MiPO 2005

GUEST EDITOR GABRIEL GUDDING ~THE STRANGE CALL
VOLUME 19, ISSUE 3 ISSN 1543-6063

The Carnation’s Misfortunes
by Gherasim Luca

The next day the ocean seemed to me even more enrapturing than an operating table. With frowning locks flung over my shoulders, this outmoded mantle from which I never separate, I board this raft without first forgetting to abandon on the shore the two oars, futile to my thirst for carnations, to my hunger to have been tenebrity. Prone on my spine with my stalking dog supine upon my lungs, I stare nostalgically into the sky, enumerating to the thousands the stars, the moon, the wolf’s lair, the vermilion, the Danube, the plague, etc. Over my brow creeps the slashing lip of a saber and two globules of plasma trickle on my cheek recalling the illustrious internal episodes which I am about to intersect like the mysteries of a circus. Monocle fitted to my eyeball, mustache twisting with panache, I stride forth, reckless and viraginous, spellbound and entrancing, slurping with cheeks inflated this magnificent viperous broth which is our internal life. You are a fawn stalked by the swift hunter within me, yes, you! the most enrapturing idol I ever pursued, you who transmutes the macrocosm into the unsurpassed trope of our internal murmur. With temples glued one to the other and both glued to a marble statue, we roam across a palpating byway and our steps disinter cities, rivers, hawks.

I hoist you on my humerus as you would hoist a horseman and with palms lifted above the eyelashes in the mimick of eaves I spy on the sap surging upwards in the distant trees, murder a bird in flight, darken the horizon. Your lashes transmute into a pillow of locks that I plunge my fingers into all the way up to the elbow joints as I might bathe them in a cauldron of plasma and haul out an armorial helmet missing only the skullcap. O! enrapturing idol with the unruffled breath of escargot, with the clamor of bones malefic like a foreshortened fright, I ferry you in my arms like a cauldron for bathing cobras. How tender are the unconcealed symbols and how many tears I would shed over the tiny superstitions misplaced in tiny provincial towns if my eyeball didn’t boast of a retina that could spin an image about nine (or even ninety-nine) revolutions. A limestone retina where they dump empty tuna cans left behind by negligent tourists. Inebriated to vertigo by the spin of this beguiling costume drama, where the entrancing and the odious, tact and impudence, transgression and atonement assemble in your smirk, the retina transmutes into a green mustang with mirroring knees. I myself a mirror, a horseshoe mirror, and your trotting canter appears to be perused across the glowing surface of a mountain lake. Massive rocks engorge us at the precise instant I tether my ascot. O, the tenderness of unconcealed symbols, o! o! O, my idol, o! the unconcealed symbol of this idol, the symbol’s symbol inflaming reality’s realities while the unreal, entrancing as a vampire, beckons me with secret ciphers, from without and within, with a gloved hand or merely with her skeleton.

Mamia, you’ll never understand

by Tristan Tzara

Mamia, you’ll never understand

I sing the soul that doesn’t exist

Your breasts are flowers minus the pots

Your heart a handkerchief

And pricks the raspberry that tastes like milk

The blouse you wrap the ripe apricots with

Hey baby, rock me, cuddle me

The one I was to marry up and died

Ask me who she was

Then tell me slowly, precisely when you’re going away

I’ll buy you earrings unconditionally

From a Jewish jeweler

You showed up like a flower garden in my soul

Interior of a metal shop

Mamia, you’ll never understand!

But it’s a wonderful thing when you’re in a poem

{Translated from the Romanian by Julian Semilian & Sanda Agalidi}

poem a la mode

by Tristan Tzara

poem a la mode, how should we spend our lives — question —

i am bored, i am the autumn tilled earth in the country

and literature is the worm munching its way through the subterranean road

water flows through it so we can grow goods in the summer

photo glued with dust to the piano and afterwards found alive

in the provinces where parents handed out education

for the conservation of faith — believed it was better to come

to the big city with its great soirees toward the displacement of conscience

my soul: woman a la mode who’ll sleep with anyone

the girls aren’t true and neither are the violins

ballerinas twisted flowers ballerinas upside down

show us secrets stripped of their cotton ball leaves

on stage silence naked woman, the house uneasy, but not even one

honest thought to make you hurt, not even an actor to die.

the black in the moon swoops down (delicious) like the sparrow on the violin

and if you want my darling if you want i’ll pay you for a whim

{The Tzara translations are dedicated to Jerry Rothenberg, man of light and reassuring presence.}

Vacationing Vultures

by Gellu Naum

In August when the sky fills up with bulls

a vulture flies down to the neighborhood

and calls from the nearest telephone to say he’s coming to see me

admirable pyromaniac plagued by arson

black serenity on his feathers

arrives troubled by the prophecy of certain flames

cartesian vulture graduate of some rough schools

does not easily reconcile himself to my silences

but knows we bear the same sign under our eyelids

and discerns the same gold on our knees

we man and bird resting on two easy chairs

chat long and leisurely

while my lover with peaceful gestures reawakens

the quickening archetype of Night

Certainly I could tell him that I sank a shaft into the fog

and that the otter called my name again last night

I could show him the fourth sign of the mole and

the lucid reply of the stinging nettles

but my spaces will likely seem to him an unknown island

that is why he leisurely stirs an ignited wing

and takes refuge in the strict geometry of restlessness

the two of us resting on two easy chairs chat long and leisurely

outside the night rusts my dogs

Julian
Semilian

Julian Semilian is a poet, translator, novelist and filmmaker. He was born in Romania and presently teaches film editing and serves as the Chair of the Editing and Sound Department at the North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking, after a twenty-four year career as a film editor in Hollywood where he has worked on more than 50 movies and TV shows. Semilian is a member of PEN America. He has published three books: A Spy In Amnesia, novel, from Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York, Paul Celan's Romanian Poems, translation, Green Integer Transgender Organ Grinder, poems, Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York. Recently he translated Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu, for New Directions Press (fall 2005). His translation of Gherasim Luca's The Inventor Of Love will be out later this year from Green Integer. His new novel, Osiris With A Trombone Across The Seam Of Insubstance will be out this year from Spuyten Duyvil Press.

Among the published poets translated by Semilian are: Paul Celan, Gellu Naum, Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Fondane, Stefan Augustin Doinas, Tudor Arghezi, Urmuz, Gherasim Luca, Ilarie Voronca, Mircea Cartarescu. in such magazines as: Exquisite Corpse, Suitcase, Arshile, World Letter, Mr. Knife & Miss Fork, Ribbot, Transcendental Friend, Syllogism, Callaloo, Sun & Moon Kenning Review, Trepan, Urvox, LACMA and MOMA catalogues containing writings by the Romanian avant-garde. The October 2004 issue of Words Without Borders contains Semilian's translations of current Romanian literature. As a poet, Semilian has published in magazines such as: Exquisite Corpse, Suitcase, Arshile, Callaloo, World Letter, Syllogism, Trepan, Romania Libera, Vatra (Romania. His column "The Skeuromorph Detective" apears regularly in the Exquisite Corpse.

Tristan Tzara needs no introduction. One of the principal founders of Dadaism, he later became one of the seminal forces of the Surrealist group in Paris. The two poems chosen here are from his early pre-Dada poems, written when Tzara was a teen, and which were later collected in Romania under the title of Primele Poeme (First Poems).

Gherasim Luca (1913-1994) was, along with Gellu Naum, one of the principal poets of the Romanian surrealism. He moved to Paris in 1952 where he lived till 1994, when, following a great tradition of Romanian poets, he leaped in the Seine. Luca was the first to introduce the concept of "Anti-Oedipus", which was later appropriated by Deleuze and Guattari. His suicide note read: "There is no room left for the poet in this world." we hope to prove him wrong.

Gellu Naum (1915-2001). One of the seminal forces of Romanian surrealism and the only major poetic force who chose not to leave Romania in order not to be forced to write in a language other than Romanian. From 1950 till 1970 he was not allowed to publish and lived from translations (Jules Verne, Rene Char, Henri Michaux). After 1989 all his poems and prose were collected and he finally received his well-deserved recognition.