translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Petru Iamandi
The light sends its ambassadors among the birches,
forgets its fires in the roses and the sunset.
It’s evening even in words; you rock the archangels.
Everything somehow appears finished.
The dawn waits to form you
while Atropos sharpens her scissors.
You saw the boundary between people and the law
while the Fates fell among their thoughts.
The trees have taken their shadows to pasture.
Everything breathes a dull waiting.
The garden gathers its richness of beauties
and laughs in the colt that frisks about
after butterflies, field rabbits and wasps.
When peace set loose its offspring, it counted them in the sun
and drank the dew from the stag’s crown,
I separated night from day and,
to my utter surprise, in the candid spheres
of the afternoon floated as in a dream, slowly, singing,
feverish beings, nightingales lonely
as soon as they took shape and mind.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 21, Issue 1.
Aura Christi has published 15 volumes of poetry and 6 novels. Born in 1967 in Chișinău, Republic of Moldova, she now lives in Romania. The poems here derive from her 2016 collection, The God’s Orbit.
Petru Iamandi teaches at the Dunărea de Jos University, Galați, Romania. A prolific translator, with over 100 books between Romanian/English, he translated Mihail Gălățanu’s The Starry Womb with Sorkin (Diálogos, 2014).
Adam J. Sorkin has won numerous translation awards including the Poetry Society (U.K.), Ioan Flora, and Poesis prizes. He recently published Mircea Dinescu’s The Barbarians’ Return, translated with Lidia Vianu (Bloodaxe, 2018).
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Nora Iuga was born on 4 January 1931 and made her debut in 1968 with the collection of poems It Isn’t My Fault. Because of their “morbid eroticism,” Iuga’s work was banned by the communist censors between 1971 and 1978. Since then, she has published 15 collections of poems, including The Hunchbacks’ Bus (2001, rpt. 2010), and, most recently, The Wet Dog is a Willow Tree (2013).
Adam J. Sorkin has translated more than forty-five books of contemporary Romanian literature, and his work has won the Poetry Society (U.K.) Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry, among other awards. Recent books include The Book of Winter and Other Poems by Ion Mureșan; A Path to the Sea by Liliana Ursu, translated with Ursu and Tess Gallagher (Pleasure Boat Studios); Medea and Her War Machines by Ioan Flora, translated with Alina Alina Cârâ (University of New Orleans Press); and The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry.