Silence amongst ancient things
By Lucian Blaga, translated by Gabi Reigh
Closeby is my mountain, the mountain I love.
Surrounded by ancient things
Covered by moss since the day of creation,
While the evening’s black suns
Bring me the kindness of darkness,
I should be glad.
There is enough silence in the dome
That bolts together the staves of the sky.
But I remember a time before I existed
Like a faraway childhood,
And I ache for that country without a name.
And I tell myself again:
The stars in the sky are speechless.
Yes, I should be glad.
The distance to that star above
By Mihai Eminescu, translated by Gabi Reigh
The distance to that star above
Stretches so far beyond us
Thousands of years have struggled on
Before its rays could find us.
Its spark snuffed out in tombs of sky,
Long since by chaos thwarted,
Its ghostly light reaches us here
An age too late, a life after it started.
The icon of that fallen star
Lifts slowly through the night
Where once it lived, invisible.
We see its absence glowing now
Frozen in sleep, unreachable.
So too, my love,
Remembering our ancient sorrows
dissolved in time and darkness,
The light of all our smothered love
Glows through us cruel and boundless.
The Oblivion Factory
by Ioana Ileana Ștețco, translated by Gabi Reigh
This is where they forge famished shapes
Hollow with loneliness
Their mouths agape
As if frozen in song
I know how wars are lost
In a game of roulette
And reported in the evening papers
As domestic squabbles
Or the postponed dreams of those left behind
on the patch of ground at the back of the oblivion factory
where they cast off remainders.
The waters pass over us
And wash the shame from our songs
Lick clean our sores
Unbend the walls of sound
In the village where everyone signs the same name
A name no-one remembers
The prodigal tongue borrows notes
From those who can still recall the melody
And can name the shadows in the oblivion factory
And bow down before those who carve them by hand
The factory expands
Seeps into everything
Even those who still remember
Now play with shadows exiled from memory
And it will be an age before it will go into liquidation
On a day etched somewhere on the seam
The Evening Suicides
by Ioana Ileana Ștețco, translated by Gabi Reigh
A cloud scissored with wings
Is the flight of crows
In the autumn
I remember eternity
A palimpsest glimmering bitterness
A whore squinting her eyes somewhere beyond the pulse of this moment
Sniffing around the evening suicides
Who drag themselves up, in vain, towards the ramparts
Their blind fingers fumbling half-truths
In vain all the dreaming and the ending of dreams
In vain you circle around the parched earth
To shield the new blade of grass
The salted sea of my blood
Splinters, cursed, through the hourglass
Into our shared, unpaired memories
Birds with fins, for me
Fish with wings, for her
And not even the evening suicides
are what they once used to be
In the days when they teased death
And paused laughing, inches away from infinity.