Interlitq publishes Ana Blandiana’s poem “Ar Trebui” (We Should Be) from “Călcâiul vulnerabil” [Achilles’ Heel] (1966), translated from the Romanian by Paul Scott Derrick, a contributor to Issue 9 of Interlitq and Issue 11 of Interlitq and www.interlitq.wordpress.com, and Viorica Patea
We Should Be
We should be born old,
Come wise into the world
Already able to choose our destiny,
Already knowing the pathways that lead from the crossroads of the origin.
Then, it would only be irresponsible to yearn to go ahead.
Afterwards, we’d gradually grow younger,
Come to the gateway of creation mature and strong,
Pass through, and enter into love as adolescents,
Then be children when our children are born.
They’d immediately be older than we are.
They’d teach us to talk; they’d rock us to sleep in a cradle,
And then we’d disappear, getting smaller and smaller,
Like a grape, like a pea, like a grain of wheat . . .
Ar trebui
Ar trebui să ne naştem bătrâni,
Să venim înţelepţi,
Să fim în stare de-a hotărî soarta noastră în lume,
Să ştim din răscrucea primară ce drumuri pornesc
Şi iresponsabil să fie doar dorul de-a merge.
Apoi să ne facem mai tineri, mai tineri, mergând,
Maturi şi puternici s-ajungem la poarta creaţiei,
Să trecem de ea şi-n iubire intrând adolescenţi,
Să fim copii la naşterea fiilor noştri.
Oricum ei ar fi atunci mai bătrâni decât noi,
Ne-ar învăţa să vorbim, ne-ar legăna să dormim,
Noi am dispărea tot mai mult, devenind tot mai mici,
Cât bobul de strugure, cât bobul de mazăre, cât bobul de grâu…
About Ana Blandiana: Poet, essayist, and prose writer, Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 inTimişoara, the city where the 1989 revolt began. She is one of the most significant contemporary Romanian writers, and one of the country’s best-known poets in Europeand beyond. She has authored 46 books, and her works have been translated into 23 languages. The poems translated here all come from her first three poetry collections, Persoana întâia plural [First Person Plural] (1965), Călcâiul vulnerabil [Achilles’ Heel] (1966) and A treia taină [Third Sacrament] (1969), which received the Herder Prize. Her poems were banned in the 1980s by the Ceausescu regime, but they continued to circulate by word of mouth or in clandestine handwritten copies, samizdat. An opponent of the communist regime, after 1989 Blandiana assumed an important role in Romanian public life as president of the “Civic Alliance” and founder of the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Sighet Resistance”. Framing metaphysical thought in a personal and intimate tone, Blandiana’s poems are profound meditations on human fate, otherness/alterity, artistic creation, moral responsibility and love as an absolute inspiration. She has also published literary essays and articles of political analysis and has given lectures and participated in conferences and symposia in a large number of European countries.
About Paul Scott Derrick: Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. His main field of interest is Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in the art and thought of the 20th and 21st centuries. His critical works include: Thinking for a Change: Gravity’s Rainbow and Symptoms of the Paradigm Shift in Occidental Culture (1994) and “We stand before the secret of the world”: Traces along the Pathway of American Romanticism (2003). He has co-edited several critical studies, including: Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, with Viorica Patea (2007); and with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt Publishing, forthcoming). As a translator, he has published bilingual English-Spanish editions of various works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson and most recently, has co-authored with Juan López Gavilán a critical Spanish edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs [La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos] (2008). He has also published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luís Borges, Luís Cernuda and Pablo Neruda, and together with Miguel Teruel, a small selection of Richard Berengarten’s poems in Spanish, Las manos y la luz [Hands and Light] (2008).
About Viorica Patea: Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Her main fields of interest are American Romanticism, Modernism, twentieth-century American poetry, utopian literature, and the short story. She has published books and articles on American poetry and fiction. She is the author of various studies on Emily Dickinson, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); and a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad: El Prefacio de 1855 de Hojas de hierba (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999). She wrote a book and edited the bi-lingual edition on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (La tierra baldía: Ediciones Cátedra, 2005). She has edited various collections of essays, such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2001) and a most recent volume Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first-Century Perspective (Rodopi in press). Together with Paul Derrick, she has coedited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Together with Prof. Dr. Fernando Sánchez Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish Jurnalul fericirii by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Cáceres: Periférica, 2008, 2011). At present she is working on a Spanish and English edition of of Ana Blandiana’s collected poems.
maybe we are born with this knowledge and forget in order to make room for speech and other self-expression other than crying.