I am alive.
Nothing human is alien to me.
I barely have time to wonder at my existence, but
I am always glad that I am.
Never do I fully realize myself,
for I always have
a better and better idea
of life.
I am staggered by the difference between
me and the grass blade,
me and the lions,
me and the islands of light
of the stars.
Between me and numbers,
for instance me and 2 and me and 3.
I also have a flaw, a sin:
I take grass seriously,
I take lions seriously,
the almost perfect movements of the sky.
Even a casual wound on my hand
makes me see through it,
as through a spyglass,
the pains of the world, the wars.
From such a happening I got
the great understanding I have
for Ulysses - and the admiration I have for
that surly-faced man, Dante Alighieri.
I could hardly imagine
a barren earth, swirling
around the sun...
(Perhaps because there are in this world
such verses.)
I like to laugh, although I
rarely laugh, always minding some business,
or travelling on a raft, endlessly,
upon the oval ocean of fantasy.
It is an unforgettable pageant, that
of knowing,
of discovering
the map of the expanding universe,
while you are watching
a picture from your childhood!
It is an old body of yours,
which you had lost
and not even an advert, given
in bold letters,
can offer you any chance
to retrieve it.
I unfold the papyrus of my life
full of hieroglyphs
and what I can communicate
now, here,
after an arduous deciphering,
yet not lacking satisfactions,
is a poem devoted to peace
which has, in brief, the following content:
I do not want,
when I do lift my temple from the pillows,
to see on beds dragging behind me
death,
and in each and every word gushing towards me
to throw me putrid fish, like in stalled rivers.
Nor after every step,
into that emptiness behind me left,
I want
death to step upwards, alike
to a quicksilver column,
bracing infernal canopies above me...
But its black rainbow, made of kelp,
would crack by knocking on my youth, no help.
There's unprecedented fertility
in earth and stones and scaffoldings,
magnetic, time, moment by moment,
raises my thoughts
like living bodies.
There's unprecedented fertility
in earth and stones and scaffoldings.
If just one instant I'd hold my shade riveted,
by ferns and weeds it would at once be hoarded!
Just let your longish face, my beloved,
let it be as it is, leaned to rest
between two of my heartbeats,
like between the Tigris
and the Euphrates.
Translator: Vasile Andreica
see more poems written by: Nichita Stănescu
