Translated from the French by Luke Hankins
alone under the shifting vault
and the mauve of a passing thought am I this body struggling with itself next to me the world at hand the twitch of a mouth about to speak as one speaks in the fallen evening with the angels : I’ve grown quiet don’t want to sleep at the price of a day and the one who carries the lamp his steps this violence in the throat the yes the no I cover myself in sounds and I walk
from Journal with Closed Eyes
If I don’t describe things precisely, no one will read them. The dogs barked the whole night. This is my distant childhood. We had to cross a river, someone took me in their arms. The yellow lampshade in the corner of the room and the barking dogs. When they stop barking I hear echoes. I stuff my head into the pillow, but I still hear them. The deserted streets of sleep. Tonight my father gets up, totters around in his tomb, raises a sickly arm and closes the window. - As soon as I bought a notebook I was sure that I’d fill it. The first page was already the last. Time hurries me onward. It speeds up. There are still a few minutes and I have to get to the station, cross the streets and the waiting room, the sleeping bodies with open mouths, the dirty benches and the breathing full of weariness and alcohol. It’s written in my destiny that I must pass this place, and the hours, without respite, without reason, shuffle past. Remember, a certain month of that year, a certain day of that month, on the quay . . . If I had at least left . . . - You can rearrange these pages. There is no order, no sequence. You can erase lines, add others, switch out the events. It’s up to you. I won’t respond to you anymore. Too busy staying silent. I would have liked to have spoken to you about my life but I don’t feel up to it. What I say is what I want you to know, and you don’t want even that. For some time everything’s been out of place, and things have never gone back where they belong. I won’t respond to you anymore because I’ve forgotten the taste of snow. Each winter it snows less and less. - I live in an unknown village. You can smell salt and seaweed here, but you can’t see the sea. The more I look for it, the more elusive it becomes. A warm breeze blows and the men, in shirtsleeves, build dams. Some days pass more quickly than others, and there are few women. You can’t tell the color of their eyes. I want to plant trees—I bought a shovel—but they won’t let me do it. There are strict rules and streets with no address. Dogs eat one another. I seem to catch glimpses of someone signaling me with a motion of their hand. To get here, I often take the six o’clock train. I rarely return.
interior
I wake in my own body and then in the other waking beside me jealous that I stirred first wall of sounds : barricade the night crack language in half the earth clutches the void what’s left of it . . . I stretch out on the beach no wave carries me away as the day we’re still talking about approaches . . .
what life on earth is about
in the garden among the leaves have the birds gone away? where is this noise at the bottom of the ocean coming from this avalanche of human forms? enough? of course not, it’s starting again the empire is drowning they’re hanging innocents and it’s up to the wind to listen to their cries to soften their souls
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu was born in Romania and left the country in 1983, at the height of the communist regime. She holds a PhD in French Language & Literature, and she was a professor of French at Loyola University and Northwestern University for many years. Writing poetry in three languages, she has published numerous books in the United States, France, Belgium, and Romania. Radulescu’s French books have received several awards, including the Grand Prix de Poésie Noël-Henri Villard and the Prix Amélie Murat. Her latest book of original English-language poetry is I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems (Orison Books, USA, 2015). She lives in Chicago.
Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and a collection of essays, The Work of Creation: Selected Prose. He is also the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. A collection of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, is forthcoming from Seagull Books.
World Poetry Review 