A Kind of World We Live in Somehow
Written by Marius Chelaru
Translated from the Romanian by Olimpia Iacob and Jim Kacian
Narrated by Bill Wolak
Romania
For those who flow
like a water of birds between past and future
the people were like some birds
with branches for hands and cut wings
so that they can fly
some people try on words
as if clothes
others seem to have always been gathered up in camps
teeming by the fire
in which they burn their memories
in silence they bite at their past they do not want any more
spitting a piece of their yesterday’s bodies
one of them looked at me
as when you understand that everybody dies all alone
and lives more lonely than dying
another lay before me
as if a transparent carpet
I looked at him
he had a bullet for an eye
and for a heart he had but broken memories full of blood
a child
passed through my glance
as through an angel’s tear
instead of smiles he had his boyhood’s absence
instead of words I felt
only hatred’s fingers of he who had hit him
tearing off my glance
………..
at home
the streets are all the same
besides
this day lacks a few people
I barely felt them
passing like mist through this world
there
the people were like birds
with tears for hands and cut wings
so that they cannot fly
Marius Chelaru is a Romanian poet, editor/director/contributor to various national/international cultural magazines and journals from Romania and abroad. Chelaru has contributed articles, poems, essays, literary criticism, prose, translations, interviews, and book-reviews to various international anthologies, magazines, and journals from Romania and abroad. He has published over 40 books including novels, poems, and essays. His works have been translated into over 25 languages.
Olimpia Iacob graduated from the Faculty of Letters of the “Al. I. Cuza” University from which she earned a Ph.D. in 2000 with a dissertation entitled Translation Theory Applied to the Poetry of Nichita Stanescu. Her book-length translations include works in poetry by Cassian Maria Spiridon (translated with Jim Kacian), Gabriel Stanescu, Mircea Petean (translated with William Wolak) Daniel Corbu (translated with Jim Kacian) Marius Chelaru (translated with Gabriel Rosenstock), George Vulturescu (translated with Adam J. Sorkin). She is a member of the Writers’ Union of Romania.
Jim Kacian is founder and president of The Haiku Foundation (www.thehaikufoundation.org), a world-wide non-profit that seeks to archive the first century of haiku in the West, and to create new opportunities for its second; founder and owner of Red Moon Press (www.redmoonpress.com), the pre-eminent dedicated publishing house of English-language haiku in the world; editor-in-chief of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013, https://wwnorton.com/books/Haiku-in-English/), the definitive work on the subject; author of more than a score of books of poetry, primarily haiku; and translator of another score of books of poetry, from Japanese and (especially) Romanian (with co-translator Olimpia Iacob).