POEME ROMÂNESTI ÎN LIMBI STRĂINE

Lucian BLAGA

 

Eve

 

While handing the apple over to Eve, the serpent

spoke to her in a voice like tinkling silver bells

from amidst the leafage.

But then he also happened to whisper

something in her ear

softly, most softly,

something the Scriptures don’t breathe a word about.

 

Nor did Lord God catch the full whisper,

although He was eavesdropping.

Nor would Eve confide it

to Adam.

 

Ever since that time, woman’s eyes harbour a secret

and flutters her eyelashes as if to say

she has knowledge of something

we are ignorant of,

something nobody is aware of,

not even Lord God himself.

 

The Spring of Night

Most beauteous,
your eyes are so deep and pitch-black that at night
as I lay with my head in your lap
meseems
your unfathomable eyes are the spring
whence the night mysteriously flows over valleys

and mountains and fields,
enwrapping the earth
in a sea of darkness.
So deep-dark are your eyes,
my light.

 

Legend

There was radiant Eve

standing at Heaven’s gate.

She gazed at twilight’s wounds healing on the vault

and, dreamily,

she bit the apple

temptingly furnished by the serpent.

Unwittingly,

a pit of the cursed fruit stuck between her teeth.

Ruminative Eva blew it into the wind,

but the pit vanished into the ground, sprouting.

There sprang up an apple tree – others followed

along the stringing centuries.

And one coarse, stout trunk

was the ground

for the Pharisees masters

who carved the cross of Jesus.

Oh, the black pip cast to the winds

by Eve’s white teeth.

 

Song to the Wind

 

“In love nobody, nobody keeps

their word, no victor’s grace.

The only true close embrace

is the earth’s firm encircling grimace !”

Thus sang the harrowing

wind by my side, billowing

to the right now to the left,

by my side the wind wallowing.

 

Ceramics

Like pitchers born to quench the thirst,

maidens radiate youthfulness from contours

as if meant to slip from embraces.

They are forged form blazes, carved from water.

Brisk, unvanquishable pitchers.

We grasp them in our thoughts, through our eyelids.

You indulge in illusions of capturing them,

though the deceitful play proves a lure.

(English version: Gabriela PACHIA)