Fundația culturală Antares
Filiala Galați-Brăila



Lyrical Spaces in Europe's South-Eastern Province


Nine poets from Galati and Braila - Saint-Simon Ajarescu, Corneliu Antoniu, Virgil Costiuc, Constantin Gherghinoiu, Iulian Grigoriu, Nicolae Grigore Maraşanu, Tudor Cristian Roşca, Sterian Vicol and Florina Zaharia
- have decided to put together, by selecting a maximum often poems each, a Romanian-English anthology in Petru Iamandi's translation. The title has been chosen to measure their ambition: Eight + Onefor Europe. Braila- a cosmopolitan picturesque limbus of no-one/everyone, and Galati
- a realm at the Orient's gates or (as Mihail Sadoveanu wrote in The Hatchet), at the "edge of the world," just before the Danube unplaits its hair into the Delta, make up - it is a well-known fact - a unique cultural geography in the Romanian habitat. However, if we were to localize this geographic, cultural, and literary space and pinpoint its main characteristics, of a distinct literary universe, we would realize we cannot outline an articulate critical vision, despite the short distance separating the two towns. We cannot objectify a certain empathetic intuition of the local specificity in terms that differ from those used by theories, completely out of place here, coming from the morphology of culture. After a careful reading of the book, we are absolutely sure that Poetry is (also) the meeting point of a perceived space, a familiar space, and a lived-in space, a juxtaposition of imaginary spaces on a place which is accepted as real, a fusion of diverging models and of converging lyrical discourses. We can, therefore, but partly review them by commenting on several lines from the anthologized poems. Here we go:
In Saint-Simon Ajarescu's poetry, the lyrical ego feels how it gradually becomes less and less familiar with its own dwelling and starts to irremediably lament: "[-,.;} I'd take myself by the hand/And go home but I forgot the room/ In a city without gravity and locality ...// Who takes care of the darkened for all of us!?/ My hearts sagging like a tired woman s/ Breast" (An adverbial-ofitime poem). The more assailing the viscous dark gets, covering not only the alienatingly projected imaginary vistas but also the being, the clearer the fragments become and thus confirm the fusion with the living unity of the world always gliding to a dissolving degradation. The melancholy is caused by the poet's inability to identify himself with the genetic prototype, although the "directions of the human race 7 have been transmitted correctly, revealed in the images of Aureole's time. That is why the lyrical ego feels still young and not head over ears but head over "Aureole's Specter" in love. More than that, when it comes to Mary of Magdala's heart, the incision is made on ... an open heart: "No lightning rod will protect her/ From My globular pulse. "
A pulse connected to the being's vital rhythms can also be felt in Corneliu Antoniu's poems: ' 1 Very beautiful/ Thefifteen-year-old dancer/ Is swimming around in the alcohol/ Therefore/ My blood feels accomplice/ To the natural charm of her age/ All in white devastating vague/Spaces and intimate reclusions. "(Oracle) And that despite the fact that the self intuits a loss of spatial landmarks: "I could become the consciousness/ Of those who are chasing me/ Before me there s an absolute space/Behind me another absolute space/ And in between a buoy/On a strip of sand -/ To which I keep saying good-bye!" (Nothing but nothings) The poet says good-bye to a state of con-fusion, to a juxtaposition of imaginary places along a spatial trajectory known as being rebellious. Space is neither really material nor wholly imaginary, and Corneliu Antoniu is marked by form's insufficiency, as if he were suffering from a "high disease" he does manage to get over, although with great difficulty because of "the vanity of the words/ To have a homeland. "A homeland as vast as the language that invented it. The docile fibre of the universe, as Virgil Mazilescu called him, the poet belongs to the 1970s constellation, as Marian Popa justly remarked in his History of Romanian Literature.
On the other hand, the lyrical ego in Virgil Costiuc's poetry seems much more tied to the firmness of palpable reality and does not have anything to do with the delusive ghost of undulating waters: "I'm sitting on the hank/ launching boats made of leaves/from time to time/ a fisherman passes by/ and slaps me " (Landscape). At the same time, a cavalcade seems to be coming from nearby, from the atemporal plain: "so much running/ makes horses whisper to one another/ counting the whip lashes/ broken shields/ helmets covering inherited wounds/ arrowed elephants/ swords tempered in the damask of faith " (Reversed reality). It is a poetry of agony, of the melancholy sort, focused on the imaginary complex of contemplation, catching the being's failure in its attempt to preserve its material consistency, even if that is done only through the wish to keep it instantaneously, using the stiffhess-in-the-negative characteristic of the art of photography (see The Photo). Hence an acute feeling of non-adherence to the concrete, obvious in the very excess of matter.
For Constantin Gherghinoiu, the lyrical tension is born out of the being's necessity to fix its precarious ontological statute inside the language which he subjects to his intentions to retrieve an integrating meaning: "in vain do we wait for you to give us light,/in vain do we wait for you to give us love/ and redemption,/ you fre incapable of intervening in the world,/incapable of descending/ from the clouds of the anabolisant metaphor,/ weaker than us,/ who build step by step,/ halting,/piece by piece,/ something from the culture medium of our minds.// [...]
What can we do with you,/a poor construct of our minds,// [...] How can we still believe you can govern/ the world/ when you can't even govern/ the web of words/
you 're caught in/ like the butterfly in the cocoon?/How can we still believe/ you are the word? "(Against). This poetry is of the conceptual kind, its author trying to give the world a meaning without neglecting notation, which faithfully "describes" the space between the limits of a real past through the filters of experience. Constantin Gherghinoiu believes in beauty's chimeras and poetry's chance to be even a life's analogy by retrieving the Meaning.
"What an extraordinary thing this law of conservation/ this universal balance that doesn't allow anything to be lost/ anything that exists in a closed space under various shapes/ manifestations sublimations Iulian Grigoriu exclaims. It is at the same time an open and shut space (a landscape, that is, according to Rosario Assunto, like something finite opening to the infinite), described particularly through such notions as border and threshold. The poet voices a lyricism of transitory states that approximate the being as related to memory and text: "I talk to the poetry/ it requests only the glory of an indifferent sacrifice// we vainly multiply the word[...]// it was one single word that we were given/ it is one single word that we have/ which must not get lost/ which must be there/ when we call it". The tension between the text and the world keeps the creative combustion going as the text eventually shapes for itself an outer identity which, self-devouring, can be not only a sign but also a hieroglyph of the world: "there doesn ft seem to be any other combination/ able to light the matter/ with a pure meaning// and beyond fear/ a day like/ yesterday// as if you could reconstruct the work of art/ in which/ they poured all the skills of the abyss. "
In his turn, Nicolae Grigore Mara^anu exclaims too: "It s here, the river we've been running to for ages! - we shouted:/ its invisible
waters, look, are flowing beneath us, over us,/ or through us! Lets find it and may its miracle-wave// wash our pains away! "(We would all run there). His yearning for boundlessness fires the imagination: "Beat the ships,/these thoroughbred mares,/so their bottom hulls will rattle on the sea path,/ for too lazily they 're sailing near the shore/ and the wind s worming their sail/ like night butterflies/ in old Gorgons. [...]/ /Beat the ships/so their ghost will cleave the sea/as passionately as my chest/ would like to rise/and tear up this white cerement// between miracle and boundlessness "(The ships). As protector the poet takes his own patron saint (for always life-saving at the helm of the fish carrier/ the magus under the hood/ and the icon of gentle St. Nicholas/ appear to us// delivering us with a haven.- The magus under the hood). There is a permanent self-seeking (In Mother s womb I search for myself/ andfind tears;/ in my death I search for myself/ andfind oblivion;/I dive inside me and search for myself/ and don'tfind myself - The ecstasis of the one who searches for himself), the lyrical ego alternating between the hunter and the hunted, between the one who actually builds an illusionary world, for everything is the consequence of objectivity and one's point of view, and the one who unavoidably becomes an illusion himself (The distance between a rabbit and me).
Tudor Cristian Ro§ca prefers dark visions, and extinction in solitude which seems to be fecundated by a funeral kiss: "the lonely man and death are alike./ neither knocks anything/ off the price. The sword/ and desperation link them/ they speak/ the same language/and don 't understand each other/at all. " (in the house). In these united provinces of Eros and Thanatos, nicto-morphic disappearance is seen with a certain resignation and fatality's shadow is thus clothed in a disillusioned cogitative expression: "when vermeer died he owed/ 600 guldens to the baker that is/a quarter of what a whale ship was then worth./therefore let s think affectionately of the baker/ who baked him so much bread on credit/ and of that god that had the gentleness/ to accept him without his receipts in order./ a precedent on which we can all build/ bright hopes " (from the unitedprovinces). We are not going to die entirely! the old Latin maxim consoles itself and so does the soul, after its long quarrel with the body (the dialogue of the desperate with his soul).
Which is Sterian Vicol's redeeming hope too: "Happy is he that on/Resurrection night/ drinks wine with milk, praising God/ and the Book like the most beloved woman!" (Happy is he that). Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage! (the French classic exclaimed) since, getting us familiar with the mermaids' temptations, "Closer to death,/the dust looks like a transparent song" (Transparence). Death is the hard core of an imaginary complex, of a phantasmatic world around which the lunatic fumes of death mingle with the voluptuousness of embraces - the halo of desperate/disparate pleasures. For Sterian Vicol, poetry is the result of an autoscopic glance which above all feverishly registers the being's depth and Christian sacrificial acts: "On the knife blade that killed the lamb/ at Easter not even an angels wing/ can stand a chance, he only painting/ with his blood the pathway in the icon!" (The knife blade) .Not even the flutter of a more worldly inspiring wing, of Baudelairean extraction, can quench the thirst of dis-confmement: "Even if youfeed up on seagull/ wings, you can't cross the sea! "(Even if)
Fiorina Zaharia does no longer believe in the illusion of fabricating possible existential artifices, and she no longer changes the ontological inconsistency into an opportunity for seductive wonderings, ready to provide traps in which one can feel comfortable. She gives rein to a sensitiveness attracted by the ritual and the symbolic, in the way in which sensoriality is stimulated by ingenuity, and shapes a partnership-like conduct according to the mnesical lines of her soul: "I'm waiting for you/ but you died/and I don't know whether you ever existed/ whether I saw you in all the men on the main street". The textual adventure (I'm dragging writingthrough me too/I'm its satchel) takes place in a fabulous environment in which the sky and the earth embrace in a self-limitation of the infinite, in a median space in which man becomes a receptacle of the universal soul: '7 don't want to reshape any letter/ of the body that surrounds the words/ below me the sky is rising/ and earth s flowing from it/ that's why I can't sit down.// no word's my home/ no word's a being any longer/ outside the sky and earth/ the half of my way started".
The juxtaposition of imaginary places, the anchoring in realities or non-realities - the dilemma of reunited, or about-to-get-reunited provinces - the sensoriality stimulated by ingenuity, and the solar authenticity of universes correlating with spatial dimensions, grafted on the textual experience of an original lyrical (8+1) crew, could lay the foundations of a lyrical argument worth taking into account, which imprisons and frees, and tortures and redeems any genuine writer.
Vasile Spiridon





About the Translator






PETRU IAMANDI, PhD, is an associate professor with the English Department of the Faculty of Letters, Dunarea de Jos University of Galati, Romania, and a member of the Antares editorial staff. Has written American Culture for Democracy (2001), English and American Literature - Science Fiction (2003), American History and Civilization (2004), SF - Literature about the Future (2004), An Outline of American English (2008) and compiled an English-Romanian Dictionary (2000). Is the co-author and co-editor of several dictionaries and English textbooks. Has translated twenty books from English into Romanian and fourteen books from Romanian into English (prose, poetry, drama, non-fiction). In 2008, the Dramatic Theatre in Galati staged his translation of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. Has published translations in various British and American magazines. Has received awards from Antares, Porto-Franco and Dunarea de Jos. Mentioned in Who s Who in the World (1999, 2001).