Two Poems by Aura Christi

By Aura Christi, translated by Gabi Reigh

There’s nothing to be done

There’s nothing to be done.
The sun swallows the room where I write -
The pleasant tomb of before, tomorrow, after.
A white vulture splits the window
And its wax shadow tips
The whole house skywards.

There’s nothing to be done.
The statues of this town tilt slowly
Deathwards. And here the nights
Seem split by the words of a prophet
Worshipped by birds, by the horses of gypsies.
The air is sealed like an orphan tomb.
Loneliness drowns us, scull through the night!

Sometimes, there’s a breeze reaching through
From another night entirely,
Like a scream chained inside an answer,
Like the silence of a soldier,
Wide enough to trap empires
Conquered through hesitation, through fear.
We plaster ourselves, layers of death upon death.

There’s nothing to be done.
The sun swallows the room where I write -
Tomb of before, tomorrow, after.
And now? I’m less than a shadow.
The sky of this town is the mouth of a fountain
You run into it as if through a field of wheat.
And you don’t care about the power of being less than a shadow.
And you don’t care that, for a long time now, there’s nothing to be done.

Finish

The power of that spring
Crouched inside twilight.
The silence flashed like the eyes
Of young steppe wolves.
Gazing at your hands
Reminded me that I was alive
And I darted away from reality
Like a Saturday hurling down
From a Friday constellation.

The body of an ending
Opens eye after eye.
Insomnias - suckling lambs -
Tattoo reclaimed spirits with their bleating.
From time to time - above, somewhere -
We hear thudding,
Like conkers bouncing off the ankle of a soldier.
The town hall clock unloosens the sluggish phantoms
Of a time
So grand, so cold, so high.

Yes. Time swelled as if we lived inside a syllable
Inside the memory of a sound.
I chose the letter ‘A’
To measure the void between the flesh and the spirit.
You stopped at ‘E’
Because it reminded you of a staircase
And the shore of the sea.

We squeeze inside a distant sound,
Digging the grave of our snuffed youths
in the twilight; the sealed crypt air
Vibrates with tranquility. Oh!
So close, the power of that spring.
And the lead sky
And death
-give me your hand-
So close.
 

About the authors:

Aura Christi is a Romanian poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, and editor. She was born in 1967  in Chișinău, The Republic of Moldova. Three years after graduating from the State University, School of Journalism in 1990, Christi retrieved her Romanian citizenship and settled in Bucharest, Romania's capital. Since then she has established a remarkable reputation as a poet, novelist, dramatist and essayist, with more than thirty-five books to her credit, and many national and international prizes. Christi's poems, novels and essays have been translated into French, Russian, English, Swedish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Macedonian, Chinese, Korean, Bulgarian, Polish, Albanian, Turkish and Hebrew. The poetry collection ‘Austere Gardens’ was published in 2010 and has been translated into German and Spanish. Translations of Christi’s poems were also included in the anthology ‘Women at the Border - Ten Romanian Contemporary Poets’ published in Spain in 2022, alongside others by celebrated poets such as Ana Blandiana, Nina Cassian and Ruxandra Cesereanu.

Gabi Reigh was inspired to translate more Romanian literature, focusing particularly on works from the interwar period, after winning The Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation in 2017. Reigh has translated novels, plays and poems by Liviu Rebreanu, Mihail Sebastian, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Lucian Blaga and Max Blecher. Reigh is also passionate about promoting the work of contemporary female writers and her translations of their poems and essays have been featured in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, The Blue Nib, Another Chicago Magazine, New Eastern Europe, The London Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books and more.