Ana Blandiana

Soot


What do you think about when you see
An archangel covered with soot?
Pollution in the stratosphere, of course.
And anything else?
That habit angels have of
Sticking their noses into all and sundry.
And anything else?
Stoves that get clogged up in spring
And start to spit out smoke.
And anything else?
Oh, now I’ve got it  –
An archangel covered with soot
Could also be one
That’s set itself alight –
Forgetting that angels cannot catch fire.

*

Surmise


Is the flower free
If the date it has to bloom
And the date it will wither,
The perfume
It must give off
And the colour it has to show
Have all been precisely set?
The flower says yes.
And the petals say yes, each one,
And the stamens, and the tiny threads of pollen
And the leaves, and the slender and fragile tower
Of the neck. Yes.
But then, what is freedom? I ask
Somewhat flustered, already surmising the answer.
What a question! Amazed
The angel blinks its petals in reply.

*

Hide-and-Seek †


There go the churches
Gliding across the asphalt
Like sailing ships loaded with horror,
The steeple is the mast
And its sails are swollen
With the constantly
Shifting wind.
So shifting, in fact, that
If you don’t watch out
You could at any moment be run
Over by a church
Gone mad,
Scurrying to its hiding-place.
 

† Allusion to Ceaușescu’s plan of urban ‘reconstruction’ for Bucharest which implied the destruction of the old centre. Many old churches were dis-placed or demolished. [Tr.]


*

River with One Shore


Death, on whose bank I’m sitting,
Is only a momentary interruption,
Long enough to decide
To step into the ice-cold water
And tread across the slippery rocks
To the other shore.

I’m not afraid of the crossing,
Only of the moment when the bank
I’ve left behind disappears
Downstream as if death were a river
That can only have
A single shore.


*

You Never See the Butterflies


Haven’t you ever noticed how
The butterflies share glances above us?
Or the signs the wind makes
To the grass when we walk by?
If I suddenly turn
The branches are stone-still
And they wait for me to go away.
Have you noticed that the birds are setting?
Have you noticed that the leaves are going out?
Have you noticed the whispers
Growing behind us
Like moss on the north side of trees?
And the silence that meets us everywhere…
They all know something that is hidden from us.
Maybe we’ve been condemned
Maybe there’s a price on our heads.
At night the stars shine nervously
When they hear the rustle of the husks of corn.

 

    14    Introduction

Four poems from the journal Amfiteatru (1984)
    39     Children’s Crusade
    40     I Believe
    41     Limitations
    42     Everything

Predator Star (1985)
    44     Soot
    45     White
    46     Definition
    47     Twins
    48     You Move
    49     Icon
    50     Through the Air
    51     He Who Lives
    52     Lullaby
    53     At the Other End
    54     Insomnia Sun
    55     Belatedness
    56     Inflation of Birds
    57     Inward
    58     March 25th, 1942
    59     If
    60     Courage
    61     Nec Plus Ultra
    62     Amber
    63     The Weight of Snow
    64     Union
    65     Chimes of Ice
    66     Shelling
    67     How Easy
    68     Sky or Earth
    69     Exchange
    70     On Principle
    71     The Spell
    73     The Scream
    74     Towards the Mountains
    75     My Hand
    77     Questions
    76     The Father
    78     Remember
    80     Body
    81     Wind-blown Star
    82     Soothing Song
    83     A Blinding Animal
    84     41
    85     Compromise
    86     Continuation
    87     Axis
    89     Footprints
    90     My Eye
    91     Outburst
    92     Fir Tree Boughs
    93     Harvest of Angels
    94     The Bell That I Hear
    95     Shore
    96     Letters
    97     Dance
    98     Scale with a Single Pan
    99     Tale
    100     The Number of Birds
    101     Wail
    102     Surmise

The Architecture of Waves (1990)
    105     A Trap
    106     Architecture in Motion
    107     Signal
    108     Earthquake
    109     Passage
    110     My Forehead
    111     The Hour
    112     Dies ille, dies irae
    113     Cold Casting
    114     The Path
    115     Tableau
    116     Of Love
    117     Omphalos
    118     Worms on the Move
    119     Sleep
    120     Subject
    121     Unseen
    122     Hide-and-Seek
    123     A Chain
    125     Motionless
    126     Refrain
    128     Systematisation
    130     Nameless (1)
    131     Witnesses
    132     A Hell
    133     Also in a Mirror
    134     Full Moon
    135     Exasperation
    136     Beneath the Insults
    137     That Old Point
    138     To Strike
    139     Gara de Nord
    140     Plains
    141     The Statues
    143     Model
    144     In Motion
    145     One by One
    146     Alone
    147     Measure
    148     In Its Scabbard
    149     Molecules of Calcium
    150     The Art of Dying
    151     Earthly Sounds
    152     Fallen from Heaven
    153     Helter-skelter
    154     Inscription
    155     Head Down
    156     Through Non-Being
    157     A Straight Line
    158     Countdown
    159     Loneliness
    160     A Less Charged Atmosphere
    161     The Tomb Unburied
    163     More and More
    164     Open Bird
    165     From Chaos
    166     Torn Void
    167     Colosseum
    168     Clocks on Rails
    169     Like Foam
    170     Nameless (2)
    171     Charred Remains
    172     Nameless (3)
    173     Rhetoric
    174     Like Waves
    175     Clio
    176     Glue
    177     Thermometer
    178     Wooden Language
    179     Obsession
    180     Ballad

Clock without Hours (2016)
    183     White on White
    184     Times
    185     Nostalgia for Paradise
    186     And So on and So on
    187     Pause in Writing
    188     Heretic
    189     From Mirrors
    190     Flow
    191     One
    192     This Beautiful Time
    193     At a Pavement Café
    194     Disease
    195     Transplanted Church
    196     In a Wound
    197     Different Languages
    198     Similarity
    199     Green Icon
    200     Silent Film
    201     I was afraid
    202     Nothing Further
    203     That Year
    204     Always Led
    205     Web
    206     My Horses
    207     Curved Tiles
    208     Symposium
    209     Joyce’s Tower
    210     Interior
    211     Trees
    212     In the Shade
    213     Beneath the Snow
    214     Dissolution
    215     The Right to Shade
    216     The Mirror within the Mirror
    217     Facebook
    218     Message
    219     River with One Shore
    220     Sketches
    221     Not Afraid of Loneliness
    222     Residues
    223     A Game
    224     Why?
    225     Overdose
    226     Mândrămărie Blue
    227     Parnassus
    228     Question
    229     Angels in Their Pockets
    230     Final Exam
    231     Insectarium
    232     An Hourglass without Sand
    233     Rape
    234     Birches
    235     Like Birds
    236     Between the Seconds
    237     Sonnet
    238     Clock without Hours

October, November, December (1972)
    241     Do you remember the beach?
    242     Wait until October comes
    243     Bitter Body
    244     What Good Is Joy?
    245     By the Gliding of the Moon
    246     About the Country We Come from
    247     I won’t remember any more
    248     If we killed one another
    250     I fall asleep, you fall asleep
    251     Brightness of Death
    252     My shadow is afraid
    253     The one in me
    254     Do I have the right?
    255     Swing
    256     Alabaster bodies of poplars
    257     Two Suns
    258     With a Soft Despair
    259     While I Talk
    260     I Only Have to Wait
    261     Mother
    262     Light inside Myself
    263     Teach Me to Darkly Burn
    264     You have no shadow
    265     Crowned with poppies
    266     You Haven’t Forgotten the Language of Plants
    267     Our place
    268     You Never See the Butterflies
    269     If you don’t want to come back again
    270     There was a time when trees had eyes
    271     It’s tall and dark in me
    272     I was taught
    273     Lament in solitude
    274     All the Peace in the Universe
    275     Among Leaves That Are Almost Cold
    276     Couple
    278     Without you
    279     Why not come back to the trees?
    280     You Are the Dream
    282     I had just begun to fear
    283     Which of Us
    284     Sometimes I dream of my body
    285     I’m blinkered
    286     The fog coming in
    287     Alone and Without Any Thoughts
    288     Oh Your Body
    289     Close your eyes
    290     Exile

Variations on a Given Theme (2018)
    292     I knew it was just a suit
    293     I remember wondering once
    294     Between the spirit and the body
    295     Lately my life seems like a novel by Agatha Christie
    296     Time, at times
    297     ‘I have a pact with the mirror,’ you said
    298     It’s as though we met in a bubble of soap
    299     They sway, they sway
    300     If there were microphones in houses
    301     Without you
    302     When I say, ‘to those in their graves’
    303     What if we decided to dream about each other
    304     I’m afraid of the darkness
    305     I don’t understand
    306     ‘Where is the Gentleman?’ the old women asked me
    307     What splendour suffering gives us
    308     Now I pray to you
    309     What is love?
    310     It isn’t true that ‘Every Angel terrifies’
    311     I suppose you can also see it now
    312     I’ve thought about what I’d like to tell you
    313     The leaves are falling…
    314     Is it easy to be dead?
    315     Voices muffled by leaves
    316     Everything begins with death
    317     ‘I’d like for us to die together’
    318     Just as unwritten thoughts
    319     I often wonder if what you knew here
    320     Why won’t the moon let me sleep?
    321     Always
    322     In the phone, your photographs from spring
    323     Nothing stands still
    324     Your smile above the TV
    325     Just as somewhere in Africa
    326     If you feel forced, as I fear
    327     Do you remember when you buried the seeds
    328     Sleep is as mysterious as a road
    329     There is a law – the Babinet-Mayer law
    330     I’m not certain you can hear the sound
    331     Why instead of darkness
    332     We’re alone
    333     I don’t know how to pray
    334     Every gesture of mine
    335     On holidays I feel you closer
    336     When I was small
    337     They ring and ring
    338     All of the questions
    339     I’ve read a lot of books
    340     Where are you, really?
    341     Where do the hours go?
    342     New Year’s Eve
    343     Light on light
    344     Snow!
    345     The life in your diaries
    346     Perhaps the word love
    347     Into the abyss that suddenly opened in the sky
    348     You can only die in the present
    349     Our parents and grandparents died
    350     Do you understand what it means

    352     The Translators

‘This is a collection that deals with change and its repercussions; the affects that can’t be seen coming and the way that large scale change can utterly de-centralise a person.’ – Matt MacDonald, Glasgow Review of Books [on The Sun of Hereafter]