POEME ROMÂNESTI ÎN LIMBI STRĂINE

 

Gabriel STĂNESCU

 

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

The bright still wet ink
And the wind syllabicating the now lost manuscripts
Next to my scrupulously drawn up slips of paper on Sein und Zeit
The moss-covered steeple emerging from the right-hand storey
On the first floor the landlady’s study
Where I would enter speechless with admiration for the gain of science
Renting an attic room about ’74
Wondering how many generations of students might may lived there before
Out of how many illusions had they, too, planned their lives?
Now starting 4 am amongst the blocks of flats the city vibrates
(The same city) and the rain overlaps the sounds… How unfair!

 

CASE STUDY

He might have dictated his last thoughts to the insects
In the Cyrillic of the princely chancelleries
He might have dissected his visions with increasing dissatisfaction
Short and dark naturally capricious
He might have stirred up his senses by systematic study
Up to exhaustion he might have discovered an
Unknown substance out of the wound of the medical
Treatises one last abstract I know
If only there had been differently ordered
The Justice
     The Destitution
                And the Glory
                                    Of this poem

 

DEAR READER

I can’t explain why despite
All the remarkable progress recorded by
Humankind in the field of science in
Conquering space is ever
More difficult to publish
A poem

EXERCISE IN LYRICAL SKILL

Thursday September 13 around 6pm
Another ordinary autumn day like all the others
By my side, hundreds of years of experience
Of the good old Latin alphabet
That has sufficiently consumed our wish
To express ourselves as hermetically as possible
Stopping at the offices of the above-mentioned publishing house
To take my poems back
As settled

 

SOCRATES TALKING TO HIMSELF

I shall never know
What that rare illusory thing looks like
The thing I’ve never needed while alive
And I’ll never regret

 

APOCRYPHAL LETTER

Country –
My poem in flames

 

BORGES

All of a sudden it is evening
Over the infective dust of the books
The details of this
Blessed afternoon
Agglutinating in my memory
”You’re not like the others”
It seems that I can still hear him seeking his words
Blindly descending amongst his things
Leaning
Upon an unseen
Unutterable
Amnesia  

 

SECRET MEMORY

To reach this point I needed
A certain amount of skepticism
Nobody came to teach me
Whom I should trust or distrust
Whom I should agree or disagree with
Solitude burns nobody’s poems at the stake

 

A NEW RENAISSANCE

Crowded streets

Under the huge sunshade
Of a coffee shop
From another century
Zen artists
Are talking until dawn
About the function of the point
In the economy of the drawing
While young punks
Are dancing
Without minding the rain
The position of the stars
And Zen art

 

BIOGRAPHY OF A DAY

Suburban neighbourhood

Few occasional pessimists cherishing the rain
The sad performance of a summer day

In the shop window the same obsolete dummies
Indifferent people
Absent-minded glances
Lost between the traffic lines

Nothingness has invented
A new religion

God wanted it otherwise
And now He is in doubt
Selected and translated by Elena NISTOR