Apollodorus the Loose-tongued and the Priests

Ofelia Prodan


               to Günter Grass

Apollodorus' voice is divine
he barely utters two, three fractions
of a word and wonders come to pass

the only thing is, Apollodorus is loose-tongued
and, at the rate he is talking,
wonders occur on a permanent basis

in the land Apollodorus comes from
people got used to those wonders to such an extent
they can't tell apart any more
wonders from everyday things.

the priests are at the end of their tethers
they convene non-stop councils
and hold heated debates on the matter
until they reach the conclusion
that the best they can do
is cut off
Apollodorus' tongue from the root

they take along a butcher's knife
and in the dead of the night tiptoe
into the house of Apollodorus who sleeps like a babe

they tie his hands behind his back
Apollodorus wakes up and struggles to scream
as if on cue, a priest grabs up his tongue
lops it off, drops it into a small sack

the tongue writhes and wriggles in pain
it essays to speak, speak it does
from inside the small sack and wonders occur all over again

without a moment's hesitation the priests light up a pyre
they take out the tongue from the sack, cast it into the flames
and then watch contently as the tongue turns to ashes

now the priests and the rest of the people all wait
for a wonder no matter how small
but in vain—Apollodorus is as mute as a fish


translated from the Romanian by Florin Bican

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Ofelia Prodan (b. 1976) has published seven books, including The Elephant in My Bed (2007), which received the Grand Ion Vinea Award as well as the debut award of the Bucharest Writers' Association, and Psychoroulette (2008), which won the George Coşbuc Special Poetry Prize at the National Poetry Festival. Her most recent book, Pathfinder (2012), received the Ion Minulescu National Prize. She was awarded first place for foreign poetry in the International Contest of Poetry and Prose held by the Napoli Cultural Classic Association in 2013. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English, French, Hungarian, and most recently, Dutch. She is a member of the Romanian Writers' Union and the Romanian PEN Center.

Florin Bican studied English at the University of Bucharest where he became a compulsive translator of Romanian literature. The resulting translations have been published in Britain, Ireland, the United States, Singapore, Germany, and Romania. His translations from English into Romanian include Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark and T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. When not translating, Florin Bican works on subversive children literature. His first volume of poetry, A Slob's Treasury of Verse (2007), is a collection of politically incorrect cautionary rhymes. A second volume in the same vein, The Recyclopedia of Nonsense Rhyming Tales, was published in 2013. Bican's work in progress, Torpid Tropics, is an attempt at cautionary prose and is just as politically incorrect. In 2009 he edited and contributed to The Cook-a-Book Pancyclopedia of Texts and Images, an anthology of Romanian children's literature. Between 2006 and 2012 Florin Bican was in charge of the Romanian Cultural Institute program, Translators in the Making, training foreign translators of Romanian literature.