But you won’t make out your son.

I’m so old, mother

And I carry in my heart backpack like

The ashes of alienation!

Florentina Loredana Dalian

Florentina Loredana Dalian is a Romanian writer, who by profession is a chemical engineer. She is also the member of the Professional Journalists Union of Romania and other Cultural Associations. She was born on 29 March 1968 in Bucharest. She writes prose, poetry and plays and publishes in different literary magazines. She has published eleven books: seven of short prose, two novels and two of poetry books – Miss Nobody, and Isle.

The Prodigal Son

Mother, I am a prodigal son

I squandered both my love and years.

I knocked to all the hearts’ doors

Nobody’s home

Dried out are my lips

With the heat of so many missed kisses.

I went winged away from home

I fed myself on dreams

But carobs are what I was now left with.

Sometimes in the evening

I remember the sun setting behind our hill.

Ah, mother

There was a time I could see only the sun rising.

How are you?

Are your tears as salty

And quiet 

As my heart pounding

For an unspoken love!

I will come back, mother,

But you won’t make out your son.

I’m so old, mother

And I carry in my heart backpack like

The ashes of alienation!

Don’t tell

Don’t tell father to slaughter the fatten calf

Make but the fire in the room

I yearn to seeing the light of the flames

Dancing on the white walls

You had whitewashed before Easter.

And neither

And neither hire fiddlers

What’s the use of it?

All I want is to hear your song

That you were singing when my being in the cradle.

Do that!

Wait mother for your prodigal son

For he will come back

Some day!

War

You see, my daughter, that’s the war,

You have time to think at nothing,

Most often than not you’re on the edge!

I served at the border troops,

It was a starry night, with a fragrance of freshly scythed hay in the air;

Wherefrom hay? When only the grim reaper walks by along there

Who brought that Russian in my line of fire?

I challenged him curtly: Freeze or I’ll shoot!

Sergey or what the heck was his name

Stuck his hands in the air and mumbled in Romanian:

Don’t shoot! Kids!

The poor bastard fished out the photo and put it over his heart

Now you shoot Mitica, shoot you son of a bitch!

you, who’ve never culled a chicken in your life,

Hurrying up to the pub on the pig slaughtering day,

Shoot, you soldier, don’t you hear me?

I armed, that was shaking all over,

Pozhaluysta

I fired in the air and shouted at him: run for your life!

blagodarya!

Then again: freeze!

He froze still,

I took off my coat and put it over his shoulders

Not to make it out those behind the lines

We looked in each other’s eyes; his were blue,

I glimpsed the sky through.

Ever since then, my daughter, I see the sky looking like two eyes

In a night redolent of scythed hay, gun powder and death

But life prevails even in war.

He tossed me his gold watch,

(He might have been an officer. I don’t believe privates will have had something like that)

A rap gold is not worth in war,

I asked him nothing, I wanted to give it back to him,

He ran away.

I stood still with the watch in one hand, the rifle in the other,

I pictured myself as a traitor

But how could you whack a man at such close quarters,

Especially after having put his kids over his heart?

I need no gold, but the watch I keep

I look at it and remember

The night when I felt like having been God

And your granny holds forth my not being a good Christian,

Not going to church

Supposedly about to fall in hell,

But I had lived my own hell out there, on the front,

And I say maybe the Heaven will open up for me, too,

Opened by the eyes of Sergey, or what the heck was his name,

As were that night looking like the sky.

That’s what I think… but who really knows?

The Fair Had Come

And it was fall and a nip was in the air

The fair had come with halvahs and sideshows

The gypsies had settled down over the valley

We were leaving school late

The darkness had fallen and I was scared.

Zolea, the class wash-out, says

“I walk you by, it costs you a halvah”

It’s fine for me – I say – and you a farthing

Each time I give you my notebook in the break to copy the exercise. 

“Deal; it costs you nothing.”

He walked me past the valley, waiting by the gate until I let myself in.

The following day I looked with another eye upon him

He seemingly grew taller

And nor so witless did he appear to me.

“You see, my dear” – I felt like hearing my grandma’s voice –

“Nobody should be laughed at,

God had given each of us something…”

______________________

The post The Prodigal Son – Poetry from Romania first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Nichita Stanescu was more concerned with how the metaphysical world emerges out of the physical experience of life and how poetry can represent this new extra-body life

Solom Marcus pointed out that mathematics and poetry are similar, according to principles of Aristotle’s logic: the principle of identity, of non-contradiction and of the excluded third.

By Streche Nicolae Florentin

Nichita Stanescu (1933-1983) remains one of the most acclaimed literary figures of the 20th century in Romanian Literature, his poetry being widely cherished and well received. His body-work became increasingly philosophical, from the initial neo-modernism back in 60s, then engaging with existentialism and the metaphysical approach in 70s and early 80s. Winner of the Herder Prize for poetry and nominated for the Nobel Prize, Nichita’s philosophy was often linked to: “The poet, much like the soldier has no personal life /His own life is wrecks and ruins” (The Poet and the Soldier).

In “Self-Portrait” poem, for instance, he starts an inner travel to his body: ‘I am nothing but / a blood stain / that speaks’, wrote Nichita Stanescu in a poem entitled ‘Self-Portrait’. Actually, Nichita Stanescu was more concerned with how the metaphysical world emerges out of the physical experience of life and how poetry can represent this new extra-body life, as an escape from common and daily limitations.

After publishing “11 Elegies” masterpiece around 1965, Nichita was convinced that there are two types of artistic structures, as opposed to schools of thoughts and literary currents: artists that see ideas and artists that see the feelings, the outer world that really matters.

Nichita Stanescu (1933-1983)

One can say that mathematics and poetry are the extremes of language, they are not compatible: if mathematics is dense and precise, on one hand, poetry represents is based more on language as a form of suggestion and essence of inner and outside world. In fact, Nichita focus his art on symbolism of numbers and letters, integrating mathematics in a new really of poetry, in a vivid and powerful interplay between science and imagination, poetry suggestion. Meeting famous scholar Solomon Marcus was for Nichita Stănescu reaching new levels of Art: joining far-off domains with enriching concepts.

For example, in “Altă matematică” (Another Mathematics), taken from poetry volume called “Maretia frigului” (The Grandeur of Coldness) (1972), one can easily perceive the transgression to a new reality, in a completely higher perception of reality than the theme of numbering and free association which can be found in Prevert’s famous and similar poem structure called Page d’ecriture (French and English version at https://benslavic.wordpress.com/2008/02/06/a-poem)

Altă matematică

Noi ştim că unu ori unu fac unu,

Dar un inorog ori o pară

Nu ştim cât face

Ştim că cinci fără patru fac unu,

Dar un nor fără o corabie

Nu ştim cât face

Ştim, noi ştim că opt

împărţit la opt fac unu,

Dar un munte împărţit la o capră

Nu ştim cât face

Ştim că unu plus unu fac doi,

Dar eu şi cu tine,

Nu știm, vai, nu ştim cât facem.

Ah, dar o plapumă

înmulţită cu un iepure

Face o roscovană, desigur,

O varză împărţită la un steag

Fac un porc,n cal fără un tramvai

Face un înger,

O conopidă plus un ou,

Face un astragal…

Numai tu şi cu mine

înmultiţi şi împărţiţi

Adunaţi şi scăzuţi

Rămânem aceiaşi…

Pieri din mintea mea!

Revino-mi în inimă!

 Another Mathematics

(Translation)

We know that one times one is one,

But a unicorn times a pear,

We don’t know what

We know five minus four is one

But a cloud minus a vessel

We don’t know what it is

We know, we surely know that eight

Divided by eight is one,

But we don’t know the

If a mountain can be divided by a goat

We know that one plus one is two

But, alas, we don’t know

The sum of me and you

Ah, but a blanket times a rabbit

Is a redheaded one of course

A cabbage divided by a flag is a pig,

A horse minus a trolley is an angel,

A cauliflower plus an egg

Is an ankle bone . . .

Only you and me,

Multiplied and divided,

Added and subtracted,

We stay the same . . .

Vanish from my mind!

Return in my heart!

If Ion Barbu, famous mathematician who imported science notions to poetry, was hermetic and enclosed, in Nichita’s poetry mathematics was a revelation, and he would turn it into an universal and symbolical language, using Euclidean geometry to extend his poetic strategy and explorations of the world, and beyond it. His poetry became complex and intertextual, philosophical, which was finally called “poetical mathematics”. The influence of Solomon Marcus was great towards Nichita, and their personal meetings were intended to make possible this conjunction between languages.

Solon Marcus (1925-2016)

Solomon Marcus published in 1970 his chief work called “Mathematical Poetics”, approaching poetical language in a distinctive way: he underlined the contrast between the discreet, algebraic structure of scientific methodology, and the continuous, topologic structure of poetical meaning. Solom Marcus was determined and he succeeded to point out that mathematics and poetry are similar, according to principles of Aristotle’s logics: the principle of identity, of non-contradiction and of the excluded third.

In short, Nichita dissociates quantitative operations from qualitative ones, saying:

“I loathe the arithmetic I learned because it assumes a truth. The true truth seems to me of a qualitative nature, that is unique, that is thrilling”

(Breathings, 1982)

In fact, mathematics is for Nichita a tool to invent “The Unwords”, to express his anger against common words, unable to reveal the reality of the spiritual world. Words acquire a will of their own, he would say, they have autonomy, independent of the poet, becoming a real threat. But the word is the foundation of his work, which naturally captures the beautiful, the artist’s relationship with the material world, the essence, and the existential or cosmic unity.

____________________

About the Author

Streche Nicolae Florentin was born on October 26, 1982 in Bucharest, Romania. He studied Romanian – English Philology Department, ‘Dimitrie Bolintineanu’ Theoretical High School, Bucharest; For higher studies he went to University of Bucharest – Faculty of Letters – Department of Information and Documentation Sciences; got Bachelor’s degree with thesis paper on: Romanian book printing in Wallachia and Moldova (16th-18th centuries); Did Masters Course on ‘E-government in Public Administration at University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters; Master Program in European Studies – “Culture and Politics in European and International Context” from same university;

Literary and publishing activities

• Participant of the events of the “Evening Literary Meeting” (2012 – 2014)

• Participant of the meetings of the “Club Art – BOEMA 33” circle (2014)

• Participant of the competitions of the Romanian Kukai online circle – haiku poems (2013)

• Presentation of “The lace train” – poetry volume by Loredana Tudor Tomescu (May 6th, 2014)

• Co-organizer of the anniversary event dedicated to writer Ileana Vulpescu (in the presence of the writer) and the one-year anniversary of editorial project “Infinity of Love” (bilingual anthology – Romanian and English).

• Co-author, with three poems, in the bilingual anthology “Infinity of Love” (38 authors) 2013

• Co-author, with two poems, within the anthology “Romanian Soul” – the group “The Art of Conversation” (22 authors) 2013

• Public reading of “Stelica” poem by Gellu Naum at Gellu Naum event – vol. 2 Prose anthology (June 2012)

• Online editor of several literary magazines including ‘Words’ and others

• Diploma of participation in the International Festival “Romeo and Juliet at Mizil”, 8th Edition, 2014-2015 – Poetry and Epigram section

• Graduate of the Manager Course project: New skills for new challenges in the publishing field (April-June 2015);

• International Festival of Poetry Bangladesh 2020: Online Romania Poetry Evening – October 16th, International Coordinator: Dr. Masud.

Email Contact: florentinstreche@yahoo.com

Reference:

Romanian Poetry in English – Episode 9 – Nichita Stănescu

The post Poetry and Mathematics Lesson: Nichita Stănescu and Solomon Marcus first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Contemporary World Literature Poetry from Romania

Six Poems by Streche Nicolae Florentin

Streche Nicolae Florentin was born on October 26, 1982. He lives in Bucharest, Romania.

Education:

• 1997 – 2001 – ‘Dimitrie Bolintineanu’ Theoretical High School, Bucharest – Philology Department: Romanian – English
• 2002 – 2006 – University of Bucharest – Faculty of Letters – Department of Information and Documentation Sciences; Bachelor’s degree with thesis paper on: Romanian book printing in Wallachia and Moldova (16th-18th centuries)

• 2006 – 2007 – University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters: Master’s course “E-government in public administration” (Academic thesis: “E-government policies in the information society”)
• 2011 – 2013 – University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters: Master Program in European Studies – “Culture and Politics in European and International Context” (Academic thesis: “European culture and mentalities in the Enlightenment (18th century)

Literary and publishing activities:

• Participant in the events of the “Evening Literary Meeting” (2012 – 2014). Venues: National Library of Romania, Metropolitan Library, “Bookfest” Book Fair (presentation of volumes launched by Zip Publishing)
• Participant in the meetings of the “Club Art – BOEMA 33” circle (2014)
• Participant in the competitions of the Romanian Kukai online circle – haiku poems (2013)
• Presentation of “The lace train” – poetry volume by Loredana Tudor Tomescu (May 6th, 2014, Suţu Palace)
• Co-organizer of the anniversary event dedicated to writer Ileana Vulpescu (in the presence of the writer) and the one-year anniversary of editorial project “Infinity of Love” (bilingual anthology – Romanian and English). Date and place of the event: May 17th 2013, at the National Library of Romania
• Co-author, with three poems, in the bilingual anthology “Infinity of Love” (38 authors). Publication date: May 2013
• Co-author, with two poems, within the anthology “Romanian Soul” – the group “The Art of Conversation” (22 authors). Publication date: July 2013
• Public reading of “Stelica” poem by Gellu Naum at Gellu Naum event – vol. 2 Prose anthology (June 20th, 2012)

Online Literary Activities:

• Online editor: http://cinefan09.blogspot.ro/ – personal blog – 2007-2010
• Online editor at “Mixul de Cultură”
• Online editor at “Liternet” project (2012-2013)
• Online editor of the magazine “Words”
• Article for Revista Arte şi Meserii (RAM) – “Marius Manole and the art of being an actor” (June 2014)
• Article for the newspaper Naiunea – “Mircea Eliade and historical consciousness”
• Diploma of participation in the International Festival “Romeo and Juliet at Mizil”, 8th Edition, 2014-2015 – Poetry and Epigram section
• Graduate of the Manager course project: “New skills for new challenges in the publishing field (April-June 2015)
• Online editor at Regal Literar project – July 2020 – ongoing
• International Festival of Poetry Bangladesh 2020: Online Romania Poetry Evening – October 16th

Hobbies:

– Literature, foreign languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian); cinema, music, travelling.

Email:

florentinstreche@yahoo.com

_________________

Motto

“We are foolish and immortal gods, who have forgotten our destiny”

(Constantin Noica)

I am (not)

I’m here for something

That is called silence

And I was truly born

When I began to count,

When I caressed the sunlight

Wholly staring at the horizon!

I know I’m a grain of sand

In the huge desert of the universe,

For I have the vision of life,

But I’m not a blind man

Who denies the faces of the others!

I am just a man reaching for the limit.

Forgive!

In the very first second

Life brings you in the state of man,

Out of love between an Adam and an Eve

When the second comes again,

Your body would smell as a new love,

Now you are Adam and you are looking for Eve,

Or perhaps Eve running after Adam,

With the apple pulled off the tree.

Here it comes; here it comes the third second,

When again, it will be night time,

She will lie down to you,

Because you did not know how to dream

Trees, horses, stones and birds,

Because you forgot to say,

On the one day of spring:

“Forgive me for not loving you!”

Only you

The earth trembles from me,

The days are no better,

I do not know either beginning or end,

Everything around burned to a crisp.

Oh, angel, where are you going?

Don’t you see I am crying for you?

When I know you’re too far,

Now, in the moment of love

Only you are everywhere,

The most sacred of everyone,

And I sit gently, thinking to myself:

Is it true or did I dream about it?

Pater Noster (Lord’s Prayer)

How long do you suffer till you become an angel? –

Asks the poetess with her sea name

“How many people will suffer from death? –

I ask myself with my flower name.

Oh Lord, send thy rain and fire upon men,

Take our gaze, the deceiving voice and the hearing,

Make us new bodies, without flesh and bones,

For I have tired of so many deceiving souls!

    Our Father who art in Heaven,

   Hallowed be thy name,

    Give us this day our daily bread,

    And lead us not into temptation,

    But deliver us from evil.

A M I N †

Tick tock

I stole the minor key from you

And I put it in my eye –

Tick tock, tick tock…

I stole the minor key from you

And I put it in my heart –

Tick tock, tick tock…- both of us

We stole minor keys from each other

And put them in Heaven,

Among the mysterious stars

When the minor keys met,

The clocks fell from the tree

And the memories about us

Tick tock, tick tock…

Tick tock, tick tock…

You and me – a dream,

Of everything or nothing

Separation

In my chest it is very cold,

I feel the wind blowing through all over me,

It rains outside like in the Biblical Flood,

Do you hear me, beautiful girl, how I cry to you?

Staying gentle in the corner of those who have been left behind,

Dreaming of the moment when we were together,

When one plus one equaled… us,

When Lord looked at us, while holding each other

My mother asking, “Son, what ails you?”

“Who left you out of too much love?

And I pause and going ready for the funeral,

Where no one believes in loneliness

Come with the photo when we swear love,

Come with a flower that smells like you,

Dreaming of the moment when we were both,

When one plus one equaled to us

____________________

The post Contemporary World Literature: Poetry from Romania first appeared on Sindh Courier.