Wheel With a Single Spoke Read online

  I don’t, said the weary eagle, dying.

  – Bon appétit, said worms from the bowels of the earth.

  – Bon appétit, responded no one.

  II.

  – Bon appétit, responded no one.

  – Bon appétit, said worms from the bowels of the earth.

  – I don’t, said the eagle, dying.

  I don’t, said the eagle, I don’t.

  A round hole in my wing in place of a sun,

  my only property is absence,

  I don’t, said the eagle, I don’t have anything.

  – Then what do you have, what do you have, then?

  Then what do you have? asked worms from the bowels of the earth.

  – I have no pyramidal thought,

  I have no pyramidal thought, the eagle said,

  no, the eagle responded.

  – If you had a pyramid, could you breathe sand,

  if you had a pyramid, could you breathe sand?

  worms from the bowels of the earth said.

  – I have nothing to breathe sand with.

  No, I cannot breathe sand.

  – We have sand, can you breathe sand?

  worms from the bowels of the earth said.

  – Air, I want air!

  No, it responded, I want air!

  – Do you want magma or lapis lazuli?

  came to ask

  worms from the bowels of the earth.

  Its plumage changed color, to green.

  The grass was green and fresh.

  No one heard

  the smack of its fall

  by its body into the earth

  when a hole was made;

  only the cold of him remained, only the cold,

  white balls of hail, then

  falling, first it became a turtle, then

  as if through the breath of a child, –

  the eagle rose through the air, timidly.

  The no one who longs for nonexistence

  shone through its wing,

  through it nothing went toward nothing

  to crown the emperor’s forehead

  like a ring of gold too tight.

  The eagle’s wing had a round hole.

  Jacob and the Angel

  The angel came, tired and mad

  And beat me with its wing

  My eyebrow its feather celeste

  My daily life took a beating

  Great wings still batter me

  For I am bad and full of blood

  Today it seems like I complain

  to secular and darkened woods

  The angel hit me flying backward,

  Banished me toward the depths

  O God grant me today this verse

  And then, well blessed

  It pummeled me as though

  I lay on pyres with ancient Greeks

  Their speech of wind of smoke

  Was something you, my Lord, would eat

  Take the angel off me

  Take away my beat

  A stream of blood from wide and far

  An ossified and fleshless star.

  Lesson on the Circle

  You draw a circle in the sand

  then split it in two, and

  with the same hazel switch, split it in two.

  Next you fall on your knees,

  then you fall on your elbows.

  Then you beat your head on the sand

  and beg the circle for forgiveness.

  That’s it.

  KNOTS AND SIGNS

  (Noduri şi semne, 1982)

  Through an Orange Tunnel

  Frighteningly fast I sped through an orange tunnel.

  Frighteningly fast,

  when I came to, I was on a field,

  fallen from a horse,

  I rejoiced in the bugs,

  in my hands, rejoiced in my legs,

  the sky and sea blue

  but not orange.

  Ah, tunnel,

  What bullet did you shoot through yourself?

  Who were you shooting at?

  Who?

  Knot 17

  The word and I slumped over the horizon

  pressed together,

  like the cheeks of an angel’s child

  over a rainy sea.

  What rain still rains on the sea

  and how much, you can’t know, I wanted it

  to snow over the glittering, flurries

  to snow on the sea, that’s what I wanted,

  and the child I hold in my arms

  to teach him not to want you, his mother,

  to pull him like a ship of bone

  from the breast of the shore,

  to send him to me near the Caribbean

  when it snows on the black and widening sea.

  When it snows on the Black Sea near the Bosporus,

  when it snows on the blue Mediterranean,

  and it’s not that I cannot die of cold,

  I cannot die!

  Lord, I struggle and cannot die

  Lord, I cannot die

  My life is eternal and wounded

  and I cannot die

  and it snows and I cannot die

  and I’m very cold when it very snows

  and I cannot die!

  Sign 14

  Then – we parted

  low and black

  as the shadow and leaf part

  just because

  the sun seemed

  an evil of light.

  Knot 23

  I stole my childhood body,

  I swaddled it

  and put it in a basket of rushes, –

  and threw it in the river

  so it would go and die in the delta.

  The unfortunate, tearful, tragic fisherman, full of pity,

  brought me the body in his arms

  just now.

  Sign 18

  I climbed in through my own ankle,

  through the tunnel up, through the knee,

  heart, up to the top, under the eyebrow,

  and I ran through the eye

  buck naked, – without noticing,

  but he bent his hand toward me,

  he shooed me through the enormous pupil,

  through the crown of the blue iris,

  he knocked me almost senseless with his heart,

  whacked me with his kneecap,

  and shook me into his ankle.

  – Now let’s run, because it’s time, he said,

  let’s run fast, he said,

  we have to tell someone something, hurry, he said.

  And he started to run.

  Sign 19

  The angel died

  but I could not carry him,

  he turned to water and slipped through my fingers,

  he wet my knee

  and washed the feet

  I use to run,

  it was his way of leaving

  and leaving me alone

  in an endless sprint.

  Knot 31

  What the fish feels cleaned,

  what the deer feels shot,

  what the butchered ox feels butchered,

  what the stone feels shattered,

  what the fly feels swatted,

  what the snake feels split,

  what the grass feels withered,

  what the flower feels picked,

  what the chick feels boiled,

  what the egg feels burnt,

  what the oak feels felled,

  what the traitor feels decapitated,

  is the light when seen.

  Knot 33. In the Quiet of Evening

  I thought of a way so sweet

  for words to meet

  that below, blooms bloomed

  and above

  grass greened.

  I thought of a way so sweet

  for words to crash

  that perhaps grass would bloom

  and blooms would grass.

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  When I
left Liceul Ioan Cuza, the high school in Bucharest where I taught for two years, a fellow teacher gave me a collection from the Romanian Modernist Lucian Blaga, a poet my colleagues had introduced to me. While I was moved by the gift, I was puzzled by the dedication: “Eu insumi / şi după aceea” – “myself, / and after that” – two lines from Nichita Stănescu’s poem “Enkidu.” The literal statement was clear, as was the token of friendship, but I could tell I was missing a sense of the gesture. Not only did I not know the particular poem, depicting the bond between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, I also did not recognize the aesthetics that endowed lines as abstract as these with the longing for friendship. Only now, almost two decades later, have I begun to understand Stănescu’s poetry, his importance in Romanian literary history, and the promise he holds for readers of poetry in English. Behind the lines from “Enkidu” “my slower body / dragged along by thought, like goats at evening, / by a rope. / Time, alone everywhere, myself, / and after that,” we can glimpse a complex history that made his work beloved in Romania, the words one might reach for to express farewell to someone leaving the country.

  He was not an obscure choice, by any means. Nichita Stănescu was the defining poet of Communist-era Romania. From his first collection, The Sense of Love (1960), to Knots and Signs (1982), the last to appear in his lifetime, he wrote innovative, conceptual, and challenging poetry charged with energy. In an era of intense cultural politics, his aesthetics made him a leader of his generation, and his poetry was widely read. Stănescu’s work was reviewed everywhere, required in high-school curricula, and recited on stage and television by the leading actors of his day. At its peak, his fame transcended even humanity. Nichita Danilov recalls Stănescu being feted with an introduction suited for a demigod: “Remember, my friends. Take a good look at this man. He is a genius. Rejoice that you were able to meet him! That you lived at the same time as he did!” This reverence followed Stănescu until his early death in 1983, at age fifty, and continues today. In what is perhaps an even more meaningful indicator of his significance, he has also become a parricidal target of poets who followed him, among whom, in Doru Mugur’s apt phrase, “he is loathed like a god.”

  Despite his relatively brief life, Stănescu published an extraordinary amount. The present volume includes roughly a sixth of the first post-Communist edition of his collected poetry, edited by Alexandru Condeescu. This edition does not include Stănescu’s voluminous output of essays, prose poetry, and translations. In general, I selected poems that demonstrate not only Stănescu’s particular power as a poet of the intellect, but also his ability to write on a range of themes, from love to war, and that reveal his humor. This selection also highlights Stănescu’s formal versatility, including elegies, free verse, and many works in rhymed quatrains.

  While this edition includes poems from each of Stănescu’s books, I have focused on the particularly fertile period from 1965 to 1971 in order to chart the emergence and growth of his characteristic style. His distinctive voice developed, I feel, in large part through his friendships with various Serbian poets, beginning with his translation of Vasko Popa into Romanian in 1965. For this reason, I have included all his poems from the short collection Belgrade in Five Friends, first published in former Yugoslavia in a bilingual edition in 1970.

  Stănescu thrived on his public reception, constant company, and the presence of friends. Of all the poets of his generation, he perhaps took the most inspiration from the company of others, be they his readers, lovers, or entourage – what W. D. Snodgrass once called the “loud and boozy group at a table in the corner.” Stănescu was famously averse to solitude, and he often practiced what he called “the ritual of writing on air,” composing his works out loud, in a café or bar, while a friend transcribed them on the tablecloth. “Gutenberg flattened words out,” declared Stănescu in a Belgrade interview, “but words exist in space . . . Words are spatialized. They are not dead, like a book. They are alive, between me and you, me and you, me and you. They live; they are spoken, spatialized, and received.” We see this in the scores of poems written in dialogue, with angels, stones, generals, or horses. In his personal life, Stănescu found it easier to develop friendships outside of Romania where, he explained, there was no tension from literary competition. Stănescu’s closest friend seems to have been his Serbian translator, Adam Puslojič.

  Poets and Soldiers

  Stănescu debuted in a time when history impinged strongly on aesthetics, a decade into the Romanian Communist regime. The 1950s had seen a series of campaigns against writers who refused to declare their allegiance with the new Communist regime. Pre-WWII Modernist poets, such as Lucian Blaga and Tudor Arghezi, were attacked as “hermetic” and “mystical.” One common line of accusation held that their obscure language served a bourgeois politics and confused readers in order to sap their desire to construct a new, Communist regime. Consequences were severe for suspect writers: their work was censored, and they were subject to surveillance, harassment, arrest – which could result in torture, prison, or a labor camp – and assigned unattractive and time-consuming jobs. Writers thus faced the choice between some variety of this treatment or the production of work that demonstrated allegiance to the regime through Soviet aesthetics, defined by simple, accessible language and a clear and uplifting moral message, or what Evgeny Dobrenko has labeled “the disaster of middlebrow taste.” Romanian literary journals were filled with unimaginative and compliant quatrains.

  Stănescu navigated this demand with various tactics in his first two books, published in 1960 and 1964. Some of his poems treated Romanian suffering during WWII, which the state referred to as the “War for Peace.” Works that catalogued enemy aggression, e.g. Eugen Jebeleanu’s Hiroshima’s Smile, were approved for publication in part because they provided justification for the new regime. Stănescu was ten years old in 1943, when the oil fields of his hometown of Ploieşti sustained some of the war’s heaviest bombing, and throughout his life the images of incendiary bombs and human bodies afire haunted him. He was thus able to shape his early poems about the war in compliance with the official narrative. For example, “End of an Air Raid” first presents the destruction caused by the enemy and ends with an optimistic gaze toward nascent spring, to be understood as the new, postwar Communist era. Other early poems, such as “The International,” made more direct statements of allegiance: “And it was a terrible war – / but whether you call its end PEACE/ or you call it LENIN/ it means the same thing.” Stănescu supported his more intensely literary pieces by writing a quantity of party-line poems. His first two collections interspersed these poems with more self-consciously artistic work; later in his career he segregated his poems into separate volumes. He published the political books A Land Called Romania (1967) and Vertical Red (1969) with the Military Press almost at the same time that Egg and Sphere (1967) and Unwords (1969) were released with literary presses.

  Yet Stănescu’s engagement with political verse is not mere pragmatic calculation. Stănescu gained fame because he and his generation transformed Soviet-style aesthetics from within. The poetry of this period took the form of anecdotes in verse and paeans to state leaders, the party, or agricultural collectivization and industrialization. In a political atmosphere in which leading literary journals published poems such as “The Bricklayers” or “Verses About the Young Lathe Operator,” Stănescu wrote “Song on an Aluminum Scaffold” in the voice of a construction worker. Yet the speaker describes something unusual: a personal experience of transcendence. Although carefully framed by references to Hiroshima and a luminous future, the moral is deliberately vague and the worker’s soul travels in a kind of ecstasy. Confronted with the state’s opposition to mysticism, Stănescu cunningly portrays socialism as the impetus for a mystical experience.

  This perversion of state aesthetics continues in his transformation of “obscurity.” Stănescu’s characteristic simplicity of style – he preferred common nouns such as “stones” and “birds” and avoided orn
amental description – can be seen as unassailably direct. His images become “unsettlingly concrete,” in Matei Călinescu’s description, as they present abstract ideas of light, the universe, or the seasons. Condeescu describes 11 Elegies as a “difficult volume which opposes the imprint of its time by programmatically closing off immediate understanding, escaping ideological accusations based ‘on the text,’ making sociological interpretations impossible.” Stănescu’s poetry features things, just as Socialist Realist poetry features tractors or new apartment blocks. Yet when we read, in his fifth elegy, “I was never angry with apples / for being apples, with leaves for being leaves, / with shadow for being shadow, with birds for being birds. / But apples, leaves, shadows, birds, / all of a sudden, were angry with me,” we feel unsteady, as though we might not know what these things are or how we should consider them. Without challenging the importance of the physical world, Stănescu questions our relationship to it. Without overturning the terms of Socialist Realism, Stănescu shifts its subject from the state to metaphysics.

  As part of a new generation of Romanian poets – one that included such voices as Ana Blandiana, Mircea Ivanescu, Marin Sorescu, and Mihai Ursachi – Stănescu generated great excitement for a literature reborn. At the same time, the Romanian state allowed a cultural thaw to accompany its gradual disassociation from the Soviet Union, a process that reached its peak with Romania’s denunciation of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague. A new group of literary critics began to champion the new writers, opening new channels for literary discussion and reconnecting with prewar Romanian Modernists and such international literary figures as Franz Kafka. Romanian readers enthusiastically supported the return of a lively literary culture. This return was felt, in part, as the restoration of an authentic, human existence. Stănescu expresses this desire in his reversal of the Pygmalion story, as the sculptor implores the statue, “Give birth to me. Give birth to me.” Readers likewise turned to art with the hope that it would give them new life. Even a delicate love poem, such as “Sentimental Story” or “The Lion Cub, Love,” could generate a frisson, as the lyrical expression of emotion satisfied the need to spite the regime that had been installed so thuggishly. The more abstract Stănescu’s poetry became (“If I lived on a square, a cube / there’d be some type of plenty, / but I live on a sphere, a sphere, a sphere, / a sphere”), the more intensely his readers read him, with a longing to experience a world outside their own. His difficulty and popularity were perhaps directly proportional.