Traduceri poetice (vol. 1) [6]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Traduceri poetice
(vol. 1)
*
Ligia Keșișian[1], Climate and punishment
My son tells me –
NASA announced that in thirty years
we won’t be able to live
on this earth anymore,
it’ll definitely not make it to forty.
He asks me how you live
when you know you won’t live to be old.
He tells me I won’t have any grandchildren.
That would mean they would have
a much too short life
and it wouldn’t be fair to anyone.
I look at him guilty
because I too consumed plastic,
wasted electricity.
I have made a child who,
when he reaches my age,
no one will ask him
where you see yourself in five years,
who won’t have to worry about
the pension plan,
dementia and Alzheimer’s.
My son is nine years old
and he asks me what we are going to do
with the thirty we have left.
I tell him about the children
in Artsakh or Afghanistan,
and those thirty years of probable existence
begin to seem like a luxury.
I hug him –
a ball of helplessness
and noxiousnesses
takes our breath away.
Robert Șerban[2], Ars poetica
Poetry is the crazy fly that
no matter how loud it buzzes when it sees it,
no matter how green it turns when it feels it,
no matter how many circles it makes in flight,
no matter how close it gets to it,
no matter how feverishly it rubs its legs,
no matter how much it stretches its proboscis
it never eats
shit.
Codruța Simina[3], The poem for my daughter
Pay attention to the one who screamed so loudly
one day that the next day everyone spoke like him
– he is the one who defines the battle surface!
Parents are not equipped with the power
to transmit to their children,
while they are alive,
all the love they bear them.
There’s something wild
and bringer of fury in being
mother-father.
Poems don’t go
there very often either.
Neither do we.
The poems are my attempts
not to lie to you,
not even in time,
when I will become a voice
in your head.
I would do anything
to be a gentle voice,
your gentle voice.
I imagine that every parent sees
in their child this incredible reserve of beauty,
spread out into possible worlds.
Then,
speechless in the face of this evidence,
she repeated in bewilderment:
Are you hungry, mommy’s love?
Just clean your room and that’s it!
She does not save him
with the tears of this wonderful love.
Don’t call him the groin, the monster of fear!
May you never die, mommy’s love!
And this is perhaps the greatest betrayal
I leave you with:
the loneliness with the monster.
Here no one had parents and:
the monster diminishes
when you listen to the gentle voice.
Rebeca Marchiș[4], Counterpoint
I was a child, a crocodile and a doll;
an angel and a glove.
Now I’m a poorly thought-out,
terribly dynamic mosaic.
(„diver, director or cosmonaut”)
For you I am a lighthouse perhaps babylonian,
however, far placed.
For her I am a mirror, scratched, rust-colored.
I look for myself in the fields,
through raw or dry grass,
full of dandelions,
to walk the babyhood on my back once more.
What would it be like to find myself
as a child on the couch,
sitting in an old chair,
like grandma had in the garden?
Blowing like the bird
and with the gaze all gentle.
But I only see myself when I dance,
when I paint and when I create,
when I look into your eyes,
because your gaze always
returns to me
(hopefully without the evil eye).
When I feel myself popping,
but peacefully,
like a soap bubble,
without grotesque earthquakes,
just with the wind on which I float.
Smells, breezes and leaves carry me
with them without refusing me.
I remember that I am alive
and that everything in the world
is human.
[1] Am tradus poemul de aici:
https://revistavatra.org/2025/10/30/parada-debutantilor-ii/#more-15106.
[2] Am tradus poemul de aici:
https://revistavatra.org/2025/09/01/robert-serban-ars-poetica/.
[3] Am tradus poemul de aici:
https://www.scena9.ro/article/tot-ce-i-suav-produce-taieturi-codruta-simina-fragment-carte.
[4] L-am tradus de aici: https://revistaechinox.ro/2025/08/rebeca-marchis-poeme/.