5-5-2019
Marin Sorescu (1936 - 1996)
APRIL 23, 2019
Poem of the Week:
‘Elegy’
A poem by Marin Sorescu; introduced by Andrew McCulloch
‘The earth dissolves. / Does it go beyond, too, mother?’
– by Marin Sorescu
The poet, novelist and playwright Marin Sorescu (1936–1996) was so popular
during the years that Nicolae Ceaușescu, the authoritarian leader of Romania,
was in power that his readings had to be held in football stadiums. The need to
be subtly subversive drove him, like many other east European poets, towards
fairy tale, fable, allegory and parable, and – according to Peter Forbes in
the Listener – an “almost complete absence of traditional poetic music”.
Although, for George Szirtes in the TLS, with Sorescu “the poem within the poem
is constantly pressing outward”. He had the impressive ability to respond to the
pressures of history without sacrificing artistic integrity –what Seamus Heaney
called the power of “surviving in the realm of ‘the times’ and the realm of
moral and artistic self-respect”.
In “Elegy”, first published in this translation in the TLS in 1990 and
subsequently in Hands Behind My Back (1991),
a failure to believe in the ultimate liberation of death is code, perhaps, for a
politically conditioned inability to conceive of being free from totalitarian
control: “Is it harder there, than it used to be here? / Do they die there,
too?” The compulsory visibility of the Communist regime is so absolute in its
erasure of the border between public and private that escape seems impossible.
And yet Sorescu’s unanswerable questions point towards the kind of freedom he
appears to dismiss, an order of belief that transcends the grim realities of
vanquished lives and futile gestures of resistance. Sorescu’s god, says Szirtes,
“is the wry wisdom that sees through everything and yet continues to hope and
despair”.
The first snow
The earth dissolves.
Is it harder there, than it used to be here?
Translated by Gabriela Dragnea
Mama, intaia zapada
Incepe deasupra-ti sa
cada,
Asculti inspicarea de
vant,
Ascunsa-ntr-un singur
cuvant.
Pamantul intreg se
destrama
El trece si dincolo, mama?
Materia unde se duce
Din locul c-o floare de cruce?
Urmeaza mai greu, dupa greu?
Se moare si-acolo mereu?
Si cine mai plange aceste
Noi morti fara boli, fara veste?
Tu toate voiai sa le stii,
Izvor pentru verbul a fi
¬Tu
care nascut-ai in chin,
Aceasta ninsoare ti-o-nchin,
Sfintind cu prohod de nameti
Prea multele tale peceti.
Elegy
Starts falling over you, mother.
Can you hear the
wind?
It’s hidden in a single word.
Does it go beyond, too, mother?
I mean the
substance
Of this place, marked with a flower?
Do they die there, too?
Who weeps over
Those deaths without annunciation
And caused by no
disease?