For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Asymptote remembers the life and work of acclaimed Romanian poet C.D. Zeletin. The three selections below exemplify Zeletin’s prosodic brilliance and his masterful juxtaposition of nature with emotional memory.
Translator and our own Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon honours the late poet:
“C.D. Zeletin, born Constantin Dimoftache (1935 – 2020), was a Romanian poet, essayist, translator, and medic. He was a professor of biophysics at Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest. He published forty books during his lifetime, including translations of Michelangelo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine into Romanian (among many others), as well as his own poetry. He was awarded a series of international prizes for his work, and was decorated with the Order of Cultural Merit by the Romanian state. Zeletin died on February 18, 2020, exactly one year after we published a story on his work. We mourn his loss with immense regret.”
It’s no longer enough for the soul
It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say just: you, you, you, and you,
so it seems to me, in these strange timely spheres,
that in you I enumerate my hours and my years,
and you, from my ever weaker hesitation
grow of yourself an independent incarnation.
We find Elysium in each other,
It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.
To left and right, look up or down
you move, I move, we live without duration,
the sunbaked sweetness of stagnation . . .
Our lives braid into one another—a rope for a maroon
strewn out between the frigate and pontoon,
through which there is no chance in storms
to hide our grain of sand’s small form.
By memory we rise and fall at helm,
encountering the venom of the same realm,
of pleasure locked in a kiss,
as butterflies over a flower’s deep abyss.
It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say: you, you, you, and you . . .
At the magic ravine
I race back
to the magic ravine
with the soles I wore in childhood,
after millennia has fecundated
weed with weed . . .
Ah, the carious iconostasis
of shells and slugs’ bodies
trapped in the familiar perfume
of time, dizzy in a spindle!
The earth has frozen like my heart
at the news of Mama’s death.
For a moment, it strangles the grass
until its weight gives way.
Beneath the wild blue lucerne,
the stratum grows more and more drastic,
past the Getic alluvium
to Sarmatic smoke . . .
Summer crowns the ravine’s temple
with acacias, castors, and with danewort,
a spark spurted from my eye
illuminating the darkness with pink.
I keep putting off looking, I keep putting off
the gash in the body of life,
as in sacred meadows a pagan
lifts his hawk only in jest.
I keep putting off, putting off looking
at the slim line of water in the chasm . . .
I know it all—a human talent,
but the core of it all evades me.
I return to the magic ravine to wander, sing
of what my guardian angel has lost:
a godly flute note
and gazes that don’t bring pain . . .
Hesitation
The swimmer
stands straight before the dispassionate sun.
Water blankets over twilight’s glimmer,
a deck
stretching from infinity to his feet.
Carrying his contours, the sea palpitates,
wishing him towards tender valences:
the body, straight, total,
defeats cataleptic water
in silence
and stillness.
The swimmer does not jump.
Hot terror descends within her,
Cold decision rises within him.
Death lasts . . . forever.
The swimmer does not jump,
the sea sobs and water
gives rapid birth
to tens of thousands
of eyes.
One severe sigh,
just the wings and mouth of a seagull,
a lash fallen from the immense eye,
a scream for a fissure, to cull
life,
the wounded sky . . .
Translated from the Romanian by Andreea Iulia Scridon
Andreea Iulia Scridon is a Romanian-American writer and translator. She studied Comparative Literature at King’s College London and is currently studying Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. She is assistant editor at Asymptote Journal, the Oxford Review of Books, and E Ratio Poetry Journal. Her translations of the short stories of I.D. Sîrbu are forthcoming with AB Press.
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