Emily’s Eyes over Amherst
This night doesn’t know the greetings and introductions
This night with little robots and lasers, with remote-control toy cars
This night with hands dirty with lye
This night that throws everything in your face
This night kidnaps hitchhikers and locks them in an attic
with stuffed animals and clowns
This night peeks at the drafts of a poet who doesn’t believe anymore
This night, like a long allegory
This night we settle old disagreements, pull down the blinds, close the till
This night enthusiastically watches the election of a new pope from the crowd
This night when white tigers dream of the windup bird
This night, without tongue and eyes, a skull from which something’s leaking
This night with its milky makeup remover, with its damn straps
This night rocks you, honey-tongued, purrs near you, pushes itself into
your heart
This night plays with you nicely and leaves you in a pool of blood
This night smokes despite the fire hazard sign
This night, choked with nerves like a debutante
This night will unplug a few souls
This night, coming out of the gates of the Machine, ready to sacrifice itself
for a noble cause
This night, Lace and Extermination
This night, carved in wood
This night, the room and the distance, the bodies of silence around us
This night, smelling like dough and fresh paint
This night bread and flesh are black like in a poem by Antonio Gamoneda
This night can’t take a joke when it comes to love
This night is a communist with strong breasts and unattainable ideals
This night disarms nuclear warheads
This night sinks the oil rigs and buries them at low depths
This night scares the life out of those who believe imagination doesn’t
This night, with big burned-out stars like Emily’s eyes over Amherst
Untitled
Beyond this night
Beyond its reptilian light
Beyond pills as big as
The wheels of an allegorical parade wagon
Beyond crying avalanches revolutions
Beyond cathedrals and mosques
Beyond the will for technology—
Someone’s affection,
Paralyzing like a kick in the balls,
The outrageous song of the beggar
at the entrance to the subway
When you have no hope you have no body
As if you’d head downtown
With a piece of marble in your mouth
The bottomless pit in others
Windup happiness
When you have no hope you have no body
When you have no hope you have no body
On this run-down planet,
Almost barren.
from Masters of a Dying Art
Claudiu Komartin
translated from the Romanian by Diana Manole
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Claudiu Komartin is a passionate cultural activist, whose themes range from from love, anxiety, and parenthood to acute sociopolitical issues, while his style is defined by combining theoretical concepts with street slang, playing on a word’s multiple meanings in the same line, and sometimes using multiple speakers within the same poem.
To recreate his puns and metaphors in English often feels like detective work and requires hours, even days of reflection, hoping for a eureka moment. Slang references to recreational drugs have forced me to educate myself on the topic, first in Romanian, then in English. Most of all, however, Komartin’s work is defined by a special kind of feverish irony, which intellectually alienates and emotionally involves the reader. “Emily’s Eyes over Amherst” and “[Beyond this night]” are no exception.
Knowing that the first poem’s speaker is Emily Dickinson, looking over her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, I’ve done my best to connect to Komartin’s anachronistic imagining in the twentieth century (with robots, lasers, and postcommunism) to Dickinson's town of the nineteenth century. One of the most difficult challenges has been translating the repetition that structures both “Emily’s Eyes over Amherst” and “[Beyond this night]” and gives them a litany-like rhythm and mood.
My translations of Komartin's poems have recently been published in The Arkansas International, Columbia Journal, and Washington Square Review; we’re now very happy that they’ve also found a home in Asymptote, a magazine we both admire. I look forward to wrestling again with his complex word choices and puns in the future.
To recreate his puns and metaphors in English often feels like detective work and requires hours, even days of reflection, hoping for a eureka moment. Slang references to recreational drugs have forced me to educate myself on the topic, first in Romanian, then in English. Most of all, however, Komartin’s work is defined by a special kind of feverish irony, which intellectually alienates and emotionally involves the reader. “Emily’s Eyes over Amherst” and “[Beyond this night]” are no exception.
Knowing that the first poem’s speaker is Emily Dickinson, looking over her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, I’ve done my best to connect to Komartin’s anachronistic imagining in the twentieth century (with robots, lasers, and postcommunism) to Dickinson's town of the nineteenth century. One of the most difficult challenges has been translating the repetition that structures both “Emily’s Eyes over Amherst” and “[Beyond this night]” and gives them a litany-like rhythm and mood.
My translations of Komartin's poems have recently been published in The Arkansas International, Columbia Journal, and Washington Square Review; we’re now very happy that they’ve also found a home in Asymptote, a magazine we both admire. I look forward to wrestling again with his complex word choices and puns in the future.
Claudiu Komartin is an award-winning Romanian poet, author of five collections and the anthology Maeștrii unei arte muribunde (Masters of a Dying Art, 2017), which earned the Matei Brâncoveanu Award in Literature. His books have been translated into German, Serbian, Turkish, and Bulgarian, while his readings have taken him all around the world, from Europe and the UK to Israel, South Korea, and the the United States. Komartin is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Poesis International literary magazine.
Diana Manole is a Romanian-Canadian award-winning scholar, writer, and literary translator. Praying to a Landed-Immigrant God, her seventh collection of poems, will be published in a Romanian/English edition by Grey Borders Books in 2020.
