Poezii de Mircea Dinescu
(translated by Gabriela Anderson, 2026, copyright protected)
The shipwreck survivor’s message (Mesajul unui naufragiat)
If instead of the sun in the sky
my blinding 18-carat fate were to rise up
all of you would continue at ease
to cultivate instead of the love-thy-neighbor
the carrots for soup
out of arrogance combing your gals with your teeth
out of pride sticking peacock tails on your faults
through the fog of the song you’d fail to see
how I withdraw inside the empty wine bottle
like a message for remote times
waiting for a ship
in this town where the ocean has ceased to exist.
Elegy to the cold trains (Elegie la trenurile reci)
If you asleep were to fall, my love, on the cold railways,
the trains would blush to touch you, around you they’d tiptoe,
huge cotton balls like snowflakes’d be snowing from the heavens,
at drunken feasts of morn’ dew, quadrilles danced on the snow.
An angel too’d be coming from stations of the sainted
your sleep to neatly soften with gentle peacock plumes
and in the worldly stations sequoias would be planted,
in market places people would get free soap balloons.
Your tresses made of sunrays on siberias would be gushing
till snow will end up sizzling even on ostrich heads,
and then in the cold barracks your eyelashes’d be brushing
the tear-stained cheeks of recruits hidden in pillowed hands.
But you, my love, on railways asleep will never fall.
Stained in the ash and chlorine dull trains go and are gone.
And I’ve not known a body of sweet girl not at all.
And then to cry I am starting from pity, all forlorn.
Blues Song (Cântec de inimă albastră)
Remember what I used for names
“Long-legged icon, you”, those days?
Come with a stream or turned to stream,
in me you ran to heaven’s beam
with tongue transformed in whipping tips
I chased small bunnies on your hips
I chased honey-hued hay on your thigh
Perfumes were you, alive was I.
But oh, alas, eye thicket now,
three priests around me pull and bow,
my flesh gives off by now for good
the smell of thin acacia wood,
a plate I’m named by earthen pot,*
love – you, an apple that has rolled.
________________________________________________________
- hint to the Romanian folk saying that a deceased turns to “(clay) pots and pans” = (turned to earth)
Armless (Ciungul)
My arms are aging
faster than me.
I get on a train
and I see them right and left.
I feel hot
and one hand is kindly opening the window.
A fly’s buzzing around me
and the other hand gently slaps my forehead.
I would ask them where they go,
but we’re there already
and I see them getting off together with me.
I tell them “bye”,
But I notice they get on the tram with me,
they get off at the same stop,
they climb the stairs inside the same house
and after we have a three-diners’ dinner
they cuddle catlike
by my side under the blanket.
We too, God, are aging,
faster than You,
we – your restless hands
with which you’re blindingly groping the earth.
And just as the one mutilated in war
feels pain in the fingers abandoned at
Verdun
our absence will torment you on nights
of dreary fall.
Pain-stricken one! Oh, our armless God!
My true love waving by the train (Iubita c-o batistă pe peron)
In older days the Polish cavalry
were trying into tanks to poke their swords.
Gone are such heroes, drones in our day
will turn all heroism into joking words.
The Army’s boss has never served, that’s bad
and I don’t know if we should laugh or cry.
I, now much older than my dad,
an old horse as a colt they’d list me high
and I’ve been waiting to get the draft order soon
to climb on trains to Heavens gone, bye-bye,
to see grandma kerchief in hand, a boon,
the one from high school, Helen Talagai.
Travelling theatre (Teatru ambulant)
The way I was born, God,
red-faced with fury
clamoring in a language unknown to all
charged with lightnings and whimsies like a great actor
and the way I’ll disappear
wobbling and carrying my tray
stage-fright filling me before death
like an amateur on a smalltown stage-plank
the souffleur in the pit of my chest asphyxiated.
The gold wire (Sârma de aur)
Like champagne is exploding your hair,
it gets sipped by the wind of south awe,
when I see ya the piranha from its lair
travels the seas of my sweat-o.
Hip and hop Spainwise will icebergs slide fair,
monkeys on branches of chickpea go,
on a sleigh I will surely take you there
or on a mammoth-butterfly riding low.
Thousands of priests will be chanting the prayer,
as for hunting a kiss I will bow,
thousands of flies starting raids will stare
at my body beloved and raw.
I’ll seem, kissed, the dull beast lying bare,
on its snout a gold wire to show.
Sky clearing (Înseninare)
If you’d sleep, your door open wide,
the sea would light up like a stage
and swimming we’d fall to old age
to undecisive shores without guide.
The imprint of flesh wants the silt,
from mists the acacias are whistling,
allow me to amble one morning
nude through your scent without guilt.
And you’ll see how like opening flowers
infinity will split up a gap,
the forbidden fruit’s ray will go up
through blood’s clouds to pierce for peace hours.
Love Song to the Taper Candle’s Melting (Cântec de dragoste la topitul lumânării)
The Lambs’ Snow* time may kill some lambs,
but rams are cuddling horns on meadows green
as if their sheep wore earrings and in dance
crazed wits would fall in love with the new sheen.
February’s fainted now over the fields
spiders have come alive in window sills
and even I, though old and of odd wits,
I’d take for wife a girl no dowry-frills,
so people could laugh that when at my age
while I climb rooftops death could do step-theft,
my thoughts of women still go out of cage
though in the beehive only wax is left.
Well, do rejoice that you’ve got much it seems
a brand new scented candle still to carve
so with it round your neck to have sweet dreams
how for your sake a girl melted in love.
___________________________________________________
* Lamb’s Snow time = In Romania, an early year period of frost during which only the strongest lambs survive.
Walls (Ziduri)
Foolish illusion:
to surround yourself with walls
and suddenly feel
so free.
Endless Sunday (Duminica fără sfârșit)
Raise up three absurd masts on me tonight
I am the neighborhood’s transatlantic
I am the foggy dog blinded by headlight
whom bravemen would strike with stones
whom drunkards would seek to kiss
and hooligans would lure with ham.
Down here boredom plays the ocean’s role
and the undocumented and cold-shriveled god
gets killed by all the common sense at dawn,
down here furtive lovers lock themselves up as in cans
here the elders stand impaled in the walls
here only my cough turns out candid
here the rumor’s zephyr carries in
a live-your-life mood riding over dredges:
the soccer game unsettles families
and the pathephon’s bellow has freedom
and spring seems to knock on windows
with its green fly fingertips …
After all, I doubt even you
tilI touch you with my bitter lips.
Avalanche (Avalanșa)
On November 11 at 9 in the morning
I had a date with a young snow avalanche
in Himalaya
on a sweetest slope.
What love at first sight it’d have been,
but before my passport was issued
before I declared my relatives
before I packed up
before I bought a ticket
before the detectors smelled me,
by a quarter past 9
offended and hysterical
the avalanche eloped down the valley a bit, with a Greekman and two Japanese guys…
Dismantle, God, the institutions of sadness, these institutions that fight against love
against love and death.
from About guilt you’re asking me? (De vinovăție mă-ntrebi?)
(…………..)
Me, out of guilt I invented my aura,
out of despair the levitation, the circus,
I didn’t find it easy to tread on waters,
instead, with three fish a crowd I fed
for, doubtlessly, not in their stomachs
did their hunger dwell, but in their hearing.
And the fall season of the Empire was coming (the barbarians were hollering
and in Rome there was a shedding of pine trees and courtesans)
and to the youths, to my naïve friends,
I showed the hole that had just been broken into provincial towns
through which they furtively escaped to death.
Back then I believed in
or imagined the existence
in man
of a time-worn clockwork that
somehow one could turn to make it sing.
The Artist’s Blessed Sleep (Binecuvîntatul somn al artistului)
Between the rumble of the upbeat-mood works
And the perilous gratuity theory
Reach out a hand to the verse book
And shave yourselves cheaply
Feed on its eateable covers at lunchtime
Sprinkle some pages at the redbeet root
Till it blushes
And for the poet who has no sleeping place
Make a fast bed in the rifle barrel:
„it won’t rain in there, dearest,
No worries
The rifle cock will wake you up at dawn.”
A small ceremony for the burial of a submarine from the interwar period (Mică ceremonie la îngroparea unui submarin dintre cele două războaie)
Right from birth
I put my whimper
in the service of artists wiped out through starvation.
Inside a bowl of spirits
I could have turned my back on all of you forever
but I don’t know on which occult paths
doubt plodded along behind me
and here I am today
like the fool on the ship praying
“Give me, God, a ship”
or like a wonder godmother
ready to pull the dockworker out of the priest
without any pains.
With the thread from Ariadna’s stocking in hand
I really disappear in a heavy soldier-coat
looking at the world through my boots
like through two periscopes in reverse.
The discovery of America (Descoperirea Americii)
Give yourself one more chance Columbus of trash
reader in beetles
at the remaking of the world
be the serene witness, you,
that
a lemon a bottle a shoe a trumpet
a knife a can a potato a journal
and a watermelon shell
are not the same as:
a watermellon shell sailing through the bosphorus
of ants
a journal that lost its memory
a potato with flimsy socks
a can rusting under the child’s weeping
a knife excomunicated between the dope and the Pope
a trumpet growing old at a canal mouth
a shoe with a hole with a view to the sea
a bottle emptied of meaning
a hysterical lemon…
Rented sun (Soare închiriat)
I am an oil spot on the high windows
on your daily starched life
neither force nor rain will make me go away
just as the coins in the beggar’s pocket
attract lightening
among your silvery
I’ll slip in
the rat killed in the guards’ garden
on the watermelon shell you’ll discover
a poem nail-scratched on purpose
and here is a crack in the wall
through which one of your daughters will elope with the poor student
but you’re retiring under the cheaply rented sun celebrating your heartburns
let him bark, you’ll say,
let him bark, don’t even throw him as in the old days a bone
and carefree you’re lounging under the rays
of my sparkling fangs.
from Nameless (Anonim)
Rather than sweeten with my art your tea, still,
(oh, heart in infant’s garb and without guards)
better, tonight, drunk, with a straw I will
suck up the moon and jump down on glass shards.
‘cause, though nameless as a needle in haystack
with mole blood running hidden in my veins,
I would invent a multi-storey-woman plan to back
with stores of sugar down in the basement,
my love to pull the countries out of crisis,
my kiss pumped higher up to the North Pole
to pull the cords and plug in stoves of ices
so cancer of a heart attack could fall,
to whip up the whole town over the low field
like a heretical horse-carried tram in flee,
to your saddling game I’m here to still yield,
but don’t you ask me to give art for tea.
from The Ballad of the Three Sprinklings
I had been dying to see you even before
your birth in the small town of antique fame,
a photograph spotted you in his store,
Acsinthe, if I’m not wrong, a weird name,
as in your mother’s womb you were asleep
right in the window of that photograph
a shelf covered in cards that made one weep
which he was daily dusting, never tough.
And your mom in her calico plain dress
illuminating she was, doubt no more,
as if a lamp-with-child the superb lass,
and I guessed right away that flame you were.
(…)
from Song of the Weary Gold Seeker (Cântecul obositului căutător de aur)
Today I won’t pull out of sleeves my aces
be they high-browed, nor a ruddy-faced priest,
But I’ll be willingly hunted by the faces
of savages who hide in pale spurge the’r fist.
Let them take out in a frenzy my bead-string
and tear off the flask from ‘round my neck,
in whicker hut now will I let them fling
me like a god who gives off smells of heck.
‘Cause too long did I knead gold with my boot,
too much I sailed on a stream of tough drink,
I yearn for blooms on my chest of mint shoot,
and that death lure me in a flirting link.
(….)
A song of God-forgive-me (Cântec de Doamne-iartă)
God forgive, I’ve laughed so much
death no rosin had in touch,
running his bow, bro, in nags
on out-of-tune strings of hags.
Screechy, screechy, screechy, screechy,
we’ve no bread, its bran tastes itchy,
whirr and whirr and whirr and whirr,
we’ve no sheep, bears there are.
Alas cousin, alas bro,
Nail of gold in woman, lo,
I beat at night as in coffin
and I can’t go out a-ploughin,’
irons bark – if I’m not dead
I’ll plough her skirt over head.
Screechy, screechy, screechy, screechy,
we’ve no bread, its bran tastes itchy,
whirr and whirr and whirr and whirr,
we’ve no sheep, bears there are.
from Exile (Exil)
Potatos in Marmatia have sprung in bloom
and y’all have just decided to go south?
when the sky’s head-in-clouds, loose and uncouth?
when the laments and nation are one soon?
(….)
from Song of an extinguished lamp (Cantec de lampa stinsa)
The jails got open doors and beams,
but no one got out for new goals,
some even hung themselves to dreams,
others buried themselves in walls.
(….)