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.
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
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.