Wheel With a Single Spoke Read online

  Nichita Stănescu

  WHEEL WITH A

  SINGLE SPOKE

  and other poems

  selected and translated from

  the Romanian by Sean Cotter

  archipelago books

  Copyright © Nichita Stănescu

  English translation and afterword © Sean Cotter, 2012

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #AIII

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stanescu, Nichita, 1933–1983.

  [Poems. English. Selections]

  Wheel with a single spoke : and other poems / by Nichita Stanescu ;

  selected and translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-935744-42-9 (pbk.)

  1. Stanescu, Nichita, 1933-1983 – Translations into English.

  I. Cotter, Sean, 1971 – II. Title.

  PC840.29.T345A2 2012

  859'.134–dc232012006255

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  cover art: Henri Michaux

  The publication of Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems was made possible with support from the Romanian Cultural Institute, Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  Acknowledgments

  The translator wishes to thank Luminiţa Soare, Angie Shapira, Luminiţa Lupu, and the Cambridge of Dallas Working Group for their help with this project. I am also grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and the University of Texas at Dallas for their support.

  Table of Contents

  THE SENSE OF LOVE (Sensul iubrii, 1960)

  The Airplane Dance

  End of an Air Raid

  A VISION OF THE FEELINGS (O viziune a sentimentelor, 1964)

  In Praise of People

  Song on an Aluminum Scaffold

  The Lion Cub, Love

  To Peace

  Sentimental Story

  I Remember, Still Amazed

  One Thursday, with Love

  Song Without an Answer

  A Poem

  End of a Season

  Autumn Love

  THE RIGHT TO TIME (Dreptul la timp, 1965)

  The Right to Time

  Bas-relief with Heroes

  Enkidu

  Ars Poetica

  The Chariot

  Savonarola

  Bas-relief with Lovers

  Song

  [To the right, and then to the left]

  To Galatea

  Old Soldier’s Song

  Sad Love Song

  To Bend the Light

  II ELEGIES (11 Elegii, 1966)

  The Second Elegy, in the Style of the Getes

  The Fourth Elegy

  The Fifth Elegy

  The Eleventh Elegy

  ALPHA (Alfa, 1967)

  Raid on the Interior of Stones

  Surface

  You Might Think I Was a Tree

  A Sleep with Saws Inside

  Ulysses

  VERTICAL RED (Roşu vertical, 1967)

  A Soldier

  EGG AND SPHERE (Oul şi sfera, 1967)

  Fate

  Smelling a Flower

  Winter Ritual

  Medieval Letter

  Invocation

  Eye Snow

  Angel Holding a Book

  Transparent Wings

  The Young

  President Baudelaire

  LAUS PTOLEMAEI (Laus Ptolemaei, 1968)

  The Atmosphere

  Reading

  On Contemplative Beings, What They Say, and Some Advice I Would Give Them

  A Few General Statements on Speed

  On the Life of Ptolemy

  On the Death of Ptolemy

  Field

  An Argument with Euclid

  UNWORDS (Necuvintele, 1969)

  Paean

  Loss of an Eye

  Jacob Battles the Angel; Or, On the Idea of “You”

  The Battle Against Five Antiterrestrial Elements

  The Heart’s Battle Against Blood

  [I slept with all my bones along a sword blade]

  Sleeping and Waking

  Decree

  [The beating moon inches across the roof of the mouth]

  Mime

  Poetry

  Song of Three

  Laughs and Tears

  Murderous Memory

  It Was Crushed Music

  I’m So Tired I Can’t Go On, He Said

  Brusque Speech

  You Leave Your Scent

  [You leave the air with your scent]

  The Jester and Death

  Contemplation

  Pulse

  Law

  Ode to Joy

  Undeciphered Inscription

  Where They Go

  Scent on a High Hill

  The Sacrifice and Burning of Everything

  What Is Life? When Does It Start, and Where Is It Going?

  Noose

  What Is the Supreme Power That Drives the Universe and Creates Life?

  What Is a Human? What Are His Origins? What Fate Awaits Him?

  The One Who Eats Dragonflies

  Who Am I? What Is My Place in the Cosmos?

  Atavistic Melancholy

  Idols of the Grass

  Fruits Before Being Eaten

  Air Currents

  Tragedies in Peacetime

  Ars Poetica

  Song

  Self-Portrait in an Autumn Leaf

  Time

  Passage . . .

  Mirage

  So I’ll Stay

  I, That Is, He

  Poem

  What?

  Game Delay

  Tennis

  Unwords

  A LAND CALLED ROMANIA (Un pământ numit România, 1969)

  Cain and Abel

  DOLCE STIL CLASSICO (În dulcele stil clasic, 1970)

  Loss of Consciousness Through Cognition

  Soul of Mine, Psyche

  Myth

  BELGRADE IN FIVE FRIENDS (Belgradul în cinci prieteni, 1972)

  To Buy a Dog

  Vitrification

  Fear

  Eye Depth

  Fading

  Signal

  A Poet, Like a Soldier

  While

  Ritual

  Way of Speaking

  Carriage for a Butterfly

  Little Colored Glasses

  On the Thickest

  Drawing Lots

  Dialogue Between a Horse and the Good Lord

  Serbs

  Song to Encourage the God Andia

  [The dogs of your father barked]

  [Inside me screams my heart]

  [What kind of freight train are you]

  Bloodmobile

  Eminescu

  Cold Balance of the Stars

  Letter

  GRANDEUR OF THE COLD (Măreţia frigului, 1972)

  Transformation

  5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0

  Beauty-Sick

  Ars Amandi

  And If

  EPICA MAGNA (Epica magna, 1978)

  Paean

  Wheel with a Single Spoke

  Soldier Oedipus

  Self-Portrait

  Eye Squared

  Oration

  Forward Movement


  To Feed Me from Your Hand

  Haiku

  Another Haiku

  Tableau with Blind People

  Wedding Toast

  IMPERFECT WORKS (Operele imperfecte, 1979)

  Lesson on a Cube

  Hourglass

  Jacob and the Angel

  Lesson on a Circle

  KNOTS AND SIGNS (Noduri şi semne, 1982)

  Through an Orange Tunnel

  Knot 17

  Sign 14

  Knot 23

  Sign 18

  Sign 19

  Knot 31

  Knot 33. In the Quiet of Evening

  Translator’s Afterword

  WHEEL WITH A

  SINGLE SPOKE

  and other poems

  THE SENSE OF LOVE

  (Sensul iubirii, 1960)

  The Airplane Dance

  The dance moved in circles, with airplanes:

  some golden,

  some silver.

  They went like this: a half circle

  on the left side, going up

  then down, over the roofs

  . . . then up, on the right

  golden, silver.

  How they spun as they fell

  golden, silver . . .

  After that a neighbor’s house was gone

  and the house on the corner

  and the house next door . . .

  And I was amazed

  and shook my head:

  look, there’s no house! . . .

  look, there’s no house! . . .

  look, there’s no house! . . .

  End of an Air Raid

  April 5, 1944

  You dropped your chalk

  and the splintered door beat against the wall

  the sky appeared, partly hidden

  by the spiders

  that fed on murdered children.

  Someone had taken away

  the walls

  and fruit tree

  and stairs.

  You hunted after spring

  impatiently, like you were expecting

  a lunar eclipse.

  Toward dawn, they even took away

  the fence

  you had signed with a scratch,

  so the storks would not lose their way

  when they came

  this spring.

  A VISION OF THE FEELINGS

  (O viziune a sentimentelor, 1964)

  In Praise of People

  From the point of view of trees,

  the sun is a band of heat,

  people – a terrible emotion . . .

  They are the wandering fruits

  of an even greater tree.

  From the point of view of stones,

  the sun is a falling stone,

  people are a tender pressure . . .

  They are motion added to motion

  and light you can see, from the sun.

  From the point of view of air,

  the sun is air full of birds,

  wing beating on wing.

  People are birds never before seen,

  with wings ingrown

  that beat, hover, glide,

  within an air more pure: thought.

  Song on an Aluminum Scaffold

  And a wind wrapped around my chest

  as it passed, and transparent arms,

  tossed by body into the clouds,

  where lightning licked my breast.

  Oh, and thus, in one toss or another,

  were my soles sliced by a peak, whose white

  turned ruby red with my blood,

  later,

  when my body extended its height.

  A floating soul and I crossed paths.

  It told me, in despair:

  I have not descended from these high currents

  since Hiroshima’s mushroom launched me into the air.

  O soul, I shouted,

  I am not dead!

  Calm yourself with the moon.

  The scaffolding sprayed into translucence

  and I danced across, surrounded by light,

  with the tip of my vision in the future.

  The Lion Cub, Love

  The lion cub, love

  leapt toward my face.

  Her hunt had begun, muscles tense,

  long before.

  Her white fangs plunged into my face,

  the lion cub bit me, today, in the face.

  And at that moment, nature

  encircled me, further

  away it felt, then closer

  like a narrowing of waters.

  And my gaze jetted upward,

  a rainbow in two parts,

  and I found my sense of hearing

  near the song of the skylark.

  I moved my hand to my brow,

  temple and chin,

  but my hand no longer knew them.

  And slipping into the unknown

  passing over a desert, dazzling

  in measured steps

  moved a copper lioness

  treacherous,

  a little further away,

  and a little further . . .

  To Peace

  I look back over my life’s ages,

  over the line of bodies I set up

  straight

  like a pillar to support

  the sky, with the sun in the center.

  There’s a child’s body whose arms hold

  an adolescent’s body.

  There’s an adolescent whose shoulders lift

  a man’s body.

  There’s a man’s body on whose forehead are

  the wrinkled feet of an old man.

  There’s an old man with whiskers yellowed

  from tobacco,

  who kisses the mouth

  of phantom clouds,

  the blue sky, the black universe.

  This life of mine, like a pillar,

  I offer to hold your heavens

  over weddings and births,

  and I call on lovers to carve

  their initials into me,

  enclosed in the outline of a great heart,

  pierced by an arrow

  of light.

  Sentimental Story

  In the end, we saw each other more and more often.

  I was on one side of the hour,

  you, the other,

  like the handles of an urn.

  Only words flew between us,

  before and after.

  Their vortex was almost visible,

  and then,

  I dropped to one knee,

  stuck my elbow in the earth,

  only to observe how blades of grass

  bent under falling words,

  as though beneath the paw of a sprinting lion.

  The words spun and spun between us,

  before and after,

  and the more I loved you, the more

  they repeated, in an almost visible vortex,

  da capo, the structure of matter.

  I Remember, Still Amazed

  I remember, still amazed

  by that time when my mind

  was enveloped in a haze,

  the jumble

  of memories and desires and loves,

  and I would wait to fall asleep, to plunge into a sleep,

  like a pearl diver, whose ocean

  pulls streams of blood from his nostrils.

  I was connected to objects

  by invisible vines,

  I would hang from them and swing,

  I threw myself from hour to hour,

  the way, once upon a time,

  a shouting Tarzan threw himself,

  from one jungle tree to another

  his feet fluttering through the air,

  never touching

  the silent, fecund earth.

  One Thursday, with Love

  An evening one Thursday, an evening heart-thick,

  when our destinies grew

  like grass in spring,

>   and I loved you

  so much I forgot you

  and believed you were part of me.

  And only then was I surprised

  when I smiled sometimes, and you

  didn’t

  when I stole leaves from the trees

  and you

  stayed beneath them, a little longer.

  Only then did it seem

  you were someone other,

  but only as

  the evening sun can be another –

  the moon . . .

  Song Without an Answer

  Why should I love you, woman dreaming,

  wrapped around me like smoke, like a grapevine

  around my chest, brow,

  ever lithe, ever writhing?

  Why should I love you, woman delicate

  as a blade of grass that bisects the estival

  moon, knocking it into the waters,

  separated from itself

  like two lovers after an embrace? . . .

  Why should I love you, melancholic eye,

  pale sun that rises over my shoulder

  and drags along a sky, in gentle scents

  thin clouds, and no shade?

  Why should I love you, unforgotten hour,

  when in place of tones

  horses race around my heart,

  a herd of foals with rebellious manes?

  Why should I love you so much, love,

  a sky colored by seasons knocked

  (always another, always close)

  like a falling leaf. Like a breath wind turns to frost.

  A Poem

  Tell me, if I ever caught you

  and kissed the arch of your foot,

  wouldn’t you limp a little after that

  for fear of crushing my kiss? . . .

  End of a Season

  I watched so carefully

  that noon sputtered over the cupolas

  and sounds around me turned to ice,

  twisted like columns.

  I watched so carefully

  that scents undulating in the air

  plunged into a darkness

  as though I had never before felt

  cold.

  Suddenly

  I found myself so far away

  and foreign,

  lost behind my own face,

  as if I had wrapped my senses

  in the senseless mountains of the moon.

  I watched so carefully

  that

  I did not recognize you, and you may

  be ever-arriving,

  every hour, every second,

  and through my erstwhile vigil, you march

  as if through a phantom Triumphal Arch.