POEME ROMÂNESTI ÎN LIMBI STRĂINE

 

Radu ULMEANU

 

Spell

 My Lord, how sad the world is,
as if the lizards had laid
eggs of dinosaurs,
as if the moon had laid
stars,
as if the light had laid
dark.

My Lord, how beautiful the world is,
as if it had dipped into deity’s dirt,
as if it had washed itself with eyebrows
of paradise bird,
as if it had made itself up
with powder of diamond.

God, how tipsy the world is,
look at it how it frolics on your knees,
how it fawns at the death’s feet.

God, how black the world is,
how bright, how haunted by frights,
by joys,
as if it had just passed through the Apocalypse
and you had made it again
out of simple eggs of sparrow,
and you had cast a spell over it  with the first word
that came to your tongue
in your last day. 

          Apple

I have come to wish
 the night, the long night,
only for I am not fond of  life
any more.

Strange, how miserable happiness seems to me!
 Postponed tea
where the sugar
is black in colour.

I take the moon and squeeze it in my cup
like a lemon
and its juice acid and yellow
sets my teeth on edge.

Maybe as the tree on which it has got ripe
 has grown roots among the bones of the dead,
maybe as in the dust where it has fallen down
there have rotted the gods’corpses.

I have come to wish
The night, the long night
Only for I do not want the sun,
The apple of which the light bites.

         State
I hate poetry and I also wish
the hot death of living,
said my body like a church in ruins.

And it bent like the tower of Pisa
toward its brother, the earth.

It was disconsolate my body,
it was alone
in its unequal fight against time.

It stood downcast
and thought with its thoughtful mind
and its thoughtful mind touched the wound left by the thought.

             A beautiful girl

A beautiful girl
washes all the world’s sins,
but a beautiful girl is too rare,
sometimes she does not even exist.

              xxx
The tools of Apocalypse
are nothing else
but the elements
of the poetic logics
in development.

Translations by Olimpia IACOB