“I’d like to write a book that would shut those idiots up
stop them from devouring the world” said Andrei
and kicked the rock on which we sat huddled

“dignity alone gives rise to the free man…” he went on
in no way connected to Adrian, it was just that he always used to say
words long in the pondering

“it is courage only when you have no hope” said
Vitalie irrevocably tangling things up just when everything
had seemed to be coming together under the sign of exclamation
and perspective

that summer the more impressionable leapt into the waves
so as to die in a beauty spot such as Cascais really was
others, the majority, remained on the shore and contemplated
philosophically their failure

 

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

Poemul original poate fi citit aici:

http://www.contrafort.md/vasilegarnet/?p=27

in fact we used to wander through cultivated gardens
in search of nuances
chryophytes – as Galgoţiu would say

someone (a plesiosaurus of the time)
looked on us with indulgence
“like bottles of fine wine
placed in ice buckets, that’s what you are”
he would say attempting a simile
and in our path he would set up
gleaming bamboo boundary posts
so that we could examine our charisma

we noticed other signs too
but we would recite in turn from the law of the pendulum clock
in that way it reined in our philanthropic élan
we would describe the naivety of birds
we would dream in a slightly fauvist way
we would transgress antinomies
Pia would say for example:
“tomorrow is miners’ day”
each understood as much as he understood
from those words
and we would walk…
a wind blew in our faces
we would find a book and read:
“you are now heading toward a different sentiment
let me see you knocking together some backdrops”
it said enigmatically

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

it was early now and tranquil
I carried an unfed angel on my shoulder
I refused to discuss with him
any problems I have with myself
what would be the use? I keep asking myself
lately in annoyance, I increasingly doubt
there is a God
and that means my suffering
is pointless…

and just when I had ended up feeling sorry
that I still hadn’t died yesterday
so as not to see and feel so much
who should I see emerging from the yard of the building on
31 August Street but the emblematic politician of our time
setting off on a hunting trip
he had a rifle in a sleeve – probably an expensive one,
as much as I earn in a year –
he was dressed nattily, elegantly, sportily,
he seemed well rested, absorbed, abstracted
– he obviously hadn’t noticed me –
he was probably thinking with satisfaction
about how he had done the best possible job of arranging
political affairs in Bassarabia for
the decades to come,
and how we ought to be grateful to him
perhaps even erect a statue to him…

the angel had abandoned me
it had grown hot, the air was as thick as felt
– agony for those with respiratory difficulties, I thought –
I was alone on the street that symbolises our liberation
on the walls, amid the adverts, someone had scrawled:
“down with communism!” and “the Christian in the boot of the car…”
there was a lot of graffiti, some unrepeatable, but this
stuck in my mind as I entered the Writers’ House
where there was a smell of ash and weariness
and the silence of nothingness

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

Poemul  în română poate fi citit aici: http://www.contrafort.md/vasilegarnet/?p=261

for a long time no one has looked me up
I am alone – with the forbidden urge –
alone among books and things which
now insinuate themselves even more suggestively
and they too seemingly await tenderness

I hear someone loitering on the street
walking unhurried – the footfalls have
a low, conspiratorial echo
as ever I salvage myself using my imagination
I tell myself that it’s Kafka – suffering’s calligrapher –
on a walk through Chisinau
sad and alone Kafka loitering
in a world that long ago humbled its existence

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

a crowd was flowing over the bridge
each man carried his poem shielded against the day’s neuroses
I thought how suffering lifts up some
casts down others
Miss Felicitas Hoppe had just been reading my poems
from the East
sometimes she smiled and that further enhanced her charm
the charm of a creature specially endowed for nuances
and careful observations

“perhaps we are too logical for the history
we have lived…
the problem is how much light we can shed around us…”
she said regarding me protectively and without distance
as if she had assimilated the same understanding of life

a paltry hope nestled in us
and we crossed the bridge together

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

I lived far from the sea, I shunned mirrors
and the crowds that rejoiced and prayed
with equal fervour

it was now silent there and I could observe
how one was sleeping, the others guarding his sleep
and they were unaware that he was already dead,
that his mouth was filled with darkness
and a sickly-sweet fecund steam seethed, filling our house
(“the vivacious corpse” I said of the one who – apparently – slept,
and added: “some not even death sets free,”
but I took care not to be heard)
I was grateful to them for not calling me over
to sit alongside them
they shouted out to me in jest, bored and sardonic,
like connoisseurs of mockery:
cover yourself up, why don’t you take shelter!

I’m one of those people who don’t need much
I can sit quietly on the terrace in the garden and read,
listen to the grasses growing and the trees breathing
and to the rain…
– it’s always such a promising afternoon –
I sit and wait
even if the thing I’m waiting for will never come

Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

she speaks as though she were avenging herself
she gives her usual speech – one ironically
scathing and at the same time protective…
the light of the lamp with the turquoise shade, as I said,
heightens the colours
“you reside in the comfort of illusion” she goes on
as the chimes of the city’s clock tower
drown out the voice that utters so
beautifully the truth

 Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

 

Mi s-au tradus mai multe poeme în engleză ÅŸi… rusă pentru două antologii. Le voi pune pe blog în porÅ£ii mici.

neume (II)

without solemnity, Ioana and I are discussing
the therapeutic value of illusions
we drink tea from a giant Russian samovar
at a round table with wheels, placed
so there’s light from a window,
a place made famous by our wit

(I told myself this is like a stage-set
I’ll always remember
still perfecting it each time
as if making notes in the margin of a text
for example: in my future memory
the table with wheels will symbolize
the epoch’s transient spirit
the Russian samovar – Slavic influence
the white tea-cups with generous handles
comfortable and bourgeois – our escape
into the free world – one spring in Berlin with Grig and Emil
and so on) 

like this, I would stay and talk with Ioana
in the haughty anonymity of these kitchens
it was quiet outside, except from time to time when
some Romanian guy or another curses fiercely,
beaten down by the heat
but all for nothing, for nothing
the normal life has this kind of equalizing pressure
and communism isn’t in any kind of hurry
to return as Marxist literature

what glossy directing!
this solitude conceals
profound traumas, I’ve thought
and I feel a desire to write tragically
in your names

sings for the initiated

like I said, we were at the movie
in the soundtrack I caught
Nini Rosso’s trumpet
and Ioana squeezed my hand – a sign
of solidarity between the initiated
the scent of cheap apple spray in the hall
gave us an easy sense of superiority over others
(at least we know how to defend ourselves against poverty,
that is we understand it better, I thought)
later on I wanted to hold her gloves
- navy blue – and I dropped a coin
that rolled and rolled (like in Tarkovski)
on the floor’s waxed and resonant wood
”trilulilu!” someone whistled
maybe wanting to share with us
our mortification for releasing this din
(really, the noise of the rolling coin seemed like a din to me –
though, with this sensitivity of mine,
I could be exaggerating)

on screen a lady with a broad-brimmed
feathered hat saunters into a church
(a Catholic church, Ioana points out afterwards)
fog is eating the white walls
but this detail doesn’t dissolve the film
the landscape is directed well throughout
a montage is used: under the street lamps
children shine the boots of a soldier with holding a horsewhip in his hand
(no, it wasn’t a hostile relationship
it was an idyll with multiple possibilities for development)
buildings with columns and painted frontispieces
a few pale-green houses… the clocktower – its long shadow
humble the cobblestone all the way over to the stage
where the contestants play the flute,
multi-colored flora and fauna,
abandoned objects,
an old man in a cemetery tapping a wooden cross
with a stick of hazelwood asking, but who’s here?
next scene
a harpist in a meditative pause
(her dress has a moribund color
something possibly announcing danger)
an amateur at bridge who shouts
he knows how we build the rose bonbon
a deserted train station where the animal kingdom
enacts the rituals of separations
the soundtrack again – Nini Rosso’s trumpet
and our regret that history keeps so little
of all this

outside it’s snowing as it does inside a Christmas card

contemplating a puddle

if you stay and contemplate a puddle at length
and if you realize what is happening to you
(you can’t avoid the process of absorption)
and you still have courage to speak – with a remnant
of the arrogance belonging to the species in which you are numbered -
of how many dangers lie in wait for you
in this not at all happy condition
does it have to mean that you cultivate yourself
- with voluptuous satisfaction -
a tragic image?

to sum it up is simply: our history doesn’t have style
what else could this roar of mine mean
inside the fruit-press of Balkan confusions?
my murder – beautiful like a sin
on a firing range, without destiny’s ambiguities?

wild angel, they’ll call me
avoiding a late opinion (as in Proust)
from their fear of seeming vulgar

Berliner Kupferstich

Es war im Juli wir schmiedeten lyrische Komplotte auf
einer Berliner Brücke
kamen jedoch über die Montage einer
Sequenz nicht hinaus
in de rein Bettler die “Katjuscha” singend neben dem
Reichstag auftauchte

über die Brücke liefen fortwährend Leute
jeder trug sein Gedicht
geschützt vor den Neurosen des Tages
ich überlegte, dass die einen vom Leiden erhöht
andere wieder davon erniedrigt werden
das Fraulein Felicitas Hoppe las gerade meine
östlichen Gedichte
sie lächelte zuweilen und dadurch trat ihr reiz als ein
Wesen mit der speziellen Begabung für Nuancen und
genaues Hinsehen noch stärker hervor
“vielleicht sind wir zu logisch fur die Geschichte
die wir erlebt haben
die Frage ist, wieviel Licht wir um uns verbreiten…”
sagte sie mit einem wohlwollenden Blick zu mir und
ohne Distanz
so als hätte sie sich die gleiche Lebensauffassung
zu eigen gemacht

eine klitzekleine Hoffnung nistete sich in uns ein
und wir uberquerten die Brücke gemeinsam

(Aus dem Rumänischen von Gerhardt Csejka)
  

Translated by Cornelia Golna