Showing posts with label poems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poems. Show all posts

Friday, April 18, 2014

Nina Cassian - RIP

Nina Cassian, an exiled Romanian poet who sought refuge in the United States after her poems satirizing the regime of President Nicolae Ceausescu fell into the hands of his secret police, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.
Intense, passionate and cleareyed, Ms. Cassian’s poetry often centered on the nature of erotic love and — both before her exile and after — of loss, death and decay. In “Ballad of the Jack of Diamonds,” published in The New Yorker in 1990 in a translation by Richard Wilbur, she wrote:





Nina Cassian read her poetry at Cooper Union in New York in 2003.  
Credit Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times
Here is the Jack of Diamonds, clad
In the rusty coat he’s always had.
His two dark brothers wish him dead,
As does the third, whose hue is red. ...
One brother, on his breast and sleeves,
Is decked with tragic, spadelike leaves.
The next has crosses for décor.
The motif of the third is gore.
The Jack of Diamonds is dead,
Leaving a vacuum in his stead.
This ballad seems at least twice-told.
Well, all Rumanian plots are old.

The New York Times 

RIP Nina Cassian

'In unele clipe ideale, sunt pasarea maiastra-a lui Brancusi.
Mi-e gatul ca un cast lunecus
pentru mainile tale. '

Thursday, March 8, 2012

International Women's Day - 8 Martie























“With a chaste heart
With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline
Where you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music
Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes
The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit
Over the pact of sea and earth
From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills
The cleavage of one petal
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet
Until alone remained
Astonished
The fine and firm feminine form
It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within

The moon lives in the lining of your skin”

― Pablo Neruda

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Winter in Romania -White Thoughts


Black snow was falling. The tree line  shone when I turned to see - 



Then, a thick silence descends,  and my every gesture  leaves a comet tail in the heavens.  



And I hear evey glance I cast  as it echoes against  some tree.   



How transparent your hands are in winter! 



My nostrils tremble  and no scent  and no breeze 




...only the distant, icy smell  of the suns.   



And no one passes - 


 He offered me a branch like an arm.



I passed through him. He passed through me. I remained a solitary tree.   



I could hear his sap quicken, beating  like blood. He could hear my blood slacken like rising sap. 


The field stretched on its back, near the horizon, 


Full of ice


and the trees stopped running from the winter wind ... 


Stuck in ice...


and the thought spreads in circles 


ringing the trees...


....and the Sea.






...Then we met more often. 
I stood at one side of the hour,
you at the other,
like two handles of an amphora. 
Only the words flew between us,
back and forth. 
You could almost see their swirling,
and suddenly,
I would lower a knee,
and touch my elbow to the ground
to look at the grass, bent
by the falling of some word,
as though by the paw of a lion in flight. 
The words spun between us,
back and forth,
and the more I missed you, the more
they continued, this whirl almost seen,
the structure of matter, the beginnings of things. 

N. Stanescu /From the book "Bas-Relief with Heroes"

english translation by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru. 




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