Vasile Gârneţ

I didn’t ask myself any fundamental questions
that Saturday morning
I was just walking along the street, reciting from Gellu Naum:
“it seems that at the terminus of silence there slips in a disorder
stirred up by the world’s desolation…”
I kept repeating this line from the poet with whom I’d drunk – in ’93, last
century – a cup of tea in his house on Vasile Lascăr (his wife
Liggia was there too, she regarded me with great kindness, she held
a ginger cat in her lap – a pleasant, familial atmosphere,
all except that I started to tremble when Gellu leafed
through my book of poems about a figure in a deserted garden…)

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