Tocmai am primit exemplarele de autor ale antologiei mele – „mele” este un fel de a zice, cartea aparţinând mai degrabă celui(-or) care semnează versiunea englezească a poemelor, prof. Adam J. Sorkin & Co – americane Canting Arms, Deep Vellum, Dallas, Texas, 2023. Boucler la boucle, cum ar spune franţuzul. (Amintesc că ediţia românească a Arme-lor grăitoare apărea în noiembrie 2009, la Cartier, aşadar acum 14 ani; titlu reluat mai târziu pentru antologia din 2015, scoasă în Cartier popular.)
Gândul că tocmai am traversat Atlanticul, la bordul unui volum de versuri, mă face să mă simt un soi de… Cristofor Columb „pururi tânăr înfăşurat în pixeli” (deloc întâmplător citez aici titlul lui Mircea Cărtărescu, prezent şi el în catalogul editurii Deep Vellum cu romanul Solenoid, în traducerea lui Sean Cotter), gratitudinea mea se îndreaptă către cel care a stat la timona acestei traversări (dintr-o limbă „de uscat”, româna, într-alta, „oceanică”, engleza), care a durat vreo 10-12 ani, traducătorul Adam J. Sorkin, şi nu în ultimul rând celui care mi-a urat bun-venit pe tărâm american, poetului Ilya Kaminsky (n. 1977, la Odessa). Îngădui-mi-se să reproduc, mai jos – în limba originalului! –, Cuvântul-înainte al acestuia din urmă:
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Introduction
According to the legend recounted by Dimitrie Cantemir, a notable ruler, scholar, statesman, composer and poet, the fourteenth century Prince Dragoș was once hunting when his dog, Molda, exhausted by the chase, drowned in the river. The dog’s name, given to the river, became the name of the country of Moldova.
Along with the country’s name, this early Enlightenment prince is credited with bringing wine making to the region, where it has been one of the main industries for over five hundred years. Indeed, if you find yourself in Chișinău, Moldova, dear reader, I hope it will be on the first weekend in October, when the National Wine day take place and the city is full of parades celebrating the harvest and the country’s history of wine making.
This city of wine cellars and limestone buildings, churches and Soviet-style apartment blocks, Chișinău is the hometown of the poet Emilian Galaicu-Păun.
I begin this introduction with historical reference and a place name because even though his work travels through a multitude of cultures, it always comes back to the words in his native language. The metaphysics of this poet, escaping from language spoken in the streets of his native city, always returns to it.
Multiplicity of references to cultures and heritages, a multi-vocal perspective so apparent in this work, also have a root in the city’s location as the borderland of various empires, from once powerful Hungarian and Polish kingdoms to Ottoman, Russian, Soviet and Romanian spheres of influence. The city has been the center of multicultural histories, and tragic silences, too: once nearly half-Jewish it has been nearly emptied of its Jews. Still, it is a place where over the years many languages echoed: Yiddish and Turkish, Hungarian and Romanian, Ukrainian, Russian and Gagauzian all were spoken here.
I insist on mentioning this history, not because the book in your hands has to do with linear historical narratives of empires, but because it is a product of their clash. It seems to me, for the book you are holding right now comes from a place that is a crossroads between East and West, a place of rich and diverse history, yes, but also linguistic possibility, a place where translation and intercultural conversation is organic. Thus it is not at all surprising to find out that this book’s author is someone who studied in one cultural sphere (USSR’s Gorky Institute in Moscow) but lives in a very different cultural sphere (that of Moldovan language which is by all accounts really a Romanian language one that travels from Moldova to Romania and back—not unlike the spirit of Mihai Eminescu, the late Romantic poet who is considered the national bard in both countries). Meanwhile his intricate and nuanced poetic landscape is in turn a conversation with yet very different sphere of poetic influence, namely, the works of French author Ronald Barthes’ and his seductive ideas of the pleasures of/and of the text itself.
So as you turn the pages and meet poems that might be rich in irony or various historical and cultural allusion, know that they aren’t here because the author is trying to be a “difficult” or fancy academic poet as some critics might imply, but very much because his work mirrors a non-normative historical and cultural circumstance, a crossroads.
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Let me begin with what I find most impressive: it is how direct this poet’s metaphysics seems to be as he addresses us through this vast and intricate landscape:
“just to keep you current: I’m the one who plugs
two fingers in the socket and through the
electrical circuit stretches my hand deep into the night
feeling my way to you…”
This metaphysics isn’t simple or plain: but it also isn’t obtuse. It is filled with a political charge and with irony which keep the charge alive even after the context of a particular situation that gave the rise to the poem’s occasion might be over. At times there is a flavor of lyric fabulism to his vision of history:
“in a
small country stained everywhere with ink, what kind of ink would
you have for your small country? red! god
inscribes the dead in black ink, and the living in red.
the mothers left the east going west,
each carrying a bundle with brains.”
Yet as soon as you think you might be reading an example of an exotic East European voice, you see a direct echo of the Western voice reflected right back to you, reader:
“I have made my
boots out of blackest soil. now I could exclaim (thirty-three
years after Sylvia Plath): motherland,
black shoe in which I have lived like a foot
having learned to walk to the cadence of a foreign language. I can’t
even say which foot is which.”
Here it is, our American/West European cultural empire gazing back to us from the mirror a Romanian poet puts before us. Few Americans might know who Romanian national poets are, but here it’s Sylvia Plath who looks back at us from the large and intricate panorama of voices and influences that form this poet’s work. Here she is along with many other voices as we overhear the echo from the so-called borderland of the West where “the pig asleep with its masters on the straw mattress as big as / a country….. No, the complexity here isn’t because the author is trying to be fancy. The complexity here is because our world is large, complex, and contains multitudes. On one page you might find an echo of Plath, on another Pavese, on yet another Trakl. What is fascinating is how organic it all is, this mix of influences, how it all fits together in the world of this poet where “unruly alphabets grow between the thighs of girls….” Yes, Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s historical circumstance is, quite often, charged with eros:
“following her, I remembered only her going by. Her walk, as if she wore an almost ripe
pomegranate (in Romanian, rodie, in French, grenade) between her thighs…
you could hear her blood pulsing at her
wrists like a bracelet
of hot rubies — all that’s remained after a revolution, two wars….”
However, this eros isn’t a mere isolated incident but one that happens in a context of half a dozen other emotions, historical events and metaphysical inquiries. The poet clashes categories and mythologies against one another, here “cainabel” is one word, Galaicu-Păun’s “evangelist writes through revelation….”
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, Yeats once told us. But what happens after? What happens if language isn’t there merely to deliver information, when a poem isn’t about an event, but is an event in itself? Which is to say, when a poet’s language isn’t telling us a neat story but instead the poet admits, “I swallow a letter until it sticks in my throat….” What then?
What happens when translated into our English—that is to say, the language of empire, the poet attests: “a poem is—exactly the same as an empire.” What then?
“to recite
poems in prison, ion mureșan points out, is the equivalent of organizing
a mass escape.”
What happens if truth isn’t in the message, but in the desire to deliver one? “I said everything” the poet admits, and adds right away, “I didn’t say anything.” Yet the word is out. This is a word.
Welcome to the world of Emilian Galaicu-Păun, dear readers. I hope you enjoy the ride. I know I did.
— Ilya Kaminsky
