|
|
Mircea
Ivanescu is a Romanian poet little known in Britain. His translators, Adam J.
Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, are well respected, however, for their Popescu Prize
winning versions of Marin Sorescu's The Bridge (Bloodaxe, 2004). Sorkin frequently works in
pairs, often with the poets themselves. For Liliana Ursu's The Sky Behind
the Forest
(Bloodaxe, 1997) he worked together with Ursu and with Tess Gallagher. He's a
prolific translator and one of Romanian poetry's chief proselytizers in
English.
In his introduction, Sorkin describes Ivanescu's 'habitual posture' as one of
'restraint, withdrawal, inertia, a kind of spiritual acedia.' Most of the poems
in Lines poems poetry were written (or published) in the period 1968 to 1972 and are
gathered from Ivanescu's inspiringly named lower-case titles, lines (1968), poems (1970), poetry (1970), and other lines (1972). While the rest of the
hippy generation were popping LSD and decorating the insides of their heads,
Ivanescu was reaching for the mogadon. His 'characteristic imagery,'
according to Sorkin, 'is fraught with stasis and absence.'
If these stirring opening words from the translator don't warm the corpse,
then Sorkin's neon 'Nonetheless' implores: 'the poetry raises the lyrical
persona's melancholy above the gloomy or morbid to a sort of elegiac reverie,
bittersweet with a tinge of belatedness and anticlimax.' Well, colour me blue
and call me sunny. That's an obituary, not an endorsement.
Temptingly Sorkin writes, 'the reader's involvement is undercut yet, at the
same time, given an edge, intensified, filled with silences, discontinuities,
paradoxes; inconclusive events - a shared unease or disquiet, heightened, as
the poet writes, but 'to / where? - there's no more''. And my own cynical
response to this: 'but / why? - there's no point.' I started to wonder if I
could ever truly reach the poems from here, despite Sorkin's inadvertent
assurance that the poems themselves would never reach out to me.
And there are many fine poems which deserve a more favourable vocabulary to
position them, or no vocabulary at all. At times Ivanescu's Berrymanesque
inner dialogues for solo voice have a beautifully playful elastic charm.
Sorkin and Vianu's fluid rhythms are compelling in a poem like 'the waning
year' where a simple change of pace, a syntactic hiccup, suddenly sharpens
our view:
in autumn, it
feels good to wander to the far end of the garden
and spy on
the lizards clinging to the wall warmed by the sun,
and if you
tilt your head back a little, you sense
how the year
slopes ever lower towards winter - and this makes you cold.
The book makes me cold. As a physical object it's brute, unlovely; its hardback covers
are boxy like a coffin. The heavy glossed paper, more typical of a book of
photographs, is clinical, brilliant white, and if a book ought to smell of
anything, it's trees: this one smells of a chemical bath.
In 'if death no longer existed...' we see
the dead
light in the rooms turns to snow,
piles higher,
wraps us with its mortuary white,
its soft
immobility, its orchard of fever,
which we have
heard rumours of - words that no longer
mean
anything.
It's one of the book's persisting tensions, that while the prosody flows and
pulses to the nuanced anxieties of Ivanescu's confessionalism, which at times
is intimate and knowable, the poems remain static and immobile. The microcosm
of Ivanescu's poetry is unrelentingly bleak, frequently uneventful, even
claustrophobic. His brief moments of mystery are quickly dissolved when the
writer returns us again to the obsessive self. Sorkin's description of
Ivanescu as 'an influential exemplar of fruitful, new poetic directions' is
puzzling. He's a bone licker, a carrion crow perched above the none-event of
the page waiting for something to happen. And with practiced suspense,
nothing much does.
© George Messo 2011
|