain

Archeological relic buried in lava of lust
As that petrified dog in Pompeii tied to the brothel’s door when Vesuvius erupted.
Those people knew everything about sex. It was there behind the door
Bringing good luck and ready to hold your hat.
Priapus was weighing his sex for gold
While shy vestals threw coins on scale pushing for their chances.
What a city Pompeii made to absolve you of shame and inhibitions
(Only 5 euro the entrance.)

I hoped you were a woman, a lady told me these days

Thinking that all women’s doctors are XX
And the Y chromosome is just a hanger loaded with bras and underwear.
It’s true, I told her, we all were women once. Every beginning is feminine
One beginning, two beginnings. One end, two ends, like the lives for Buddhists.
Sometimes I wish I’m a woman, to feel in their skin the goose bumps
When get aroused and put stardust on their lips
To give birth at least once, on a cliff where nobody could see me.
I pass my hand through my beard as through a forest of birch trees
And ask myself why all this cold war between sexes
In all this confusion when everything is divided, parceled out
The genetic code stretched on table like a bear fur lay out to dry
And we, stuffed turkeys prank around before the grand hunting.

Why this morbid desire of the philosophers to find the God sex
A huge one for sure, unseen yet as is the life after death sucked by the black holes
Hidden in some three-dimensional fold called the scrotum of Cronos.
Time itself should have a bisexual organ as he penetrates us with equal pleasure.
115
Everything, the philosophers say comes from a primary copulation.
Death is a woman for sure, I feel that, one with sharp labia.
A woman at the beginning, one at the end
Everything happens in her womb where somebody changes I.D.’s on our chest -
Anonymous soldiers disappeared in an inexplicable fog.

(Translated by Adrian Sângeorzan and Maurice Edwards)

116
CLAUDIU KOMARTIN

A SPINY CREATURE

I have been wandering the streets all summer

with an obsession that’s hard to name
and with the image of a child setting baby urchins on fire
at the edge of a clearing where
we walked around naked and barefoot knowing
love is a spiny creature
that will never
make it back
home

(Translated by Raluca Tanasescu)

117
 August Pictures

In August the pictures of myself get faded.

I wake up, rise from my wheel chair
and burn. I think of us
the way we used to walk side by side while nothing
could harm us
the lake now glistens deep underground
the seeds have sprouted in silence
we could take a nap there on the edge.
Above there are hills and forests
the overshadowed green iris with just a hint of
reflected light caressing
the skin cooled by the night wind.
The daylight construction cranes shatter all thoughts
helplessness doesn’t drive nails into our backbones
but parts us one from the other for good.

We’re not going to end up in any paradise

or inferno either my love
we’ll just crawl under a rock and wait there
impassively for the thunder.

(Translated by Raluca Tanasescu)

118
V. LITTLE ENDLESS SUAVITIES
ADRIAN POPESCU

A SENSE OF PARADISE

After death will your eyes still glow with love

the love never recorded in the civil register?
Will we be dwelling in a star above
no one around to put us two asunder?

Will little sins be hard to understand?

The eyes, the hands, will they eternally endure,
guiding the path as celestial omens
and dolphins frolicking, fire and azures?

In those times we had a sense of Paradise,

and thus the angels showed us to a Door
which we all entered, adolescents, babies,
treading on our long ash days, and years.

What made us smile and smile, what memory,

each dawn, what aeon dawned on me again?
I was Adam, under the apple tree
unpicked yet, hiding, but looking for her face.

(Translated by MARGENTO, Raluca Tanasescu, and Magda Crețu)

121
 THE EYES AND THE HANDS

Your eyes and hands remained the same through

all these years of colorful homemade carpets I used
to kneel on praying the Heavens that I could touch you
shy as an adolescent blushing with unease.

Now I stand on a grey bridge in the Transylvanian town

where I have fumbled, for real or in my dreams, my way
to the minuscule cabin, to the flames of love;
the water runs dirty and indifferent under the bridge.

A voice (for a moment I believed yours) murmurs: “I thought

writing was everything…” Then, as if I replied to
you: “That doesn’t mean our life wasn’t written
in the gods’ blood.”

One thousand blackbirds sing in the oak tree by the pool,

I squint in vain, I cannot see them,
it is not I for whom they sing, another season’s sun roars in
the brittle glistening leaves.

The places where you burnt in my candle-lamp embrace I revisit,

on a path that once took us to an earthly sinful heaven;
Upon return four men walk against me,
somber and sturdy, carrying huge wire coils on their shoulders.

Eyes and hands that wrap me up,

will their purple color live perpetually?
122
The dying woman in the intensive care still has the same eyes
that used to implore, the same hands that long ago united in prayer.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Magda Crețu)

123
GABRIEL CHIFU

YOU WON EVERY WAR

You won every war without firing

a single shot.
By your mere presence.
You were beautiful, mysterious.
Your body effused sea-like melodies,
under your skin were, I guess, flocks of pianos.
You were provocative, awesome,
percolating through a little town like the fragrance
streaming from the lindens in blossom.
You were sensual, shameless, wanton, and faint
like the white petal of a late-blooming magnolia.

And now you’re gone, you’re gone. Where are you?

Whom are you bandaging with caresses,
with your body, whose garden are you thawing and blooming?
Whom you making fly with his bed?
Whom, whom are you carrying to the heavens and the stars?
In whose mind are you engraved
forever?
Who’s drowning in you?

With you gone, I’ve been sick.

With you gone,
I believe even diamonds
grow wobbly and die.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Magda Crețu)

124
 ONE PLUS ONE IS ONE

We traveled by train.
We rented a room in Buda, on the bank of the Danube,
close to the subway station.
First night, the uncomfortable beds were separate
and she said we should draw them together.
Which I did not want:
she was a young willow, blown by the wind,
which made her wavy and musical,
her body ablaze with hundreds of fires
her skin bathed by hundreds of streams
like a plain in the spring-time;
whereas I felt hulking,
an iron and steel complex
from the age of triumphant socialism,
a rusty and forsaken hunk o’ junk,
a sweaty snoring rattletrap.
But she didn’t see me that way and was so deadly into
pulling the beds together.

In the end one or two bottles of red wine

melted the distance between us.
Like in some movie or some book,
she spotted in the glass of wine
a tiny god, the size of a dragonfly
swimming desperately, almost
drowning
and she carefully drank all the wine trying to rescue
the nail-sized deity.
125
Then I did the same thing. We both did, again and again.

After several such evenings,

when we got back to our city,
we decided to break up, but it was no longer possible:
we had become so stuck together
that one would have needed a saw to cut
us apart or
a blowtorch.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Magda Crețu)

126
IN PARADISE

She had something of a big, storied,

glass-roofed mansion house.
I liked to climb the stone wall
at night,
to sneak in through the left open window
and stay till daybreak
in pantries full of spices,
and on soft divans
in large chambers full of light.

She had something of a blessed kingdom, something of an italy.

Her feet in the dew, in the grass, in the waves,
and her forehead clad in cold snows and up in the stars
made anyone, anyone ask for asylum in her
just to roam blissfully through all of those realms.

God forgive me!:

it was impossible not to mess around with her,
and by messing around I never messed up.
With her,
wherever I departed from
and wherever I headed to,
I would always, always
end up in paradise.

(Translated by MARGENTO and Magda Crețu)

127
LUCIAN VASILIU

PANTHERS

You are the railroad track on which I travel ahead

like a lamppost
shining on the crossties

I’m counting.
Until I get to you,
a million crossties
ready to tear me to shreds,
jealously, anarchically –
a million panthers

I recall:
your glasses gave you the air
of a mousy
country schoolteacher

I don’t know if we told each other

the important things…

Your name was Beatrice –

you were beautiful and dangerous
like a sentence from Nietzsche…

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

128
 FINGERPRINT

She was like an angel,

immaterial

In her wake
no physical proof
not a bite, not a fingerprint

Unlike the others,

the real,
she never spoke a word –
I was predestined
to her silence

Like a sailor
I’d pilot my ship
into port
(she’d sometimes come on board
to dance naked, unforgettable)

She was like an angel,

immaterial

In her wake
no physical proof
not a bite, not a fingerprint

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

129
NICHITA DANILOV

SHADOW OF GOLD, MELANCHOLY

to Cristina
Your eyes are smoke, your lips
and teeth and voice
are made of smoke.

And your breasts are smoke and thighs

and your arms that hold me now
are made of smoke.

Your shoulders are smoke

and your hair is golden smoke
and all your flesh and all your love
are made of smoke.

Because you from my body were made

and made for me
to love you
and only and only
you.

And like smoke you enfold me

and like smoke you sadden me and break me down
with your thighs of gold
with your arms of silver
and your eyes
more sorrowful than incense.

(Translated by Sean Cotter)

130
CARMEN FIRAN

HEMISPHERES

only you can love me

just the way you do
staring directly into my brain
scratching your fingernail
across one hemisphere,
a secret mimosa
arrogant and vain

hormones float by
stick to the walls
objects wail in shame

only you can love me the way I want

you clasp my head between your hands
and tell me you’ve known me
since many a sea disappeared into the land

I only dream in secret on a rainy day

of not crying on your shoulder
with my left brain

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Firan)

131
 LOVE ME NOW

love me now
we are so very much alone
our bodies vibrate within silent walls

we are so very much alone

and the made-up drama we play out
reveals to you what I don’t know at all
and spins out scenes that I shall never see

love me now blindly, without thinking

shake yourself free
we are so very much alone
two wheels of carnal rhythms

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Firan)

132
 WALL IN THE WINDOW

you if you chose me

make the winter never end
blacken the sun with my dark circles
stop the grass from growing
rejuvenation is humiliating

you if you chose me

wall in the window to the boulevard
so that we love each other
night after night
gloomier and further on
in all that frozen white

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Firan)

133
LETIȚIA ILEA

BACK AND FORTH

he was a bit north and a bit south too

a bit of breeze and hurricane
dew and desert sun

she would meet him so very rarely

that she had nearly forgotten his face
his name the searing heat of his gaze

it was not even certain

if she had ever met him
or simply put together memories
such as the first winter

of her cactus existence

which had forgotten to bloom
such as the first prey taken

in her den-less
she-wolf life

he was a bit of a cactus flower

a bit of a den
as for her
as for her

134
 x x x

he had written for her

an unparalleled poem
the once-in-a-lifetime kind
that did not resemble anything
he had written before
a poem that finally
that genuinely
with such certain clarity
a raspberry- flavored poem
tasting of jasmine

he was far away

so far away
as she read the peerless poem
and it almost
almost
so close

she would take her morning coffee

in a single mug
with a single cube of sugar

she would sit at her table for one

she would not speak
would not answer any greeting
she only waited

135
she was alone
like the old stork
on the roof of city -hall

in his peerless poem

-the kind of poem you write
once in a lifetime
just once-
he would not write
about any of these matters

x x x

she remembered
everything:
the arch of his eyebrows
the shadow of a wrinkle
the sugary taste of his eyelids
kissed quickly
she remembered
the clinking of the glasses
the small train station chilled with night
his hands scored
from countless battles
breath she had faithfully guarded
the smell of his skin for so many days

x x x

he was close
so terribly close
yet they could not see each other
136
although they could hear each other

he was close
excruciatingly close
only as close as the blade to the knife
as the knife to the blade.

she could not see him

but she could hear him
mirroring
and for the first time
she could see so clearly
so very clearly
that a flight of thorns
was blooming in her flesh

he was

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Veronica Armaşu)

137
MIHAI IGNAT

POEMS BY TWO

***
Fervor it for those having nothing
to lose
I’m moving my index finger around
your breasts
under the skin I have half-breed feelings
her long, shiny legs
make me cry
her legs write insanity
under my forehead
once more I want you
(so better scram.)

***
Pale, barely unveiled
from her frail sleep
by the sound of the six
touches
the white ankle
post-script
of visual memory
I don’t know more atrocious an image
than his tongue
entering
through her lips
(lipstick-burnt.)
138
***
Events swallowed us both
today you’re losing not winning
tomorrow hand is looking for
the golden middle way
sky seen between your fingers
is spilling blue on the fingernails
(everybody is touching
the way he wants to be touched.)

(Translated by Romulus Bucur)

139
VI. ANECDOTAL FIELDS AND PLAYGROUNDS
EMIL BRUMARU

TAMARETTE

If Lou’s vagina sang Apollinaire to her,

Tamáriushka, what should I croon to you?
The peach caged in flames of pepper and dew,
Watched over by an angel with trembling spear?

The wild-strawberry clover with four petals of love

softened to plush by a strange, nostalgic woman?
Oh, let my mouth caress one of your legs once again
As high as that place your leg’s twin reaches above.

And shelter me with your naked body, like at the fair,

My sad soul, life consumed in sins and sweet sighs.
Let me pray to the icon of flesh, your ass, where
It is slandered in jest by your sister thighs.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

143
 THE BALLAD OF THE SAD MARQUIS
WRITTEN WITH EARTHWORMS ON MIRRORS

At five, the Marquis will come with measured paces

And taking his peasant-sandals’ laces
Steeped in perfume of opoponax,
He’ll strangle you,
Because of all that life lacks
For an ingénue.

From the door handle

He’ll hang an old-fashioned scale.
On one pan he’ll place your right
Breast, neatly scissored
Off, and on the other a lily as white
As an Antarctic blizzard.

Whichever way the scale’s more heavily weighted,

He’ll laugh with a holy snicker:
Lips black, tongue green, teeth finely serrated,
With a coach-and-pair
He’ll depart muttering, “You plead to her in vain, ‘My dear,
Consecrate your every thought to me,…’” and she, her long legs in tears!

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu)

144
MIRCEA DINESCU

THE WOMEN OF LAST CENTURY

Cast your laurel wreath inside this bean-curd ragout

to rediscover what Columbus missed:
the Golden-Epoch of a school girl in worker’s dungarees
plucked like the ears off corncobs,
the brilliant math student you visited so often
afraid you’ll get lost again for days
in the whispering labyrinths of off brand stockings,
a shepherd caught-up in her logarithmic maze,
and she a chemistry professor, decanting magnesium
with vigor from your sweet truant seed,
extracting G-sharps from your flaccid flute,
moaning softly like the mare to her stud,
the trapeze girl who flew through rings of fire
to fall right in your safety net, what luck!
inside a haywire train of jokers
you jumped her pulling blankets over her head.
Some are long gone, others over the hill
no longer shuddering to my muted mating calls.
Oh, if only you could make those lips hum again
the women of last century

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Sergiu Vasilov)

145
 WOMAN, YOU EASY CREATURE...

Woman, you easy creature, of complicated ages

who transcribed on your skin all history’s pages
to be required reading down in hell for all the crooks,
down at the house that publishes your looks
I’m waiting for you like the cheapest flirt
to decipher your last work under your skirt
with a small mirror, or, for a subtler thrill
I’ll use the old Methodius of Cyril
or touch it like a blind man reading braille,
a peasant sowing maize out of his pail,
who sticks his plow in the fresh earth with pride
and asks the plot of land to be his bride.

(Translated by Sergiu Vasilov)

146
DANIELA CRĂSNARU

POEM OF THE TRANSITION

Elegant soirées, discussions, embassies.

our image in the world, the inflation rate, monetary policy,
refined people, burning questions,
concepts, concepts and me,
dying of shame in a corner,
thinking only of the dwarf stripped of vegetation and its huge
penis, slightly curved, pointing at who knows what cardinal point.
Now, this indeed is a cardinal point, I, in my forties, think to myself,
incapable of following arguments, strategies,
the contraction of the GDP, budget deficits.
Ouch! My mind’s all harum-scarum, filled with this image,
ground to dust, penetrated with rancor. Ouch!
Surely an infinite line of women must be dreaming of him (dreaming of her),
and here I am in the line, at last, in this corner, awkwardly on my knees
as if on nutshells (there, you goddamn intellectuals, there).
I’m ashamed of my mother, of Messrs. P and P
with their various ranks and reasons.
What reason? What concepts?
It’s good I don’t have to talk, to do anything
about protecting the economy which has just collapsed,
or the budget deficit… Ouch! Ouch!
There come to mind (to mouth?) every sort of obscene synonym
for this story that pours the whole milky way
down my epiglottis, or beyond it the devil knows where –
Now, right now I need an all-encompassing word
but not even I would be able to –
147
Ouch! Go to hell, intellectuals!
You’ve no idea how to enjoy yourselves.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu)

148
NICHITA DANILOV

TINY WOMAN

The Tiny Woman wrings

mirrors irons images
with so rusty an iron
that menstrual blood
absorbs the moon entire
she rises from her stool
collects lovers in her pockets
snaps them under her bra her garter
and hits the streets
at night the Tower of Golia
becomes the Tower of Babel
that madman pushes from
one tiny square to the next
apparently without a plan
without a reason
for the love of art

Then love becomes

an end in itself
and itself itself
like a snail
crawls from its shell
and sets off giggling
after itself down the street.

(Translated by Sean Cotter)

149
MIHAIL VAKULOVSKI

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU STOP BUGGING ME

the fun we had, the names I called you, honey

between the wooden attic

and the wash basin you went to
early in the morning
the stairs as steep as a sea cliff on that day of July 13th 2000
and the stool on the balcony where
since you were no longer passing by the small window
I found you just as before
with your happy dead like colorless lips
which really got on my nerves
as it happened with my father when I was a child and
came back home walking alongside my bike in a daze
after falling off it and on my head
along with the sprinkler
I was carrying to grandpa
I didn’t take a swipe at you
the way I used to when we were kids
I gave you a spiteful kiss...
o how I wished I gave you one...
if only you could ride a bike
or swim
baby, the names I’d call you, hon, honey
you: You said it, there you said it!

the earth is round like

150
your tits two oranges from the green continent

and when I made it to your place

my roommate had (slyly) transmitted me his flu
so I crashed
with you
you fed me juice and pills
milk mineral water
and we made love
till you crashed sick
I would bring you juice milk
mineral water
pills
and oranges
and we made love
we made love and threw up green stuff
and were always in love

your soft butt like the steam of the coffee you would make waiting for me after
telling him I’d break his legs and stick them up his ass wherever I run into him
even on the Fiji Islands

and we loved each other

I loved you even when you were late for the show
and shortly after
you’d tell me you had to go
to study all night
about your PC
or that you had to make a long distance call home
at midnight etcetera
151
and I loved you
for welcoming me with a cup
of hot (make sure it’s Chinese) tea every morning
and two rum babas with whipped cream
or that box of white and pink meringues
or sometimes we met in the park
and did it there before school
we were always in love

we were in love we were in love

and I loved you

I loved you when you ran away to the disco
I’d catch you later and make love to you
on the corridor or by the window or in the kitchen
(hostel)
after teasing all your roommates horny and mad
after freaking all your neighbors out
you made love to me and your voice trembled
in the corridors
no longer running away
but loving me the right way

we loved each other

your tits like three stupid hedgehogs

when you said
but I don’t love you
it sounded really weird much like the Amore more ore re line on that soldier’s
lips
and we left for Belgrade left for Bagdad
left for Stalingrad
152
simply had to leave for Stalin’s city
while I loved you madly
we made love over the phone
did it through the holes
and I was asking you to tell me
how much
you didn’t love me

(Translated by MARGENTO and Magda Crețu)

153
RODICA DRĂGHINCESCU

SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE RUNAWAY BRIDE

within four walls solitude gives me the impression

of a close-knit family to whom I can admit my regrets
every sunday for the trains
derailed on the plain
after all I’ve never spoken the truth
because there were too many kinds of trains
good bad brazen blasé
ready to rummage through my pockets
ready to take me to a movie
(the title was THE BRIDE’S BEDCHAMBER)
after it got dark THE GROOM
(he was sort of squishy) turned into a pie poetically related
to the clocks (painted by Salvador Dali)
so necessary in a marriage
and promoted after the honeymoon
so they can be enjoyed by other grooms IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
for two or three folkloric weeks (orgies)
FOR THE FIRST THIRTY DAYS IT’S NOT REALLY A SIN
IF YOU UNLOCK THE WRONG DOOR
reported another groom who arrived (vaulting the fence)
to check out the answer
like parrot-vendors
YOU LOVE ME YOU LOVE ME
…………………………………...
maybe
I should have been a rebel
side to side with the runaway bride
154
I should have stepped right into the groom’s photograph
sleeping IN THE SUN on a chariot drawn by herons
herons would have become scared anyway
they were sold on silver trays carried high
above the heads of the throng of wedding guests
a third of whom had been part of the nudist movement
BOTH SEXES
to improve the species in test tubes
……………………………………….
solitude spins like A MEANING learned
BY HEART
it’s eight past ten
………………
HE WHO FLIES AND IS NEITHER BIRD
NOR ANYTHING ELSE

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Antuza Genescu)

155
 SACRED POSITION
 
I lie down on the railroad tracks
I give a shrill scream à la mode de chez nous
the wind is blowing in the upper reaches of the sky
my dress functions as an apartment
whose owners have gone away
where thieves sip cognac
before they set about their thievery
because of the moon I begin to feel
it’s a trojan horse
then with a sudden movement
I sit up halfway
the woman in me throws her scarf in the weeds
LET ME GIVE YOU A FAVORITE RECIPE
FIRST YOU MUST ASSUME A SACRED POSITION
YOUR BLOOD HAS AN EXTREMELY PLEASANT LOOK
IT’S A TEMPTATION FOR THE YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHERS
IF YOU DON’T SIT STRAIGHT AND UPRIGHT
THEIR HEADS AND EYES WILL HURT AWFULLY
my dress functions in the upper reaches of the sky
I don’t know what use it might be to protect me
then its fragrance sets the blind men’s accordions going
HEY YOU THIS AIN’T NO SEASHORE
the ticket seller in the kiosk shouts
she goes after them and pushes them into the sunlight
YOU WANNA GET SLICED UP BY THE TRAIN?
PLAY ALONG THE EDGE THERE!
I give a shrill scream fling myself out of my body
ARE YOU SURE WE BOTH WANT THE SAME THING?
156
(the woman in me has just washed her lingerie and bleached it
from time to time she wrings it out)
ARE YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT THE SAME THING?
a little lower
the dress hops like a rabbit ahead of the bullet

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Antuza Genescu)

157
VII. BRAVE INSOLENCES
MIHAIL GĂLĂȚANU

THE ADVENTUROUS LIFE OF HER LEGS

1. We’re Her Legs’ Pimps

At our house, her legs are the biggest stars.

Her legs grin at us from billboards. They glitter at us from magazine covers.
They’re making a pile of money. Together, we’re her legs’ pimps. They show up
all sorts of places you least expect. On T-shirts, even on labels.
There’s a sort of wallpaper of her legs, which broke previous box-office records.
Everybody’s sticking them on their walls.
They had to devise a new classification: best legs
in the human race. A perfect 11. No. 1 in the top ten, the top forty.
From time to time, even I wake up thinking I should cut her legs off
and glue them permanently between my own.

No, no, they’d be much better

above them
above my abject, crooked legs.

2. A Check Drafted in Varicose Veins

Day in, day out, I hang around gossiping with her legs
which tell me their life story. How they got tangled up with the ferentari gypsies
when they were young and naive.
And how those mountebanks with knucklebones burned them with cigarettes.
How they laughed when their first lover abandoned them, their first
pair of lover-legs, and how, to get them back, they went for love charms
to the witches in maglavit.
161
Her legs had an adventurous life, more spectacular than
edith piaf ’s. They don’t know much about cooking,
about making pilaf and soup, soup and pilaf.
Her legs led a bohemian life, an artist’s.
They boozed it up at every joint in the neighborhood.
Now they’ve squirreled away what’s to come due in the future, the sign of their recklessness,
a bag packed full of bruises, a check drafted in varicose veins.

3. Death Notice Dedicated to Her Legs

Her legs are called isadora duncan, andreea andreevna, masa mashenka,
grusenka, anna karenina. They look like ballerinas
in a pas-de-deux with a behemoth tomcat. They fall into temptation
and squander fistfuls of dollars on
on vodka, salmon, sturgeon, caviar.
To her shameless and boozy legs
which must surely repent at the last trump,
I am dedicating this death notice.

Oh, woe, oh poor legs, oh angelic,

sinful legs
slowly, secretly
suck very drop of marrow
from my bones
that straddle and sprawl between your marvellous websites
where,
boj moi, my god,
I’ve languished month after month feverish with typhoid.

162
4. Poetus Captivus to a Pair of Legs like Hers

Oh, legs, wretched lands,

paradise rank with blossoms,
yielding to all my desires in turn! By your nails I’d sit and
weep, because there’s no greater torment in this world
than to be poetus captivus to a pair of legs like hers.
The moon rises from beneath you every night
and the sun sets upon your heights. Your thigh soars into the sky,
your ankle anchors the earth.
With a myriad of little kisses I cover your paws
soiled with ordure from the world below. But high above the angels sing
in the firmament of your golden tuft, beneath which I’d gladly lie
languishing long after death. I’d wait for the bus
which has no route across these twilight zones. Gladly I’d map
the pubic triangles and
compromising bowers of your territories.

What a cascading cartography

extends under your vulva
and what magic realms,
sinuous and oleaginous!

Gladly I’d gallop

to the new indies,
yee-ha!
yee-ha-ha!
whinnying as I lie moaning, beaded by sweat.

Gladly I’d emigrate

to the united states
of your legs. The prenuptial canada
163
of your calves
covered decently by a maple leaf.
The tropical mexico of your knees, the florida of your sphincters, the torrid
trinidad-tobago between your legs. Gladly I’d lick
panama hanging in the fringes of your clitoris
an ascetic of perspiration in its humble state, little dictator in the boat. Gladly I’d say:
oh wondrous is the study of your geography,
when you learn it on the lascivious drawing board
where
humble and docile
lie all the continents of our love
so burning hot
yet in this poem, so chaste.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin, Petru Iamandi, and Mihail Gălăţanu)

164
DAN COMAN

THE COOLEST PORNOGRAPHIC POEM OF MY GENERATION

when she first called out all the guests in the restaurant thought Ms. Fana Fandiana
had seen a mouse scuttling away from under the sink smiling
the others kept on eating their steaks, talking about their good fortune.

but it was July and in July I am nearly disfigured with pleasure.

so disfigured that my penis, so bold on most occasions
cannot find the space to recline long side my body
Throughout July my penis disappears, red-faced,
I’m forced to tell my girl that throughout this month
my penis retires into a long and arduous meditation.

in fact as soon as July starts

my penis in its solitude nestles

in Ms. Fandiana`s vagina.
It’s an ancient place here, rich and roomy, a place, as one might say, full
to the brim, tranquil and green.

here, and only here, my penis feels no remorse.

It lingers like a sultan for days and days.

sometimes this lady moves freakishly

perhaps accidentally, incidentally, touching her breasts stealthily,
quickly passing the tip of her tongue on her gold canines
and then nothing can stop my penis:

165
kicked high in the air long and stiff like a fancy boot
moving so fast that Ms. Fandiana`s cellulite doesn`t even jiggle.

She’s hardly felt it between her legs, hanging like the hanged
an experienced and mature penis
when quickly, gasping she pushed it back quickly with her dried hands.

but the penis hops! in and out and the lady hops! Going back
and hop! in and out and hop! and hop! and hop!
So the lady with palms drier and drier, moans softly now and then,
as only she can do.

and, over and over all through July.

but, there at the restaurant Ms. Fandiana was in the bathroom

suddenly wrapping her skirt around her belly
when like a sun ray, the penis came out from her legs
shaking itself several times
and staining the sleeves of her unbuttoned blouse.

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Karina Ciuruș)

166
ELENA VLĂDĂREANU

PSEUDO-TREATISE ON SOOTHING THE NERVES

VI

i don’t suffer carnations to dry out

i put in my bedroom carnations that rot
and start to reek like a corpse
my man comes in and bangs me
during the day he hunts foxes and at night he pours
all over my body fox urine and fox sperm
from the vial where i once kept authentic
french perfumes
i feel his rancid breath on the back of my neck
(he eats lard and garlic when he catches foxes)
i can feel the sweaty sex of an inca god
he starts barking in the foxes’ tongue
there’s only one thing left for me to do
trim my cuticles with my teeth
nip-nip-nip

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Hanganu-Bresch)

167
 INSOMNIA

i think of you and offer myself to someone else

after he kneads my body for a couple of minutes
he whispers to me through clouds of smoke, “we shouldn’t have done it”
shouldn’t have shouldn’t have shouldn’t have my mind murmurs
endlessly his sex had the color of ripe corn
and the grimy room in ferentari stank like wet dog
in marta meszaros’s movie nothing had happened
just the blank frames and silences rolling into the theater
like ice balls through the empty seats
“pass the apartment building and you’ll get to paradise” i heard him that morning
then i remembered i’d no idea what i was doing there
then there was nothing
i saw him with a beautiful woman and i felt nothing
his hand burrowed between my thighs and i felt nothing
a huge oppressive bird had wedged itself between us
not one single man remains between this city and me
only the bird’s rough feathers leave
red watery pustules on my skin

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Hanganu-Bresch)

168
MICHEL MARTIN

SYLPHLIKE

my power comes from a Japanese gardenia it suffuses

an entire room of sylphlike london maidens and a couple of blast furnaces I’m your
husband you’re a man who likes women a man who believes that
his homosexual husband is a woman whose breasts are
oh so perfect
my arms are lovely my molars have been extracted my urine has
steeped in the toilet a couple of curious hours while a five-foot cutie
cut my hair
my blonde hair oh so rich and oh so long I look out for no. 1
fiancées blush when I come near my meals consist of
white fish salmon couscous coffee rye mushrooms I’ve quit smoking
oh so sad if I were to begin again I’d become half geisha half
edith piaf I’d be the painter of everything I’ve lost
don juan or the son of god
I’m everybody’s dream I’ll never give birth
I’m in each marriage as the longest absence
the clock ticking in your eardrum I’m why you’re getting old and why
you’re crying why held in suspension your thighs moan

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Michel Martin)

169
 MY DAUGHTER

look at my daughter little pink elephant noses will flow under her blouse
drool over her like on a slow masturbator working on
your organs with her red mouth of punched veins
give
my daughter a filthy note she will stick it on her hot labia
you all miserable all alcoholics
the guilty the ripped-off and plague-stricken
my daughter will welcome you in her divine vagina she will swallow your
white varnished spit you filthy skunks she will play the clarinet
a separation with many comas with foamy bulls and viennese lice
throw your wives into the dumpster cover them with remains of mute rats
my daughter will sleep in everybody’s bed every night
with her thigh bursting yellow juices her rectum opened to your prayers
please cut my daughter wide open with your large fist
drink all the blood between her legs with endless piety
because all that is hers should end up in your stomach my daughter is
my scream that didn’t scream anymore deepen your gall inside her
you all skeletons all the uncalled
like in a sulfuric paradise
my daughter will dance for each of you till late at night
on a long cold pole
my daughter will only look you in the sewn eye

(Translated by Michel Martin)

170
VIII. CYNICISM AND NEUROSIS
ION MUREȘAN

THE OLD LOVER AND THE YOUNG LADY

My eyes saw red, only

a red mountain as I left the bar,
for it was cold and the air damp, a really bad thing for asthmatics.
The worse my cough, the more tenderly she held my arm,
tender because of the cold.
When I stopped coughing, I strutted like a stork,
I felt as though my head were in a jar, and
I was not very steady on my feet.

I stepped between the puddles, declaiming Pound

as best I remembered, a hand in the air rather theatrically:
“If a man would be a lover
he may walk on the Scythian coast,
No barbarian would go to the extent of doing him harm,…
Cupid will carry lighted torches before him
and keep mad dogs off him.”
And she, in a nurse’s voice, “Quiet, be quiet,
you’ll start coughing again!”…

My god, I have no idea where they appeared from!

Two on one side, two on the other.
One of them, the one with a mauve hedgehog on his head, says,
“Did’ya see that dirty old man, how he pawed her under the table
and how he made her head spin with Plato’s gibberish?”
Another of them, like a child, more petulant:
“When I think his shriveled lips will suck her breasts,
round like ripe peaches, ptooey, I could puke!
Now, let’s give the pussy some fresh milk!”
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Then the one with the hedgehog on his head:
“Yeah, sweet dreams for gramps,
time for beddy-bye!”
He smacked me hard.
And she, like a cat sewn to my sleeve.

My god, I saw only the sidewalk, it moved,

it rose above me, it wrapped me around like a wet blanket.
Then buildings upside-down.
A dark puddle covered me like a pillow over my ears.
Hush-a-bye in a field of flowers!
When I came to, I tried to push the blanket off but couldn’t.
And hush-a-bye in a field of flowers again, and next a slap,
she crying and kissing me, an eye turning black and blue,
her lips as if bitten by mice, her dress torn:
“Quiet, be quiet, you’ll start coughing again!”
It was a struggle but I stood, while she plucked her pink pantyhose from the fence
and stuffed them in her purse.

Now, not quite twenty-five, she seems an old lady:

dark circles under her eyes,
forehead wrinkled, lips creased, breasts fallen.
There’s nothing I can do if she has set her mind on growing old
and grows old according to her plan.
“In two years,” she says, “love will make me just like you,
and you’ll never again be ashamed with me
at a bar in the evening!”
And I call her slut. But then angel.
And she, in a nurse’s voice,
“Quiet, be quiet, you’ll start coughing again!”

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu)

174
 A HINT OF THE SEA IN A SMALL PUB

She sits on his knee. At each movement

the chair screeches under them like a seagull.
“Hell of a life,” he says from time to time,
but the bearded man opposite him cannot hear.
(Elbow on the table, his hand like a seashell cupping an ear).
The bearded man hears only the roar of waves and, gently, together with the table,
he rocks to the cadence of the breakers.

Now the man’s hand weighs heavy on her thigh.

The bearded man bends and spits as if he had swigged sand.
The hand creeps higher and higher. Now, through her dress, with his thumb he feels
her rounded pubis, hard as a wooden egg.
“Hell of a life,” he says. And in a while,
“You’re heavy, wife. Shift to the other knee!”

She stands up, while the bearded man undresses her with his gaze.
She knows it, her nipples sting. As if he had set her dress on fire
with a cigarette lighter. Then rough fingers
squeeze the soft flesh between the thighs. Once. That’s all.

The bearded man stares into the distance. He is watching the red curtain that drapes
the entrance to the wc. When the curtain moves, there’s a heavy seaweed smell.
The curtain flutters like shreds of a cloud far out at sea at dawn.
“Hell of a life,” the man says to the woman.
The bearded man hears that. “The sun hasn’t risen,”
the bearded man says, “our sun hasn’t yet risen.”

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu)

175
RUXANDRA CESEREANU

DELIRIUM

his sex i hold between my thighs as an instrument of torture

his head i have between my thighs like a squashed ball
i play soccer with the man i’m naked playing soccer with the man
my hair i trample after i cut it with blunt scissors
a dust cloth over god’s long face
from my hair i make witchcraft dolls
from my hair i make a hair-icon so I can clean god’s face
i can wash paralytics’ feet with the same cut hair
i can also make a soft-coarse burlap robe
but i’m a failed nun an anguished sex machine
a teddy bear lacking teeth made of bone
living prison bars that cannot penetrate flesh
a swollen nail frayed by the dim moon
the purple tongue of a hanged corpse
i’m naked playing soccer with the man
i’m a woman i’m scared i’m terrified
an instrument of torture the hair cut off.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Borbély)

176
 ANIMALS FROM THE CONTINENTS

i think of you as my old lover

i play in your flesh of pork veal mutton
i make you into shiny devil-skin handbags shoes
i lick your eyes ears hair
you taste strange like a man of pork veal mutton
you say sweet words grimy and soiled
you say dirty words with gleams in their eyes
i’ll cut off your eyelashes i’ll cut off your sex that’s what i’ll do
i play animals from the continents of your flesh
i hurl mice and unknown birds against the wall
i play animals from the continents of your flesh.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Borbély)

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 PRAYER

at dawn i poke your chest with my index finger

because i know you haven’t changed into a holy man
your throat’s a pipe through which my womanly life flows like a creek
the jugular’s the red sea that i cross on my knees
my eyelids like a perfumed handkerchief
sometimes i put on arabian earrings and a starry shalwar at five in the morning
even an ankle bracelet or three toe rings
other times i paint my lips with honey and then let you bite them
before i drink coffee like a psalm
there are mornings when a sadness confessed in my sleep grinds against my teeth
my tongue is strong and all alone
arched in an atrocious kiss
in which your mouth is identical to my mouth
a warm hollow a fountain lined with eyes
at dawn i poke your chest with my index finger
you’re what i eat before i say my erotic prayer.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Borbély)

178
DANIEL BĂNULESCU

YOU’LL SHRIVEL UP YOU’LL BE AN EXOTIC FRUIT

There’s no need to forgive you

Because as soon as I fall asleep you’ll no longer exist for me

You don’t have to move or sigh

Or whimper in every last wisp of your cells

Because as soon as I fall asleep

You’ll no longer exist for me

Turn over a new self to your fetching tail to your tomatoes

Be proud satisfied with your friends distinguished in society

Act as if from tomorrow on

It would take an earthquake to get you to lift your skirt

And only spaded earth would give back part of what you’ve lost

Be reasonable

You’ve such beautiful hands that haven’t yet wised up

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And never will

Lips the bulldozer driver won’t never know thoughts the carpenter won’t

ever hear

Breasts the gravedigger won’t ever lay eyes on

Who’ll prepare you and wash you

Who’ll place the small coin in your mouth

Who’ll slip you in my pocket

Where’s your soul

And where now is your sweat

The Scala patisserie window steamed over

I’ll send a madman to wind you up with just one finger

Until you’ll no longer bore any window

You bored me

You’re just a tuft of dwarf vegetation my imagination plucked a grille

180
Through which my gaffes ogle you as if you were a giraffe

You’re graced with dresses spice cake and flesh

But as soon as I fall asleep you’ll no longer exist for me

You’re no more than a gesture someone once made to me

Someone who drank all of life with me

You’re the thought of my socks stuffed with my feet

Like an out-of-work man’s breast crammed full of work songs

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Alina Savin)

181
 COMMUTING FROM THE NORTH STATION

Without you days pass like a procession of farts dragged onward by

elephants

Skies split little by little and crack

From each a snake’s belly drips and the weather’s awful

The party’s awful

The chick I replaced you with looks awful and next morning she’s still awful

I can’t keep myself from thinking that once—analyzed from behind—

My ecstasy at being alive took form as your behind

Your beauty has a death’s head between two lips

But your beauty holds it so tight no one wants to take the trouble

Your buttocks bring me a desert-like atmosphere

That could transform me into a prophet

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I’ll prophesize to you what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes

the next Thursdays

At your hottest spot

Then you’ll forget everything

Then you’ll head to your job work yourself to death take a ridiculous local

train join with the enemy

You’ll greet me on the street with the same display of gestures

That only your great social lover—your apartment bus salary—

Can allow you

I lost you you’ve left for a village where my bike can’t make it

Where my word can’t penetrate

Where my pants would look as stiff as a picket fence

I’ll write you letters explaining that my love isn’t just a moistening of your

mucous membranes
183
And the days when you knit a sock

Will be the nights when you will writhe disheveled

You’ve forgotten everything

From now on you’ll be gossiped about only in the butcher-boy’s argot

And the sores on the geezers’ lips at the street corner

In the workshop behind the house—where everything that gets talked about

Is trash talk—

No one will give two cents about you

Because I won’t

What have you managed to do ?

Your hair left for the army in the morning and came back dyed

After it shot many man

It grazed only my leg

It tore only the sleeve of my coat

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It flayed only my appearance in a single photo

What have you managed to do?

Now boredom is descending upon me

And I’m again speaking of your name as one consumed by boredom

Nights passed when you removed your each and every organ

You cleaned each one with alcohol

Then put it back—no two times the same—just to amuse me

Now your soul is far away now only your faint buzz

Can be heard

From where I am you look like a fly

Glowing near-ripe impure

A perfect blush for my boredom

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Alina Savin)

185
ROBERT ȘERBAN

YOUR MOUTH

your mouth separates

my good flesh from bad
like a plane
cutting the wood that holds
the door into slices.

you scream
color draining from your eyes
your gums crack
your tongue bursting out
your skin rises and falls like an empire
when you’re a woman
no mirror will recognize you

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Diana Şerban)

186
 HOME CINEMA

at home
alone
or perhaps with a woman
I sometimes cry at movies

I know
I’m stupid
and stupidity makes me emotional
so the most banal stories
about death
about life
provoke tears in me, blubbery, even feverish

their reaction as always the same

take me in their arms
pull me to their chest
pat me on my head
sometimes wipe my eyes
what woman can resist a crying man?

at home
at movies about death
about life
I cry
and fuck

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Diana Şerban)

187
 MAYBE

two tall women

with short skirts, a palm’s width
step down from the sports car
they are so beautiful so beautiful
that only the thought they may be whores
somehow calms me

(Translated by Martin Woodside and Diana Şerban)

188
DAN SOCIU

THE WAY HOME IS NO LONGER THE WAY HOME

One night my wife and I carried

ten bucketfuls of shit—
I think we haven’t spent such a good time
with each other since ’98:
we were vomiting and laughing, laughing and vomiting
—that day we swore
never to eat again—
between the dogs driven mad by the stench,
between the guinea hens, in the darkness of the flowering apricot trees,
the lantern light cut her legs
gross in my father-in-law’s trousers,
and indeed, her feet went down
as in Solomon’s Proverbs
directly into death.

Then, unwashed—as people do

after they’ve crushed grapes, after funerals
or after pumping the cesspool—
unwashed we made crazy love

and in the dark our daughter’s blue eyes

stared at us.

The way home was never the way home.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Maria Niță)

189
 LORD, GIVE ME THE POWER OF A MINI SKIRT

Seven men are waiting in the train station bar.

They are waiting peering vaguely above their glasses—
her legs are bloated,
old, squeezed by stockings full of runs,
she wobbles under her beer-stained
miniskirt.

And all seven dream that,

for a moment, she would take each of them with her
into the curtain-closed warm compartment,
with the curtain closed.

On the way home.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Maria Niță)

190
MARIUS CONKAN

JO(A)NA(H)
- fragments -

1.
her girly scent her girly haircut would drive me to suicide. she would uncover her smaller breast the
scar in her thigh and I would gasp my tongue hanging down to the ground. jo(a)na(h) your head the
size of a matchbox knocks against my head. I will be dizzy for a year. jo(a)na(h) all the angels cannot
hide in the vagina.

2.
your wrists looked like hell that morning. in your blood-smeared t-shirt and jeans death was painting
her nails. you were laughing as if a prickly penis had entered you and not the razor.

4.
tan-buttocked daughter of the earth lay my bones and hair to dry so I should no longer feel the iciness
of the blood and the guilty man’s stench. take the mud from the eyes vein by vein so I should be shim-
mering like my father and ignorant like a little girl. take me on the highest building and let me fall.
daughter of the earth gone mad much too late I must hold my tongue (sic!) and die.

5.
god-fearing man wouldn’t you like a woman with vicious thighs to fuck you. yes god-fearing man I
would like it above all if your mystified mind died under the stone.

6.
although you’re with another I don’t despair I let the knife pierce my throat I’m biting my nails to the
quick and I’m fucking a giraffe. my dead have waxed their hair off they paint themselves blue and
smoke chewing mentholated gum. daughter of the earth you’ve gone away and I’m staying behind as
cocky as always I cannot stand wine, nor chocolate, nor women, nor manly chests.

191
7.
each morning I can feel my brain hairs like sharp silver threads. hence the confusion between virgin
and mother between virile and impotent. I begin to write though I mistake cigarette for pen and sheet
of paper for kitchen tablecloth. goodbye my dearly beloved ladies it’s a lot simpler to live with hairs in
my brain than close to your suffocating fur.

8.
daughter of the earth it’s time for you to enjoy my death taking the nipple to my mouth setting ablaze
my boundless vanity. it’s time to cut the umbilical cord to grow inside me a horse fed on entrails used
to smoke and drinks. daughter of the earth I’m dead. no woman yearns for me the time has come for
us to fuck for the last time razorblades clasped between our fingers.

9.
I imagined the baby sneaking into your uterus. I imagined death passing from your womb to mine like
a neurotic stuntman. only toward the end of my life I imagined making a smoking room out of your
uterus. I can no longer write. guilt has replaced all my organs. for a year and a half I’ve been a hideous
mannequin posing in the face of failure.

10.
daughter of the earth I’ve changed my sex. I like only the nasty cigarettes I have to pay for like prosti-
tutes. daughter of the earth I found out yesterday that death’s a whore although I loved her (sic!) more
than myself. daughter of the earth while death was fucking another it seemed to me as if my father was
slaughtering a pig for christmas.

13.
jo(a)na(h) you love hermaphrodites as if they were sexual objects you’ve faith in their madness just as
in your own perversity. hermaphrodites hate you and unless you kill yourself these poor animals will
hide your knives. my hermaphrodite scream is only the earth.

14.
I want to be male properly dressed up scented so that not an iota of neurosis can be seen in me girls
should surround me their tongues pulled out envious death should cut its tongue on a scythe. I want
192
always to be what I’m not unafraid of the effeminate earth lamented with razors in my pockets a
woman skilled in bed and a superstar rhymester.

15.
you’re sad aren’t you when the condom breaks when my eyes yearn for other buns when I smoke
thinking only about the sex-appeal of the cigarette. darling you’d really like wouldn’t you to tie me
down with a child to keep me underfoot for (why!) these days a man deserves it.

(Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Magda Crețu)

193
IX. ADDENDUM WITH BUTTERFLIES
ȘERBAN FOARȚĂ

EXCHANGE OF LETTERS, EXCHANGE OF BUTTERFLIES

(A SENTIMENTAL-EPISTOLARY NOVEL)

„Le papillon n’a pas de compagnon,

mais il a la tortue pour valet.”
(Roger Caillois)

Madam,
Your present: the azure butterfly marked with black in the two acute angles of its forewings, which I
did not have yet at noon yesterday, has died at dawn today.
I inhumed it under the blooming peach tree.

Inexplicable, the remote mimesis, which made it resemble an african epitola posthumus, poor thing.

● To see a butterfly passing from the state of nympha to that of imago! I myself would suddenly turn
grey, I think.

● Only a butterfly is fragile enough to express everlastingness.

(My note: according to the poet Paul Claudel, only a rose.)
*
197
Sir,
In the adjacent basket there are: a net, pins, corks, naphthalene, a package of labels, as well as a heavy
crystal case; in a word, everything that is needed to collect butterflies, and, alas, to preserve them.
As for the courage to do it…

Madam,
The Sunday entomologist that I am, collects butterflies captured by others, and prefers cases with
engravings in which they look like postage stamps to butterflies alive or more noble ones, which we
preserve under glass.
Thus, there are some Lepidoptera that represent their country very well: yellow and red, anthocaris
belia is the lively banner of Spain, which continues to flutter alertly even when her flag is flying at half-
mast.

Alas, we are the toy of Morpheus!

Imagine that I have dreamt about you, a toothless hairless stooped old woman.
“What beautiful thing have you done?” I suddenly asked you. At these words, you, or rather the ghostly
apparition that you were, straightened up, shook off her rags, grew taller, her face lit up, she smiled, left
her somber chrysalid; next, like a new-born butterfly, this creature of India took off young and white
from the palm trees. Her fair hair was fluttering around her shoulders!

198
 Honoré de B…

*

My friend,
No word can better translate my emotion than, lo, this matchless ambassador.
It is a “creature of India”, a troides helena, with fabulous elytra resembling a golden stained
glass window.

P. S. Yesterday I was surprised at my own bringing to the lips, “sniffing” and kissing your
missive, which, as I am short-sighted, seemed natural!

● A (new) meditation (The Butterfly):

To come forth with the green of spring, and pass then with the roses, on the sweet Zephyr’s breath to
swim into the cerulean and, rocked at Nature’s blooming breast, to get inebriated with its scent of nectar
and ambrosia. To shake off, in the prime of one’s life, the burden of your wings, flying up to your native
skies, this is the destiny of the Monarch or the Sphinx, the destiny of thousands and thousands of other
butterflies. A destiny that just like desire, never standing still—but, craving and tasting all there is—re-
turns at last to holly Heaven for ever to dream of what it has been dreaming A to Z.

(Alphonse de L…)
*

199
 Madam,
This dotted with brown yellowish butterfly, which I am delivering to you in a sealed envelope
by a special courier, is a timelœa maculata.

You needn’t give it back to me.

P. S. As far as the rich granulation of its wings is concerned, this is, however, not nature’s
creation.
Reading these lines, you are sure (as I know you!) to realize what this is roughly about:
cyanide crystals.

KCN…, 3 August, 18…

(Translated by Mariana Popa, Marilena Brânda, and Şerban Foarță)

200
Contributors’ Notes

Radu Andriescu (b. 1962) is a poet and essayist that lives in Iași where he teaches in the English Department
of Al.I. Cuza University. He is author of 7 collections of poetry of which the most recent is Metallurgic, and he
prefers to quote a couple of lines by his close friend the poet Constantin Acosmei in expressing his own creed:
“Poetry is like sitting on the windowsill/ with a hare’s ears in your hands…”

Liviu Antonesei (b. 1953) is a poet, essayist, editor, and journalist who has authored five books of poetry. He
lives in Iași where he is a Professor of Education Sciences. Over the past few decades he has been editor and then
editor-in-chief of major publications in Iași, including the prestigious literary magazines Convorbiri literare
(Literary exchanges) and Timpul (The Time). His poetry has been translated and included in anthologies in the
US and Europe.

Andrei Bantaș (1930 – 1997) is one of the best known authors of English-Romanian and Romanian-English
dictionaries. While serving as a Professor in the University of Bucharest, he also actively translated major
English-language writers into Romanian, among which Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde,
Charles Dickens, and W. Somerset Maugham, as well as Romanian poetry and drama into English. Of the
latter, perhaps his most notable literary translations are his English renditions of Mihai Eminescu’s and Tudor
Arghezi’s poetry.

Daniel Bănulescu (b. 1960) has published three collections of poems along with his novels and plays, and has
stated that although he knows hundreds of fellow-writers so much more talented than he is, world literature
only has three hopes: the poet Daniel Bănulescu, the novelist Daniel Bănulescu, and the playwright Daniel
Bănulescu…

Florin Bican (b. 1956) is a compulsive translator of Romanian literature. The resulting translations have been
published in Britain, Ireland, The United States, Holland, Germany, Singapore, and Romania. His translations
from English into Romanian include Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book
of Practical Cats. He also published two volumes of poetry, Cântice mârlăneşti (A Slob’s Treasury of Verse), and
Reciclopedia de poveşti cu rimă şi fără tâlc (The Recyclopedia of Rhyming Nonsense).
201
Carmen Borbély (b. 1970) is a lecturer at the Faculty of Letters in Cluj, Babes-Bolyai University; she is part of
the English Department. She translated several books in English.

Emil Brumaru (b. 1939) went to the School of Medicine in Iași and published his debut collection, Verses, in
1970. In 1966 he became a member of the Oneiric Circle along with Leonid Dimov, Dumitru Țepeneag, Daniel
Turcea, and others. He quit his job as a general practitioner after 12 years of practice and dedicated himself
solely to writing. He is author of over twenty praised books of poetry, among which Detectivul Arthur (Detective
Arthur), Cântece naive (Naïve Songs), Infernala comedie (The Infernal Comedy), and Submarinul erotic (The
Erotic Submarine), along with a collection of his correspondence with critic Lucian Raicu, Cerșetorul de cafea
(The Coffee Beggar).

Romulus Bucur (b. 1956) is author of six collections, and made his debut with the famous Cinci (Five) anthology
in 1982 together with other four young poets who are meanwhile, all of them, major names in Romanian
contemporary letters. He is a Professor of Literature in Brașov and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious
literary review in Arad, Arca (The Ark). Bucur has been translated abroad and included in significant interna-
tional anthologies, and he also published a collection of poems in English in the UK.

Ruxandra Cesereanu (b. 1963) is a poet, novelist, and essayist who lives and works as a Literature Professor in
Cluj. A founding member of The Phantasma Center for Imagination Studies and Deputy Editor-in-Chief for
Steaua (The Star), she is author of seven collections of her own and two others coauthored with Andrei Codrescu
and Marius Conkan. She believes that her numerous female personae participate in a quest for poetry—as reme-
dy—and for the “killer instinct” in the “poet-beast.”

Magda Cârneci (b. 1955) is a poet, novelist, and essayist who has published seven collections of verse, two of
which in French. She earned her PhD in 1997 from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and served
as Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris. Her poetry, while seeking “to cast light onto the bloody
inside of today,” leads towards “a cosmic, visionary state put in the service of a relentless spiritual quest.”
Gabriel Chifu (b. 1954) is a poet and novelist, author of six books of poetry, Vice-President of the Romanian
Writers’ Union and Executive Director of the central publication România literară. A seasoned and widely
commended writer, Chifu still recently confessed to have never understood any but four verbs in this world: to
travel, to write, to love, and to believe.
202
Dan Coman (b. 1975) is author of four collections of poems and recipient of a number of important national
awards and European fellowships. He has also published two novels.

Marius Conkan (b. 1988) published two collections of poems in 2009 and 2012, and has coauthored a third one
with Ruxandra Cesereanu. He is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at University of Cluj.

Nicolae Coande (b. 1962) is the author of six collections of poetry and a forthcoming “new and selected.” He
lives in Craiova where he works as a magazine editor and theatrical literary manager, while entertaining hopes
that the end of the world will not come in 2012 (in spite of all predictions) which will give President Obama the
time to read his poetry just as he read the one of Vasko Popa.

Sean Cotter (b. 1971) is the translator (most recently) of Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding (Archipelago Books)
and the winner of the Best Translated Book Award for poetry, Nichita Stanescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke
(Archipelago Books). He is Associate Professor of Literature and Literary Translation at The University of Texas
at Dallas, where he is a member of the Center for Translation Studies.

Daniela Crăsnaru (b. 1950) is author of 9 collections of poetry and recipient of many national and interna-
tional awards. If it weren’t for the living proof of her own love poetry, she confesses, she would think she has
actually repeateadly died from the several “deadly love affairs” in her life.

Magda Crețu (b. 1982) graduated from the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. She has
a master’s degree in American Studies. She is currently working as a freelance translator.

Nichita Danilov (b. 1952) is a poet and novelist who published eight collections of poems. He has been
selected for most of the major Romanian poetry anthologies and publications and is present in an impressive
number of international anthologies. He lives in Iași where he has been a very active cultural journalist and
columnist over the past three decades, even when for a 2-year break, he worked as a press attaché with the
Romanian embassy in Chișinău.

Mircea Dinescu (b. 1950) is a poet, editor, columnist, and former member of Parliament and president of
Romanian Writers’ Union who has published over a dozen collections of poems and as many selections of his
203
poetry in foreign translation all over the world. He is recipient of the highest Romanian and European literary
distinctions, including the Herder Prize for Literature.

Marian Drăghici (b. 1953) is the author of five collections of poems who has prodigiously contributed to
numerous literary magazines, participated in international literary festivals and book fairs, and whose writing
has been translated into many languages and included in anthologies and textbooks. He lives in Bucharest
where he is Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious literary review Viața Românească (Romanian Life).

Rodica Draghincescu (b. 1962) lives in France where she works as a literary review editor and has authored five
collections of poetry in Romanian and six in French. She writes poetry in order “not to be” and “not to commit
murder” while she “pulls out her mother tongue” at international fairs after “dipping it in linguistic sauces and
philosophical spices.”

Teodor Dună (b. 1981) is the author of three collections of poems who is already considered a visionary of his
generation, recipient of a number of important awards and fellowships, and a public figure who has given more
than 30 public readings in Romania and abroad.

Carmen Firan (b. 1958) is a poet, novelist, and essayist who published more than ten collections of poems in
her native Romania before moving to New York in 2000. Both in those books and in the ones published mean-
while in the United States, her poems are charged with gloom and passion, on the edge of love & loss, while
“Death is a woman with whom you can play or fall in love, a moody woman who can betray you with another
man. And the game goes on”…

Șerban Foarță (b. 1942) is author of over twenty poetry collections, including Holorhymes, Opera somnia and a
Psalter in verse, and the widely acclaimed lyrics writer for the most famous Romanian rock band ever, Phoenix.
He introduces himself as someone who has been a poet for 45 years and yet to whom poetry has remained
“vaporous, deceptive, evanescent, seducing, slippery—like a satin, a moire, a swishing silk… Therefore: Half-
colour, half-song,/a silk very fine/ seems mine, to belong,/ but it is not mine.”

Iulian Fruntașu (b. 1970) is author of three collections of poems and a book of political history who has
also worked as a diplomatic representative of the Republic of Moldova around Europe. He recalls how back
in the year of socialist realism Soviet gerontocracy declared that sex did not exist in the USSR, and that
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when he was threatened by a senior writer he “would burn in hell with his sluts” he retorted “I’ll send you
a poem from there.”

Emilian Galaicu-Păun (b. 1964) is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, translator, editor, and publisher from (The
Republic of) Moldova, who has authored seven collections of poems and has been selected in a great number
of national and international anthologies. He once presented himself as a poet who “over the last two decades
[has] been travelling between two countries [Romania and Moldova], but inside the same literature, divided
in two separate republics of letters” and who would rather “pledge for a union of souls and spirits rather than a
community of literati.”

Mihail Gălățanu (b. 1963) is a poet, fiction writer, and journalist, author of eight books of poetry who has been
heralded by major names in contemporary criticism as one of Romania’s greatest poetry virtuosos ever.

Adela Greceanu is a poet and novelist who published her debut collection of poems in 1997, which won her
several important literary awards and encouraged her to publish two more others. She has given readings
and participated in numerous literary festivals in Romania and around Europe, and was included in one of
critic Marin Mincu’s major anthologies. Poems of hers have been translated and published in more than 10
languages.

Mihai Ignat (b. 1967) has published eight collections of poems and has been acknowledged as a playwright as
well, both in his home-country and abroad. A Professor of Romanian literature in Brașov, he started a literary
movement when he was 17 (a movement which, as he boisterously declares, nobody has heard of since then),
but meanwhile he got to also enumerate among his main hobbies, movies, the female nude, and Murphy’s
laws.

Letiția Ilea (b. 1967) works as Professor of French in Cluj university and has published four collections of
poems, but the only things she would declare about herself are that her occupation is uncertain although her
education is what it takes to do that, namely to knit armors out of cobwebs.

Doina Ioanid (b. 1968) has authored five collections of poetry consisting exclusively of prose poems, and works
as Senior Editor for Observatorul Cultural in Bucharest. “I’VE NOTHING TO SAY, I’M A POET (from a T-shirt
manufactured by the female inmates of Venice Penitentiary—Le malefatte di Venezia),” says Ioanid.
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Nora Iuga (b. 1931) has published over a dozen books of poetry and she is also a novelist and prolific translator
that specializes in German and Swedish literatures. She is proud to be the most aged blogger in Romania and
the editor of an audio-video e-zine, while her latest “new and selected” in translation became out of print in
Germany soon after the book launch.

Claudiu Komartin (b. 1983) studied Foreign Languages at Bucharest University, but he never graduated. He
published several books of poetry, one of which was awarded the Romanian Academy Poetry Prize, Komartin
being the youngest poet ever to earn this distinction. His essay/manifesto “Generation 2000—An Introduction”
has remained general reference, and his bilingual selected poems translated into German by Georg Aescht came
out from Edition Korrespondenzen in Vienna in 2012. Since 2010, he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Poesis inter-
national and of Max Blecher Press.

Ștefan Manasia (b. 1977) is author of five collections of poems; after majoring in literature from The Babeș-
Bolyai University in Cluj he worked a year as a teacher and then became a journalist for Tribuna magazine. As
a personal credo, he undertakes to write on the margin(al)s from the margins.

MARGENTO (Chris Tanasescu, b. 1968) is a poet, academic, and performer whose pen-name is also the name
of his poetry/action painting/jazz-rock band which won a number of national and international awards. Over
the past few years he has assembled, published, and performed (around Europe, S-E Asia, and North-America)
installments of a graph poem, a communal book poets from various parts of the world contribute to following
the principles of mathematical/digital graphs and the spirit of jam sessions.

Angela Marinescu (b. 1941) is author of more than 15 poetry collections, among which Sânge albastru (Blue Blood),
1969, Structura nopții (The Structure of the Night), 1979, Cocoșul s-a ascuns în tăietură (Rooster Hidden in the Rip),
1996; Blues & Parcul (Blues & the Park), 1997, and Întâmplări derizorii de sfârșit (Ludicrous Incidents of the End), 2006.
People say she writes an art noir poetry, but she actually thinks it is blue.

Michel Martin (b. 1983) is the author of three collections of poems who left Brașov to immigrate to London in
2003 and who published a “Manifesto of Postsurrealism” in 2004.

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Ion Mureșan (b. 1955) lives in Cluj and is author of three collections of poems and recipient of virtually all
literary awards in his country. He believes poetry is the freest of all literary forms and at the same time the
strongest proof of God’s existence.

Alexandru Mușina (b. 1954 – d. 2013) is the author of nine collections and one collective book of poetry.
Considered by the critics as one of the most relevant poets of the Generation 80, his essays are also seen as
indispensable in understanding Romanian (post)modernism.

O. Nimigean (b. 1962) is a poet, novelist, and critic who has published five collections of poems, received numerous
national and international awards and fellowships, and contributed to or edited a number of significant antholo-
gies. He is convinced that “smart” self-blurbs most of the cases merely help passing around a poorly written book,
and therefore he just bids the readers good night (not without recording though that ”the author puts his imagi-
nary bowler hat back on his head, bows, and then walks away with an almost imperceptible limp.”)

Cosmin Perța (b. 1982) has authored six collections of poems. He is considered, along with Ștefan Manasia and
Teodor Dună, one of the most important poets of the younger generation. He is also a novelist and essayist.

Marta Petreu (b. 1955) is a poet, novelist, and essayist who has published six collections of poems. Her forma-
tion as a writer was deeply influenced by the intellectual atmosphere around the Echinox (Equinox) circle,
but her specialization is philosophy, the subject that she teaches in Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj. A very
active essay writer and historian of Romanian philosophy, she is also Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine
Apostrof.
Adrian Popescu (b. 1947) is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator who was a founding member of the Echinox
(Equinox) circle and is presently Editor-in-Chief of the literary review Steaua (The Star). He has published
fifteen books of poetry, among which his debut collection, Umbria (1971) spoke of a province in Italy he had
only visited in his imagination, but a scholarship he was granted soon afterwards only proved how our most
intense desires may sometimes be actually realized. To this day he considers Umbria and St. Francis extremely
influential to his formation as a writer.

Simona Popescu (b. 1965) is a poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and Assistant Professor of Literature at the
University of Bucharest. When once trying to answer the question of what is poetry she started working on
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a poem on poets and writing which ended up as a 325-page-long book of reflections on/and/as poetry titled
Lucrări în verde. Pledoaria mea pentru poezie (Works in Green. My Defense of Poetry); there she wrote of
poetry as a strange fish among fishes, poetry as a mode of existence, and the patient attempts one has to make
to speak of such things.

Adrian Sângeorzan (b. 1954) is a Romanian poet who immigrated to the US in 1990 from his native Transylvania.
He reached New York and grew new roots through the asphalt of the big city. “I figured out that from here there
is no other place to run to. Poetry became the door to exit reality, another escape and return to my old roots,
filled with contentment. And here I am testifying, if need be, that Romanian women are amongst the loveliest,
as the poetry they inspire.”

Robert Șerban (b. 1970) is author of four collections of his own and three others co-authored with other poets.
He is recipient of numerous national and international awards and has been invited to participate in major poetry
festivals all around Europe. He lives in Timișoara where he works as a journalist, TV show host, and editor.

Octavian Soviany (b. 1954) is a poet, novelist, critic, and playwright who has published nine collections of
poems, who started out as an Echinox editor, and then has worked as a Romanian teacher and a literary reviewer
and editor, and who holds a PhD on “Romanian Textualism.” A widely praised and awarded author, Soviany
prefers the world of yesterday to the one of today, as he finds “fiction infinitely more fascinating than reality.”

Dan Sociu (b. 1978) is a poet, novelist, and translator who has published three collections of poems, is recipient
of a number of major national awards and has been translated and included in numerous significant interna-
tional anthologies and publications.

Adam J. Sorkin (b. 1943) is a translator of contemporary Romanian literature, mainly poetry. His work has
won, among other distinctions, the Poetry Society (U.K.) Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry
Translation for 2005, as well as the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Award, the Kenneth Rexroth
Memorial Translation Prize, and the Ioan Flora Prize for Poetry Translation.

Raluca Tanasescu (b. 1978) is a PhD Candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa and the trans-
lator of 11 volumes (of fiction and non-fiction), as well as of many poetry selections. She is currently working
on her doctoral research project titled Songs of Globalization: Trans/Inter-Cultural Patterns in Contemporary
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North-American Poetry Translated into French and Romanian.
Floarea Țuțuianu (b. 1951) has published five collections of poetry and is also a well-renowned painter. One
of her mottos reads: “I have come to an age when sex commands respect./ Dürer I say, yet my mind speaks of
something else.”

Mihail Vakulovski (b. 1972) is a poet, novelist, essayist, and editor, author of five collections of poems and recip-
ient of numerous poetry and translation awards who has also earned a PhD from the University of Bucharest
with a widely praised thesis on the Generation 80.

Lucian Vasiliu (b. 1954) has published five collections of poems and lives in Iași, where he is Editor-in-Chief of
Dacia literară. He was born on a -240 C (-110 F) snowdrifty day in a village meanwhile on the eastern frontier of
the European Union, and throughout his life as a teacher, librarian, literary museum director, cultural projects
manager, and “River-Bahlui-monadologist” has been trying to finish his “unique and audacious tractatus poeticus”
on the way in which he “works his way through all this.”

Lidia Vianu (b. 1947) teaches English contemporary literature at the University of Bucharest and is the director
of Contemporary Literature Press. She has written books of literary criticism, fiction and poetry. As a translator,
she has won the Poetry Society (U.K.) Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation for 2005. Her
major research project since 2009 is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. 

Miruna Vlada (b. 1986) is author of two collections of poems and recipient of several national awards and an
international distinction. She is one of the organizers of an annual prestigious poetry festival in Bucharest and
gives frequent poetry readings in Romania and Western Europe.

Elena Vlădăreanu (b. 1981) has published five collections of poems; she lives in Bucharest where she has
worked as a cultural journalist and radio hostess since her early 20s. A well-renowned young poet and active
member of the new literature circles and movements, her poems have been translated and anthologized in the
UK and in several other European countries, and the US.

Martin Woodside (b. 1972) is a writer, translator, and a founding member of Calypso Editions. He has published
five books for children, a chapbook of poetry, and an anthology of Romanian poetry in translation. He spent
2009-10 on a Fulbright in Romania and currently lives in Philadelphia where he is a Presidential Fellow working
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toward his PhD in Childhood Studies.