Marin Sorescu

My cat washes
with her left paw,
there will be another war.
...

Throw a few more logs
on to the sun,
in a few billion years,
they say, it will
go out.
...

TRANSLATED BY D. J. ENRIGHT
The chicken I bought last night,
Frozen,
Returned to life,
Laid the biggest egg in the world,
And was awarded the Nobel Prize.

The phenomenal egg
Was passed from hand to hand,
In a few weeks had gone all round the earth,
And round the sun
In 365 days.

The hen received who knows how much hard currency,
Assessed in buckets of grain
Which she couldn't manage to eat

Because she was invited everywhere,
Gave lectures, granted interviews,
Was photographed.

Very often reporters insisted
That I too should pose
Beside her.
And so, having served art
Throughout my life,
All of a sudden I've attained to fame
As a poultry breeder.
...

TRANSLATED BY SEAMUS HEANEY
Water: no matter how much, there is still not enough.
Cunning life keeps asking for more and then a drop more.
Our ankles are weighted with lead, we delve under the wave.
We bend to our spades, we survive the force of the gusher.

Our bodies fountain with sweat in the deeps of the sea,
Our forehead aches and holds like a sunken prow.
We are out of breath, divining the heart of the geyser,
Constellations are bobbing like corks above on the swell.

Earth is a waterwheel, the buckets go up and go down,
But to keep the whole aqueous architecture standing its ground
We must make a ring with our bodies and dance out a round
On the dreamt eye of water, the dreamt eye of water, the dreamt eye of water.

Water: no matter how much, there is still not enough.
Come rain, come thunder, come deluged dams washed away,
Our thirst is unquenchable. A cloud in the water's a siren.
We become two shades, deliquescent, drowning in song.

My love, under the tall sky of hope
Our love and our love alone
Keeps dowsing for water.
Sinking the well of each other, digging together.
Each one the other's phantom limb in the sea.
...

TRANSLATED BY GABRIELA DRAGNEA
After you've learned to walk,
Tell one thing from another,
Your first care as a child
Is to get used to your name.
What is it?
They keep asking you.
You hesitate, stammer,
And when you start to give a fluent answer
Your name's no longer a problem.

When you start to forget your name,
It's very serious.
But don't despair,
An interval will set in.

And soon after your death,
When the mist rises from your eyes,
And you begin to find your way
In the everlasting darkness,
Your first care (long forgotten,
Long since buried with you)
Is to get used to your name.
You're called — just as arbitrarily —
Dandelion, cowslip, cornel,
Blackbird, chaffinch, turtle dove,
Costmary, zephyr — or all these together.
And when you nod, to show you've got it,
Everything's all right:
The earth, almost round, may spin
Like a top among stars.
...

TRANSLATED BY GABRIELA DRAGNEA
All the museums are afraid of me,
Because each time I spend a whole day
In front of a painting
The next day they announce
The painting's disappeared.

Every night I'm caught stealing
In another part of the world,
But I don't even care
About the bullets hissing toward my ear,
And the police dogs who are onto
The smell of my tracks,
Better than lovers who know
The perfume of their mistress.

I talk to the canvases that put my life in danger,
Hang them from clouds and trees,
Step back for some perspective.
You can easily engage the Italian masters in conversation.

What noise of colors!
And hence I'm caught
Very quickly with them,
Seen and heard from a distance
As if I had a parrot in my arms.

The hardest to steal is Rembrandt:
Stretch a hand out, there's darkness —
The terror seizes you, his men don't have bodies,
Just closed eyes in dark cellars.

Van Gogh's canvases are insane,
They whirl and roll their heads,
And you have to hold on tight
With both hands,
They're sucked by a force from the moon.

I don't know why, Breughel makes me want to cry.
He wasn't any older than me,
But they called him the old man
Because he knew it all when he died.

I try to learn from him too
But can't stop my tears
From flowing over the gold frames
When I run off with The Four Seasons under my armpits.

As I was saying, every night
I steal one painting
With enviable dexterity.
But the road's very long

So I'm caught in the end
And get home late at night
Tired and torn to shreds by dogs
Holding a cheap imitation in my hands.
...

TRANSLATED BY GABRIELA DRAGNEA
I.
I'm trying to spell out a state of amazement,
A sweet dilation, the sway of spirit,
That only finds room in your shape.
They say that
Transposed in our alphabet
A Chinese sentence can turn into
A series of one and the same conjunction.
For instance: "And and. And and and. And and and and."
This is a genuine transcription of the beautiful poem
"The Dance of the Yangtze River Valley
And the Yangtze River."

II.
Well, how many miracles, how many Chinese miracles,
Have I missed this time?
Too shrunk within the heart of Europe,
Stuck to Greek reason,
Spoiled by syllogism,
And born too late for the Far East!

III.
No one gave me a silk scroll as a present
At the time of the Han dynasty,
Much less during the coming ones.
My feet didn't develop corns on the silk road,
My shadow didn't pass on the winding way
To take the desert oases in its arms.
I never wrapped my shoulders
In the wavy mantle of the Yellow River.

In 120 B.C.
I didn't show myself — idiot! —
At the Music Chamber.
What melodies I could have heard!
My ear, a shell devoid of the sea's roar,
Missed the treasure of sounds
Invading north to south.
Would I have still remained
With so many uncertainties?

IV.
I was late to the contest of impromptu poems
And didn't make libations to the Muse
Along with Wang Xizhi.
I wish I'd seen how they spelled
"The literary spirit and the dragon engravings."
Humble observer, hidden in a fold of time,
I wish I could participate unseen
In the painting of the world's first landscape.
It would have included me no doubt
As an accident on the horizon,
A leaf on the sky's water.
I wish I'd been a judge when the names were checked
Or, lazily lying in the Doctrine of the Great Vehicle,
I wish I'd wandered beyond nature's limits,
And been struck by the sensation of a universal vacuum.

V.
I wonder if
The five rice measures
Would have finally revealed
The vital principle.

VI.
Can't you say anything,
Beautifully written character?
The Great Wall fits into you
Like the moon in a cacoon.
Open the silk door a moment
And let this state of amazement in —
Include this lotus flower
In your closed-circuit breath.

Why are you so silent,
When you used to tell me about all these things?
...

TRANSLATED BY GABRIELA DRAGNEA
Oh you saints,
Let me enter your society,
If only as a statistician.

You're old,
Perhaps the years are
Getting you down by now,
Laying themselves over you
In layers of color.

Just let me take care
Of your dirty work in
All the nooks and crannies.

For example I could
Swallow light
At the Last Supper
And exhale your halos
After the devotionals.

From time to time,
At a distance of half a wall,
I could
Form my hands into a horn
And shout,
Now for the believers,
Now for the unbelievers
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
...

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HAMBURGER
Between people's
ideals
and their realization
there is always
a greater drop
than in the highest
of waterfalls.

This potential gradient
can be exploited
rationally,
if we build a sort of
power station above it.

The energy it supplies,
even if we use it only
to light our cigarettes,
is something
anyway;
for while one is smoking
one can very seriously
think up
ideals even crazier.
...

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HAMBURGER
I have hidden inside a sea shell
but forgotten in which.

Now daily I dive,
filtering the sea through my fingers,
to find myself.
Sometimes I think
a giant fish has swallowed me.
Looking for it everywhere I want to make sure
it will get me completely.

The sea-bed attracts me, and
I'm repelled by millions
of sea shells that all look alike.
Help, I am one of them.
If only I knew, which.

How often I've gone straight up
to one of them, saying: That's me.
Only, when I prised it open
it was empty.
...

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HAMBURGER
I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid
whose verses like the Romanian coast roll along
so wide and subdued: waves that wait for the ice to break.

My poet, you that make what I sing to thousand years old,
ancient boundary stone on the edge of the Romanian language,
you the gulls have elected on to the governing board of our
epics,
of our song-grief you turned into Latin and gave
to the wind to carry to Rome and there, chiselled
into the column, await the Dacian prisoners.
You the first whom nostalgia, our dor, ate up
in those fields where the dust is sweet. You the first
to put your trust like a child in poetry's spellbinding power
and in help from abroad.
Sooner the Emperor would have sent experts to you at Tomi,
to change the climate, than see you back home,
your airy fame back in the purple of his retainers.
Who, he has said himself, could be better suited
to stand on the shore of the Pontus Euxinus, observing
how gradually it becomes the Black Sea, than a poet,
a good one, and one of repute—whom shall we send then,
whom?
And the choice fell on you, Ovid.
You were the first to occur to him because you
had just begun to be known, appreciated and talked about
like a bitter-sweet herb—that was your predicament.
Augustus liked your elegies, but only from a distance,
where they had the remedial effect the physicians prescribed,
an agreeable melancholy, after meals especially, when they
repeated on him...
The elegies were a medicine prescribed by the physicians
to save the Empire.
He even said: ‘Why hasn't that boy sent us anything lately?
Force him to work, pinch him a bit, so that he'll grow
sad and Pontic, this wind is troubling me again, I'm gulping air...'
‘People are asking why you had to relegate him,' a senator
timidly interjected.
‘Suggest to them that he subverted the Empire,' the Emperor
cynically smiled.
‘Morally or materially?'—the exalted servant seemed hard
of hearing.
‘What, are you trying to drive me into a quandary? Both, let's
say, a bit of each.
Ovid has done immense material and moral harm
to Latinity, and the citizens are indignant.
Or perhaps,' he considered, ‘moral would be better,
after all we are an Imperium and don't stint the expenses
of a poet, but in moral matters we're strict: so, he corrupted
our youth.'
Next day Augustus had second thoughts:
‘No, for the time being no explanations, for anyone,
till we've thought of something more plausible'; and, to
change the subject,
‘What's Horace doing?' ‘It's taken hold of him too, he's writing
no more odes but only epodes, nothing but epodes, an obscure
sort of gibberish,
what shall we do about Horace, will he too become a case?'
‘Let him be, let him be. Let's wait and see how he develops,
he may have talent.
Maecenas and his house, after all, will take care of the cost
and we shall send him the bill with a troop of a hundred men.
But as for Ovid, he shall stay for a while yet
at Tomi, and no one shall hurt a hair of his head. We shall
think it over, mediate, consult the augurs too.
No precipitous measures, where poets are concerned.'

Two thousand years have passed, and the Emperor
has not hit on appropriate action, he's thinking still.
But you must not give up hope, Ovid, you will be pardoned.
The matter was only provisional, an emergency, so be patient,
the problem will be resolved, as I said, when circumstances
permit.

I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid,
the poet whose lines of fortune and arteries my earth senses
when he raises the Dobruja's broad hand to his brow.
...

Totul e perfect
Pe pinza acestui secol
Al cinematografului:
Si imaginea noastra
Si sonorul.

Numai ca de multe ori
Ne facem corect aparitia,
Incepem sa gesticulam si sa vorbim omeneste -
Dar nu se aude nimic.
Cuvintele ti-au fost expediate pe ecran mai inainte,
Sau au fost oprite la vama.
Alteori te pomenesti exprimind
Replicile interlocutorului,
Care nu se potrivesc pe gura ta,
Iti vin prea mari ori prea mici.

Cel mai rau este
Cind glasul incepe sa ti se auda
Dupa ce tu ai iesit demult
Din fascicolul de proiectie
Al soarelui.

Nu-i nimec.
Sint citeva mici defectiuni
De sincronizare.
Poate vom ajunge, cu vremea,
Sa spunem exact ceea ce gindim
Si sa vorbim
Chiar in timpul vietii.
...

After you've learned to walk,
Tell one thing from another,
Your first care as a child
...