You know, men are Moscows ruined by vodka and carelessness
sold sub rosa,
hollowed birches into which the black fire stoker blew,
the Siberian with a shovel growing out of his strength's limb,
the ashes of paradise and the zodiacs of small countries carried
in their hearts
by the immortal conveyor belts of red capitalism.
Today when I walked home devoid of life I heard my blood
shriek at me:
old buddy, must it be so hard for a man to stay on his feet?
Blood more than six feet high and he still wants to grow.
I think I'm talking to myself like the little bell
of a blind mule on its right temple,
the clouds above me keep telling me something I don't understand
(poor poets are greedy?),
as if asking me to stop
when I make love to a woman who's not here.
Wait for her to show up.
I open the door—no one there.
I sit on the floor in my room and notice an enormous buffalo
spraddled on my clean books.
This year his green dung will make people happy as well as
the stock exchange. One day, the black fire stoker will gather us up
with his hard shovel.
I've never been to Siberia but I swear that I know
someone there.
The Black Fire Stoker
Nicolae Coande
translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea
Listen to the poem read in the original Romanian by the author:
Nicolae Coande (born 1962 in Osica de Sus, Romania) has published eight collections of poetry in Romanian: On the Edge (1995); Fincler (1997); The Dead-End Road Named Homer (2002); Folfa (2003); Wind, Tobacco & Alcohol (2008); The Woman that I Write About (2010); VorbaIago (2012); and Persona (2013). He has also published four collections of essays, the most recent of which is Romanian Intellectuals and the King's Court (2011). He has received several awards for his poetry from the Writers' Union of Romania. His work has been included in the anthologies Gefährliche Serpentinen – Rumänische Lyrik der Gegenwart (Druckhaus Verlag, Berlin, 1998), edited by Dieter Schlesak; Of Gentle Wolves (Calypso Editions, New York, 2011), translated and edited by Martin Woodside; and The Vanishing Point that Whistles (Talisman Press, USA, 2011), edited by Paul-Doru Mugur, Adam Sorkin, and Claudia Serea.
Adam J. Sorkin has published more than fifty books of translation. His work has won the 2005 Poetry Society Prize for European Poetry Translation as well as the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Award, the Kenneth Rexroth Memorial Translation Prize, the Ioan Flora Prize for Poetry Translation, and the Poesis Translation Prize, among others. His most recent publications include A Sharp Double-Edged Luxury Object by Rodica Draghincescu (Červená Barva, 2014), translated with Antuza Genescu; Gold and Ivy/Aur și iederă by George Vulturescu (Eikon, 2014), translated with Olimpia Iacob; The Starry Womb by Mihail Gălățanu (Diálogos, 2014), translated with Petru Iamandi and the author; and The Book of Anger by Marta Petreu (Diálogos, 2014), translated with Christina Zarifopol-Illias and Liviu Bleoca. His translation of Floarea Țuțuianu’s Syllables of Flesh is forthcoming from Plamen Press.
Claudia Serea is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in Field, New Letters, 5 a.m., Meridian, Gravel, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. An eight-time Pushcart Prize and four-time Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of Angels & Beasts (Phoenicia Publishing, 2012), A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky (8th House Publishing, 2013), To Part Is to Die a Little (Cervena Barva Press, 2015), and Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone Books, 2016). Serea co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles: an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011) for which she received a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute. Serea also translated Adina Dabija’s award-winning Beautybeast (Northshore Press, 2012) from the Romanian. Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month and she co-hosts The Williams Poetry Readings in Rutherford, NJ. Her latest project is Twoxism, a poetry-photography collaboration blog.
