[A slightly shorter version of this note first appeared on
Asymptote's blog
HERE)
“Eutychia”
has been identified by Simona Popescu—poet, critic, and foremost authority on Romanian
poet Gellu Naum’s (1915 – 2001) work and life—as the Naumian poem par
excellence, not in the sense that all the rest of his huge oeuvre is
contained in it, but as being one of the most comprehensive and emblematic
expressions of the poet’s creed and poetics.
And particularly of the unmistakable way in which for such a poet poetry
was not only an art, but a mode of existence.
A visionary, a great shaman—le grand chaman de Roumanie, as a French critic once called him—whose
poems have always worked as Pythic oracles, Naum was also an incredibly shrewd
and inclusive craftsman; the very personable and humorously playful person that
he was in everyday life was the same as the artist who integrated biographical
details, political critique, and popular culture (along with his erudite and alchemically-oneiric
intertexts) into his mesmerizing rhythms, expansive diction, and enthralling
imagery. Although—or rather particularly
because—he was a true poeta vates, a poet-prophet, he did not
look down on the ‘trivialities’ of ‘common’ existence, while his corrosive
ironies never settled upon postmodern detachment, and therefore, instead of
rendering the verse flat, his absorption of the ‘insignificant’ actually turned
the everyday into something magical, miraculous, and overwhelming.
The psychedelic experience of watching an insect and
its colors at the closest range possible, for instance, triggers a sort of
meta-rational ‘derangement of the sense[s]’ that helps one to see and hear a
poetry of the species and, at the same time, an ecopoetry avant la lettre:
so the
psychedelic colored insect
waits for me
with its shape reminiscent of triangular bombardments
the insect-poet looking at me with its deep blue-green eye
struck dumb on an unripe raspberry
the sole survivor of a long extinct species
the newly arrived insect-poet set to witness crazy
death by tragic multiplication
as I am certain it recognizes me
as far back
as when the times got tangled
I sit on a rock and look forward
through tangled times
as a psychedelic age arrives while the rest is merely
a golden blue-green ethereal triangular insect
trying to communicate words
In fact the title of the poem itself, which could be
translated as “true luck” or “good fortune” (from Old Greek) speaks of a search
for, or conjuring of good omens, of what brings good luck and a good fate, the
poem thus assuming the functions of an amulet or a spell. Yet this is not solely about one’s personal
fate, as the root of the word, Týche (Roman equivalent: Fortuna) was in ancient times the
presiding tutelary deity that governed the fortune and prosperity of a city,
its destiny. This city, one starts to
suspect while plunging into Naum’s ocean of images, is one of the whole world
(humans, nature, and cosmos together), and contemplating its destiny is having
a vision of—to paraphrase Eliot—its end in its beginning; and both its
beginning and end are fractally present in our insect-tiny “daily events”: “Only
when beginning at the end are we able to understand/ the nostalgic mechanics of
daily events the fury of layers preceding and/ following us…”
The surprising relevance of such a poet nowadays (famous
in Romania and widely known in France and Germany but until recently virtually
unknown to the English-speaking world) is most likely one of the reasons why
his recent selected poems in (facing page) translation, Athanor
& Other Pohems from Calypso
Editions, was unsurprisingly named by World Literature
Today one of 2013’s most notable translations.
*
One of the Romanian poets I would love to see featured
in Asymptote in a near future is Șerban Foarță. Foarță is one of the greatest writers in
postwar Romania who, because of his subtle, euphonic, and pervasive formalism
has hardly been, if ever, translated into English (or any other language, for
that matter).
A versatile and tirelessly prolific practitioner of
forms ranging from the ‘classic’ and troubadour traditions to rock lyrics to
experimental chiasmic “holograms,” the poet has over decades authored an oeuvre
of such pitch, variety, and amplitude that one could indeed—as younger poet
Emilian Galaicu-Păun allegedly (jocosely
but relevantly) did before meeting the writer in the flesh—suspect that behind his name hides an
entire institute of philology and poetics.
A
masterful and acclaimed translator in his own right, with an overwhelmingly
diverse and demanding list of accomplishments—from the French Renaissance poets
to Leonard Cohen’s Book of Desire to
Mallarmé and Apollinaire to Georgio Baffo’s Erosonnets—Foarță himself represents a huge challenge to the most
courageous translator. Well… except when
he includes the translation in the text itself, as in this multilingual poem I
can quote without having to translate anything but the (actually already a
thousand-time translated Villon’s ballad) title—BALADA DOAMNELOR DE ALTĂDATĂ
(“Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times”)… Still, even the simplest things are
not that simple: how could one ever render the subtitle, with its pun on
Babylon and François Villon’s name—“în vavil(l)onică transcripţie”—“In
Babylonian/Vavil(l)onian
Transcription”?… Until we find an
answer, here is one stanza and the envoi of this brilliant poem:
…
Where is the
wise girl Heloïs
Because whose
abelardiana
Calamitas à
Saint Denis
Incepit (Domine, hossana!);
E dov’è ora la sovrana
Die nun befahl
daß Buridan
Verschlungen
sein soll, a Sequana;
A gde prekrasnîi
snej d’antan?
…
Sweet Prince, I
don’t say omnia vana;
mais quant, enfin, à l’antean-
nua nix, ~ frag,
bitte, die Morgana:
« Où sont, où sont les neiges d’antan? »
—MARGENTO
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