Poetry

EX(o)ilium


What did I put
In my suitcase starting out?
Old scars and clever tricks,
Social misery and emotional demons,
Vices and fairy tales

Source language
With words on the other side of the word:
Muted, bruised and damned,
Itinerary words.

What did I keep
In my suitcase arriving?
The coloured batiks of my mother,
The dor for seedy places,
A fleeting proverb
The fever of tested illnesses,
Mud pies, dusted with clay,
My first toys of wood and wool,
The sparse rains, the winds and frosts of the pusta,
The woodcocks and storks brooding rebel roofs.
The drums and fires in the streets at Christmas

Target language
With its mirror words:
Avoir ou être, naître ou mourir,
Être ou avoir, mourir ou naître
,
No time to win,
No time to lose.

The tongue is no more
The heart organ in this case
Instead the organ of knowledge
And of power.

Where are you birthplace
When you become un-quietude
A place in a postcard
With no future, never mailed
Trace stored deep in the eyes,
Trace banished in the space of writing

Homelandless, stunted, hidden, isolated,
Alone with the world, beat on and bet on,
Unreal traces of your own reality,
Tainted traces in your own ownership,
In a state of inferiority or superiority,
Of opacity or heroic transparency

Source language
With words from the other side of the word:
Muted, wounded, damned,
Itinerary words, earth words.

Where am I among all these countries
Always at the window, at the border,
Always on the margin, on the march,
Always solemn,
Too tall or too short,
Pretentious or pretending,
Like a cognitive fly

Target language
With its mirror words:
Avoir ou être, naître ou mourir,
Être ou avoir, mourir ou naître
,
No time to win,
No time to lose.

Where are you birthplace?
When you become only clairvoyance
Drawing, a line to please and move
Hollow place in the frightened hand,
Passing landscape, scraps of image
Empty or full of comical mud
On top of which the painter pasted
His frescoes of a young artist:

Drawings, lines to please and move
One die, one horsy, one nanny and
Missed appointments.

Source language
With words from the other side of the word:
Muted, wounded, damned,
Earth words, itinerary words.

Where are you exposed place?
With your reveller atheist god
Rootless and ill humoured,
Who danced the circle dance of oblivion
Its wings too human, too off-beat,
Outlining indulgences from cloud to cloud

Avoir ou être, naître ou mourir,
Être ou avoir, mourir ou naître
,

Where are you my games of forgetting and shifts in meaning
With your three-coloured, bug-eyed Bolsheviks?
Your silences and your guilty tears
Your red melancholy, running out of syllables,
That they were afraid of from memory to memory.

Your kindness as apostles of the neam,*
Your life-long, acid insomnia

Where are you all those who
I heard knocking on the doors of my childhood?
Like an ode, like an anthem,
Like a drinking song:
Avoir ou être, naître ou mourir,
Être ou avoir, mourir ou naître
,
……………………………………

Note: Romanian words: dor – nostalgia; neam – people; pusta – plain

Rodica Draghincescu is a member of "generation 90," a movement of nonconformist Romanian writers that was born out of the fall of the Ceausescu regime. She has published many books of poetry, novels, and essays, both in her native Romanian and in French (http://www.draghincescu.com). She is currently doing a doctorate at the Paul Verlaine University in Metz, France, and is editor-in-chief of the international multilingual and multidisciplinairy magazine Levure littéraire: http://www.levurelitteraire.com.

Howard Scott is a freelance translator living in Montreal. In 1997, he won the Governor General's Literary Award for English translation. As well as poetry and fiction, he has translated many books of non-fiction, often in collaboration with Phyllis Aronoff. In 2001, they won the Quebec Writers' Federation Translation Award.