Wheel With a Single Spoke (20 page)

Yet Stănescu's engagement with political verse is not mere pragmatic calculation. Stănescu gained fame because he and his generation transformed Soviet-style aesthetics from within. The poetry of this period took the form of anecdotes in verse and paeans to state leaders, the party, or agricultural collectivization and industrialization. In a political atmosphere in which leading literary journals published poems such as “The Bricklayers” or “Verses About the Young Lathe Operator,” Stănescu wrote “Song on an Aluminum Scaffold” in the voice of a construction worker. Yet the speaker describes something unusual: a personal experience of transcendence. Although carefully framed by references to Hiroshima and a luminous future, the moral is deliberately vague and the worker's soul travels in a kind of ecstasy. Confronted with the state's opposition to mysticism, Stănescu cunningly portrays socialism as the impetus for a mystical experience.

This perversion of state aesthetics continues in his transformation of “obscurity.” Stănescu's characteristic simplicity of style – he preferred common nouns such as “stones” and “birds” and avoided ornamental description – can be seen as unassailably direct. His images become “unsettlingly concrete,” in Matei Călinescu's description, as they present abstract ideas of light, the universe, or the seasons. Condeescu describes
11 Elegies
as a “difficult volume which opposes the imprint of its time by programmatically closing off immediate understanding, escaping
ideological accusations based ‘on the text,' making sociological interpretations impossible.” Stănescu's poetry features
things
, just as Socialist Realist poetry features tractors or new apartment blocks. Yet when we read, in his fifth elegy, “I was never angry with apples / for being apples, with leaves for being leaves, / with shadow for being shadow, with birds for being birds. / But apples, leaves, shadows, birds, / all of a sudden, were angry with me,” we feel unsteady, as though we might not know what these things are or how we should consider them. Without challenging the importance of the physical world, Stănescu questions our relationship to it. Without overturning the terms of Socialist Realism, Stănescu shifts its subject from the state to metaphysics.

As part of a new generation of Romanian poets – one that included such voices as Ana Blandiana, Mircea Ivanescu, Marin Sorescu, and Mihai Ursachi – Stănescu generated great excitement for a literature reborn. At the same time, the Romanian state allowed a cultural thaw to accompany its gradual disassociation from the Soviet Union, a process that reached its peak with Romania's denunciation of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague. A new group of literary critics began to champion the new writers, opening new channels for literary discussion and reconnecting with prewar Romanian Modernists and such international literary figures as Franz Kafka. Romanian readers enthusiastically supported the return of a lively literary culture. This return was felt, in part, as the restoration of an authentic, human existence. Stănescu expresses this desire in his reversal of the Pygmalion story, as the sculptor implores the statue, “Give birth to me. Give birth to me.” Readers likewise turned to art with the hope that it would give them new life. Even a delicate love poem, such as “Sentimental Story” or “The Lion Cub, Love,” could generate a frisson, as the lyrical expression of emotion satisfied the need to spite the regime that had been installed so thuggishly. The more abstract Stănescu's poetry became (“If I lived on a square, a cube / there'd be some type of plenty, / but I live on a sphere, a sphere, a sphere, / a sphere”), the more intensely his readers read him, with a longing to experience a world outside their own. His difficulty and popularity were perhaps directly proportional.

Translucent Translation

In 1965, Stănescu published one of his two works of translation, a selection of poems by Vasko Popa. (The second, in 1972, was a book by Puslojič.) Stănescu admitted he knew “not a single foreign language,” only to add that he knew Romanian “seven times over, and the language of poetry, twenty times.” Stănescu translated nearly ninety poems, working from trots provided by Aurel Gavrilov and Popa, who was ethnically Romanian and had studied at the University of Bucharest. These translations for Stănescu are a moment of transformation, as important for him as
Cathay
was for Ezra Pound. Just as Pound learned to center a poem around the image, Stănescu discovered in Popa's work that images can suggest an experience just beyond themselves, a new poetic process and generative structure for words and things. Describing Popa in his introduction to the translations, Stănescu defines his own poetic method:

While the poems, often lapidary, appear to indicate a sublimation of the senses, a tendency to crystallize into a symbol, an attentive reading unveils the opposite process, that is, the symbol's subtle disaggregation, its incorporation into matter, something like the fissuring into a star of a pane of glass, broken by an invisible stone.

From the star, we notice the pane, and intuit the stone. The pane registers the lines of fissure, which we might take as the lines of the poem, moving through human language. We move from metaphor – the broken glass as star – toward the material yet abstract world, the stone that cannot be directly described in human language. Lyrical expressions of this kind of poetry are “unique and singular,” Stănescu writes, and they let us “face something like the genesis of myth.” Stănescu is less interested in myths themselves and more in the sensory experience of their genesis. The reader faces such a moment in his “Eleventh Elegy”:

The drive to find the moment of genesis of a feeling or idea, – not phenomena but the seed of phenomena – becomes Stănescu's central concern. Stănescu himself identified “the true beginning” of his poetic career after the publication of his Popa translation, with his
11 Elegies
in 1967. From this encounter emerged the most fertile period of Stănescu's life, which saw the publication of twelve books in less than a decade.

A central aspect of Stănescu's project becomes the drive to “find the sentimental equivalence of great philosophical categories.” As his work develops, Stănescu comes to structure his poems around ideas of geometry, language, or metaphysics, not to elaborate a complex philosophical system, but rather to portray in verse the encounter with ideas, the tension of intellectual paradox, the sensation of the limit of thought. Corin Braga argues that Stănescu should not be read as a theorist, because “he is not attracted by the rational-logical valences of ideas but by the halo of energy (euphoria) that accompanies them.” The elusiveness of his volume of poems on Ptolemy, for example, stems from the fact that their subject lies just at the edge of its ideas, in the aura of thought, thus becoming the emergence of something new, beyond thought. What may seem like abstraction, in Stănescu, is better understood as an attempt to recover the intellect as a place of sensation. His poems press toward the emergence of new thought.

Stănescu's passion for Serbia offers a metaphor to describe his poetry. While traveling just beyond Romania's border, Stănescu situates his poetry just beyond the limits of the intellect. What Braga sees as the halo around thought, Alexandru Ştefănescu describes as Stănescu's predilection for images of translucence. He notes the prevalence of haloes, nimbi, and translucent objects that glow without revealing their sources of light. Bringing the border and halo together, Ştefănescu reads the opening of the poem “Loss of Consciousness Through Cognition” as
the representation of this transnational influence on Stănescu's poetry. The speaker returns, Ştefănescu notes, from abroad to his home and family, bringing with him a new confidence in his poetry:

The family cannot see through the lions, because they have not had experience of lands beyond their own. Yet they note the suggestion of another world, the glow of light that charges the speaker with power. Biographically, Stănescu's poetry is charged by his encounter with Popa's. Literally, the incorporation of translucence becomes central to Stănescu's imagery. This combination allows us to see translation as central to reading Stănescu, translation understood as a kind of translucence.

We may be surprised to find, as described in the poem “Vitrification,” that transparency marks not understanding but the limit of knowledge:

The very baldness of Stănescu's language, the qualities that helped him pass the censorship of Socialist Realist critics, make him difficult to pass into English. “Everything is simple,” say famous lines from “The Eleventh Elegy,” “so simple that / it becomes incomprehensible.” The difficulty of translating Stănescu is a Stănescan problem, and it also offers a Stănescan solution. The translated text seems transparent, in that it promises us another poetry, and yet it is merely translucent, in that we see that poetry's light while noting our distance from the experience of its words. The task I set myself in translation is to maintain, as much as possible, that sense of the halo around the poems.

Unwords

Key to understanding his work are Stănescu's invented words, known in Romania as “
necuvinte
,” or “unwords.” Stănescu often writes his poetry at the threshold between sense and nonsense, meaning and un-meaning. These moments of altered language launch the poems toward the limits of language, and their translations, toward the limits of linguistic equivalence. They are, to cite one of his distorted words, “tramboleens.” These unwords stem from moments when the material qualities of words, more than their meanings, fill Stănescu with wonder. “What are you, A?” he asks in a paean to the letter. This fascination with the material of language energizes his use of traditional rhymes. Stănescu's most paradoxical or surprising images are often delivered in regular or irregular rhymes. His rhymes are dazzling (imagine a language in which you may rhyme “lily” with “sublime,” or “bitter” with “zenith,” or “gates” with “dead”), so much so that they may detract from the sense of the line. Rather than adding meaning to the poem, the rhymes move us toward the aural edge of meaning, working like unwords.

Here, reading in translation may help us experience Stănescu's aesthetics. His constant and dexterous rhymes emphasize the material properties of his Romanian. An inevitable effect of rhyme in translation is to call attention to the words' Englishness. Because we know the original is not in English, we are aware that we are missing something, that the odds are against the English and Romanian words pairing sounds in the same way. The reader of a rhymed translation occupies the same position as the family in “Loss of Consciousness Through Cognition,” who can tell that something endows the leonine poetry with light, yet the source of that light is invisible.

My translation choices parallel Stănescu's aesthetics, an aesthetics rooted in his own experiences with translation. This interaction resembles, for me, a kind of dialogue with Stănescu, as translation follows translation, a re-creation of the exchange with his audience that stimulated Stănescu to write. Friendship across the border of language is, of course, what my colleague was offering me when she wrote her dedication. The lines “myself, / and after that” have since come to encapsulate what I find so compelling in Stănescu's poetry, the tension between euphoria and depletion, clarity and nonsense, thought and the halo around thought. My encounter with his work lets me see these limits as potential for creation, as opportunities to experience the intense innovation that Stănescu brought to Romanian poetry, at a time when its poets and readers were anxious for its transformation, and which will now give English-language readers the chance to experience translation as unwords, and unwords as the halo of friendship. Decades after the cultural politics of his 1960s, Stănescu's distinctive poetry brings us to the edge of thought, a translucent lion on each hip, to peer through a pane of glass shattered by an invisible stone.