Romanian Poets: Adela Greceanu, Angela Marinescu, Svetlana Cârstean, Radu

Vancu, Ioan Es. Pop

Introductions by Tara Skurtu and Margento:

Tara Skurtu:

Romanian poetry is more than alive and kicking. I discovered this in the fall of 2013, when I first
traveled to Romania and serendipitously landed in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu the week of an
international poetry festival. I was there on a poetry fellowship and had expected to spend two
months wandering the birthplace of my paternal great-grandparents alone, unable to speak
Romanian, hoping to find inspiration for poems. Instead, I discovered the life force that is
Romanian poetry. And let me tell you, it’s a force that travels. From literary festivals and poetry
marathons to bar lecture clubs, young writers’ groups, book fairs, and launches, I found myself
swirling in a whirlwind of a vital poetry community, a poetry so strong that it made me want to
learn Romanian. And so I began to teach myself Romanian through contemporary poems. Today
I’m delighted to introduce, in this Selected Feature, the work of Adela Greceanu, Angela
Marinescu, Svetlana Cârstean, Radu Vancu, and Ioan Es. Pop.

Translation/Poem Notes:

Adela Greceanu captures the subtle observations and routines of daily life, and she does so
using quiet, colloquial narratives with unexpected bites of humor or irony. Sometimes these
narratives address a single spoken word and, in doing so, deconstruct semantics. Other times, as
in “Udo,” an 8th-floor apartment window becomes a portal to the cinema of childhood. The
speaker, Adila, is transported to her child self; a wire fence takes the place of this window. On
the other side of this barrier is her friend and neighbor, Udo. In this “each of us on our own side”
world, the two children play adult alongside each other. Limits are malleable. One can easily see
that Greceanu is also a prose writer—her speakers are more like characters, scenes and settings
are often repeated, and spoken lines from early poems are braided into later ones. Her poetry
resists a couple of the consistent features of contemporary (and some modern) Romanian poetry:
writing in lowercase, using inconsistent punctuation at best or no punctuation at all. Opening a
Greceanu book is to enter an introspective, absorbable world—or, worlds.

Angela Marinescu is one of the most esteemed poets writing in Romania. I like to call her the
Romanian poet’s poet. (I have yet to find a Romanian writer who doesn’t admire her work.) A
Marinescu poem might leave the reader thinking, Did that really just happen? Her poems
challenge their own arrivals. She’s constantly inventing and reinventing, and her poetry
especially influences young Romanian poets. Marinescu is a powerhouse, her poems are
mitochondrial. Violent, fierce, brutal, bold, uninhibited, all while using simple language. In
“these things,” resistance and surrender amalgamate, a sacrament violates, what should be holy
metamorphoses into a resilient pest. The speaker dissolves. One-word lines account for nearly
half of the short poem “Oligophrenia.” This poem is its own new dictionary entry. It’s also a
math equation: poetry equals sex, which is equivalent to true art, and the order of magnitude of
true art is measured by the visceral reaction of an oligophrenic’s throat. Whichever proof you go
with, you’ll end up with nothing but pure sex.

Svetlana Cârstean is a constant in contemporary Romanian poetry. She’s also known

internationally for collaborative writing and translation projects. Her first collection of poems
received four major literary awards, and her second book, Gravity (from which this poem was
selected), will appear in Norwegian this year. The reader of the unsent postcard “song of passing
3…” is transported to the South of France, where the whole city prepares for a bullfight. The
short lines are hinges on which the syntax (much like the people in this poem) slides, the passes
of the capote through which the reader observes the behavior of the city. The matador is absent,
the bull is but a calf, and the fight becomes a private romp. The final third of the poem presents
no red muleta obscuring a sword and controlling the bull with another series of passes. There’s
just a little bull who is, like an unsent postcard, without an audience. The reader becomes the
voyeur, the bull is transformed—and the world, dichromatic no more.

Radu Vancu creates uncompromisingly honest worlds in which the dead speak and everything is
at stake. Family is the centrifugal force of his poetry. He is also the Romanian co-translator (with
the late Mircea Ivănescu) of Pound, and this can be seen in his newest collection of poems, 4
AM: Domestic Cantos. The first two lines of Vancu’s “Canto XIII” speak to the first line of
Pound’s “Canto XIV” (“Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto”), but instead of already having
found himself in a lightless place, Vancu’s speaker looks to an inevitably blinding day in the
future which will invoke and blind the grueling present as well. The poem launches into an
autobiographical narrative—memories of personal loss, physical labor, coping through
destruction: “all Kierkegaard and vodka.” The only thing from which the speaker consistently
and admittedly strays is: poetry. That poetry “exists and matters” is an illusion, but in this poem
illusions can’t be distinguished from bodily reality. And so the speaker addresses and reassures
his own body that it won’t always be the same body, and, in doing so, simultaneously alludes to
and does away with Kierkegaard and memory.

Ioan Es. Pop is one of the most well-known and consistently published poets of the ‘90s
generation. His language is simple, subtle, and layered. He’s one of the rare poets that can hit a
reader’s tender spots without crossing the linguistic border into that sentimental zone of no
return. Pop’s “in case you get sleepy earlier” reads like a visual lullaby. The reader is zoomed
into the speaker’s childhood dream about the desire to shrink and stay shrunk and dormant as a
potato in a “potato nest” (this word was the trickiest to translate—in Romanian, there’s a
particular word for the dirt in which the potato sits: cuib (it literally means nest, although in the
poem it obviously holds additional symbolic and metaphorical weight). The speaker, or potato,
wishes to remain buried, unborn, and sleeping “well and forgotten,” season after season, resisting
the inevitable harvest in the world above.

ADELA GRECEANU

Udo

The way I am now

looking through the window,
this is how I was in my childhood
looking through the wire fence
that separated our gardens,
after I’d called for him:
Udoooooo, come to the feeeeence!
Most of the time,
Udo would come
and we’d play there,
each of us on our own side.
But sometimes he didn’t come.
And I’d be there a long while,
watching through the wire fence
into Udo’s garden,
the most beautiful place in the world,
more beautiful than any park,
more beautiful than any playground.
There were huge dandelions,
tall grass,
bus stations,
and an old cast iron bathtub.

Sometimes, after he’d park his bus,

I’d ask Udo to get in the tub.
And Udo would get in
with his little boots
open at the toe and heel,
little white boots sent by his relatives in Germany,
little boots that supported his ankles
when he drove the bus.
It was like
I was giving him a bath.

Other times Udo would call for me:

Adilaaaaa, come to the feeeence!
Most of the time,
I would go
and we’d play there,
each of us on our own side.
But maybe sometimes I didn’t go.
And maybe Udo would be there a long while
watching through the wire fence
into my garden,
the most beautiful place in the world,
more beautiful than any park,
more beautiful than any playground.
There were countless rows of vegetables,
straight paths between them
and not a single weed:
the kind of streets
in a kind of city
good enough to travel by bus.
Sometimes, after we’d made food,
Udo would ask me
to be his other bus,
the one that returned.
And I’d walk the straight paths,
muddy my boots,
go through a complicated trail
to return to Udo,
who’d be waiting for me,
his fingers clinging to the wire mesh.

I would have liked so badly to know

how my garden looked
when viewed from his garden.
In the evening, after all the grueling work,
I’d ask Udo to marry me.
And we’d marry.

Adela Greceanu (source text)

Udo

Cum stau acum

și mă uit pe fereastră,
așa stăteam în copilărie,
uitîndu-mă prin gardul de sîrmă
care despărțea grădinile noastre,
după ce-l strigam:
Udoooooo, hai la gaaaaard!
De cele mai multe ori
Udo venea
și ne jucam acolo,
fiecare pe partea lui.
Dar uneori nu venea.
Ș i eu stăteam mult și bine,
privind prin gardul de sîrmă
în grădina lui Udo,
cel mai frumos loc din lume,
mai frumos decît orice parc,
mai frumos decît orice loc de joacă.
Erau acolo păpădii uriașe,
ierburi înalte,
stații de autobuz
și o cadă veche de fontă.
Uneori, după ce-și parca autobuzul,
îl rugam pe Udo să intre în cadă.
Ș i Udo intra,
cu ghetuțele lui
decupate la vârfuri și la călcîie,
ghetuțe albe primite de la rudele din Germania,
ghetuțe care-i țineau bine gleznele
cînd conducea autobuzul.
Ș i era ca și cum
îi făceam baie.

Alteori mă striga Udo pe mine:

Adilaaaa, hai la gaaaard!
De cele mai multe ori
mă duceam
și ne jucam acolo,
fiecare de partea lui.
Dar poate uneori nu mă duceam.
Ș i poate Udo stătea mult și bine,
privind prin gardul de sîrmă
în grădina mea,
cel mai frumos loc din lume,
mai frumos decît orice parc,
mai frumos decît orice loc de joacă.
Erau acolo nenumărate straturi de legume,
cărări drepte printre ele
și nici o buruiană:
un fel de străzi
într-un fel de oraș
numai bun de parcurs cu autobuzul.
Uneori, după ce făceam de mîncare,
Udo mă ruga
să fiu autobuzul lui pereche,
cel de întoarcere.
Ș i eu mă plimbam pe cărările drepte,
îmi umpleam pantofii de noroi,
străbăteam un traseu complicat
ca să mă întorc la Udo,
care mă aștepta
cu degetele înfipte în plasa de sîrmă.

Tare mult mi-ar fi plăcut să știu

cum se vede grădina mea
privită din grădina lui.
Seara, după toate treburile istovitoare,
îl rugam pe Udo să ne căsătorim.
Ș i ne căsătoream.

CREDIT: Și cuvintele sînt o provincie (Cartea Românească, 2014)

Adela Greceanu (b. 1975) is a writer and journalist living in Bucharest, where she works at
Radio România Cultural (Romanian Cultural Radio). She made her debut in 1997 with the poetry
collection Titlul volumului meu, care mă preocupă atît de mult…, and has since published three
full collections of poems and a novel. Her most recent poetry book, Și cuvintele sînt o provincie,
was awarded the 2014 Observator Cultural Poetry Prize and received a special mention for Best
Book of the Year at The Romanian Book Industry Gala. She has participated in numerous
European festivals, and excerpts of her books are translated into more than 10 languages.