POEME ROMÂNESTI ÎN LIMBI STRĂINE

Nichita STĂNESCU

 

My Daemon to Me

 

“There comes the fire,” he said to me, “be heedful, there comes the fire

and you’ll see with your own eyes how the stones mollify

and the black chamois are swallowed

by the the rock’s softness

You’ll actually see the Sea

being absorbed by the great river and the great river

being absorbed by the rivulets and the rivulets

being absorbed by the wellsprings and the wellsprings

being absorbed by the thirst of a running being.”

“You’ll see,” said my Daemon to me,

“you’ll see

how the fish dry

and how the whales putrefy

how the jellyfish evaporate,

since I’m telling you, there comes the fire, do you hear me ?”

“I can hear you but what can I do,

even if I can hear you what can I do,

what can I do what”

“Turn yourself into words,” said the Daemon,

“immediately, as long as you can change

Turn your eye into a word

your nose and your mouth

your male organ of creation

your racing foot soles,

your hair which has grown hoary

your much too often bent backbone, –

Turn yourself into words, immediately, as long as you have time left”

I told the Daemon, “Don’t you know that

the speech burns,

the verb putrefies

while the word

does not take shape but deshapes

I’ve laid a feeling on bronze and you know that

and it has boiled from the sunlight

I baptised a child

and its name has crashed against time and the sparrows”

“I know that,” said the Daemon.

“Turn yourself into words as I say.”

 

Ars poetica

 

Oh, music, most rare

vibration

since we shall never

go beyond our ear.

 

Oh, scents, most wonderful,

since my heart sometimes

travels back to childhood

through your tunnel.

Oh, colours, you are

the hypocrisy of the light.

 

Oh, my words, words

that I keep breathing out

behind me, like a steam locomotive

unfolding her black soul...

 

And any horn can stab you,

words, my words,

and any wish to be a horn,

my words, non-words...

 

My Will

 

I patch myself up with words, with nouns,

I stitch my wound with a verb.

Too noble remedies

for a serf.

 

I write your life with my body

I write the course of stars for you.

The longest vowel is the thread

with which I stitch, while still alive, the dead.

 

Since we are bound to bear witness,

or else no thing could there be

in the sweet writing of some late hour

holding together the dead and the living.

 

You, navel, out of which there flows

the speech of other mouths

not knowing where it leads us

and into which white high floods.

 

Who truly outlives, I finally no longer know –

might be the word, might be the body.

Might be the white snow, oh Lord,

might be the footprints left by the wolf in the snow...

 

(English version: Gabriela PACHIA)