my redblue expressionist fury

time!
you refused to stop then.
i recant my softness
and my goodness.
the quietness of the leaf
i will break it to pieces.
time!
you refused to bend
to my siren song.
i recant the curve
of my eyebrow
the wholeness of my knee
the glow of my hip
and the ineffable
of my navel.
the grace of the flower
i will tear it apart.
my stabbing red whisper
i will hurl it at you.
time!
you will go down
you will go blind
i will strangle you
with the blue ribbon
of my blood.

And I wonder

O quam te memorem virgo...
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair--
Lean on a garden urn--
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair--
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise--
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.



La Figlia Che Piange (The Weeping Girl)
by T.S. Eliot

answering a double call from beyond

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rossetti (Remember)

self-portrait with crescent moon

When I take photos I float

on the verge of myself.
I am many.

Larger than myself
yet I enclose myself no more.

I who is otherwise
filled to the brim with the past
learn to walk through the things
of the present
soundlessly but not quietly
until I am
a body without a face
a heartbeat without a body
the thin edge of light.

Stay with me, my fever,
dance with me, my pain,
swirl me into the shape
of what is being born
now.

When I take photos I float
float to the crescent moon

the white moon
until the soft cloud that I am
I am
casts her shadow upon your face
your pale face
you look up

slightly bewildered
stroke your skin
that skin
as if you tried to guess
what has just touched your soul
that soul
you only catch a glimpse
of my hair
my dark hair
in the mirror
in which the world
meets the world
and that too will soon be
gone
is now

gone.

When I take photos I float

on the verge of myself.
I am many.
Larger than myself
yet I enclose myself
no more.


I who is otherwise
filled to the brim with the past
learn to walk through the things
of the present
soundlessly but not quietly
until I am
a body without a face
a heartbeat without a body
the thin edge of light.

Stay with me, my fever,
dance with me, my pain,
swirl me into the shape
of what is being born
now.

When I take photos I float
float to the crescent moon
the white moon
until the soft cloud that I am
I am
casts her shadow upon your face
your pale face

you look up

slightly bewildered
stroke your skin
that skin
as if you tried to guess
what has just touched your soul

that soul
you only catch a glimpse
of my hair
my dark hair
in the mirror
in which the world
meets the world
and that too will soon be
gone
is now

gone.

(gratefully remembering how the first time I took the camera in my hands
felt like being born again)

one small fish swimming alone, then next to one big fish, then they become three, later four and in the end many colourful stories

—
‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿  ‿  ‿
—  —  —
‿  ‿
—

Christian Morgenstern (Fisches Nachtgesang)

—
‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
[sorry, I seem to be floundering for words. -The translator]
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿ ‿ ‿
— — —
‿ ‿

—

Fish's Night Song
(English translation from Fish Language,
by Emily Ezust)

Das Vollkommene zu kommentieren ist eine unfruchtbare Übung. Jeder unbefangene Leser wird diesem Satz zustimmen. Aber gibt es das: einen unbefangenen Leser? Goethes wohlgemeinter Ratschlag, das Unerforschliche ruhig zu verehren, ist bei Philologen und Kritikern stets auf taube Ohren gestoßen. Also meinetwegen! [...]
Lakonischer als "Fisches Nachtgesang" kann ein Gedicht nicht sein; das Wort einsilbig wäre bereits eine Übertreibung. [...]
Das Gedicht, soviel steht fest, hat keine Silbe zuviel und keine Silbe zuwenig.
Es ist das außerdem einzige Gedicht, das ich auswendig rezitieren kann.

Hans-Magnus Enzensberger



To analyse perfection is a sterile exercise. Every unprejudiced reader cannot but agree. But is there such a thing as an unprejudiced reader? Goethe's well-meant advice, that one should adore the inscrutable silently, has always fallen on deaf ears when it comes to philologists and literary scholars. Well then... [...]
A poem can hardly be more laconic than 'Fish's Night Song'; the word 'monosyllabic' would already be an exageration. [...]
The poem, so much is clear, has no syllable too many or too few. Furthermore, it is the only poem that I can recite by heart.


Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, when asked to write about this poem

she could be

she could be flotsam
tossed up
from a troubled sea
washed ashore
her hair black weed
her fingers
fragile anchors
dug into the sand

she could be sleeping
numbed into slumber
by the drowsy sun
as the shore steals
upon her
the salt water
seeping into her
landlocked flesh
and with a flick
of her tail
she is no longer
beachbound
but a sea creature
mer-woman
whose song entrances
the strongest sailor

or she is a swimmer
dragged herself back
exhausted, to shore
and spent, spreads
her arms wide
not sleeping
not dreaming
but listening
to the great pulse
of the sea
as it washes
back and forth
back and forth
through her


swiss (she could be)

pare să plutească
purtată de mare
până la ţărm
aruncată pe plajă
spălată de apă
alge pletele-i negre
mâinile ancoră
subţire-n nisip


pare să doarmă
furată de malul
fără sfârşit
legănată-n vis
de un soare moale
de sarea-nflorind
în carnea ei
devenită pământ
coada ei caldă
c-o unică lovitură
o poate întoarce
în apă oricând
femeia mării
renaşte vrăjind
vajnicul călător


ori a înotat poate
până în zări
pe mal obosită
s-a-ntins să audă
departe de somn
departe de vis
s-asculte doar
marele ritm
al mării cea mare
cum trece prin ea
val după val
înainte înapoi
înapoi înainte

pare să

(my translation)

Note:

I had posted this picture before but I wasn't happy with it and I took it down soon afterwards. Little did I know that swiss had already spotted it :-) inspired by it, he wrote this poem, that I did my best to translate into Romanian. More important than the images themselves, I think what matters here most is the rhythm imitating the waves, and I tried to get this 'sound' right (repetitions and alliterations being a precious way to achieving that). I am pretty satisfied with the result :-) and open to suggestions. And grateful to swiss, but he already knows it.

if white-fingered

Cu degete albe dacă bat în fereastră

Voi credeţi că ninge şi nu m-ascultaţi

Mircea Dinescu

If white-fingered I tap the window
You will think me the snow and won't listen

trans. James Owens

is love a flame

Te mistuie iubirea? Credeai că-i o păpuşă, Să-ţi faci un joc cu toane, ca în copilărie. Când ea-ţi cerea o fire de salamandră vie, În tainica-i văpaie să arzi făr' de cenuşă. Ea nu stă-n trup, stăpână a cărnii şi-a plăcerii, Înflăcăratu-i spirit, urgie, le consumă; Îşi cată-n noi duh geamăn... şi, de-l îmbii cu humă, Rămâi o biată urnă cu zgurile durerii... Te ispiteşte jindul să-mbraci şi fericirea Cum pui, pentru petreceri, o rochie de brocarte? Dar trebuie-nfruntată cu spaimă, ca o moarte... Căci ea, ca să pătrundă, îţi sparge-alcătuirea, Preface în genune lăuntrul tău, anume Ca să încapă-acolo, cu ea, întreaga lume.

CLXXIII  de Vasile Voiculescu (Ultimele sonete închipuite ale lui Shakespeare în traducere imaginara de Vasile Voiculescu)

Is love a flame? You thought it was a doll,

To play with, like a child, with fickle glee,

A salamander she wants you to be,

Devour’d by the same flame in which you fall.

She is the cruel mistress of the flesh,

And pleasure, as her spirit both consumes;

Twin soul she seeks in our heart's frail bloom...

Don’t tempt her, or you’ll end up in her mesh,

A slag-filled urn of pain. Does your lust claim

To dress your joy as though a party dress?

You dread her like she’s death and nothing less…

For, to succeed, she breaks your human frame,

         It turns you into an abyss, so there

         She and th’entire world will worm a lair.

CLXXIII

by Vasile Voiculescu 

(from Shakespeare's Last Imagined Sonnets, in the fictional translation of Vasile Voiculescu)

trans. Cristina Hanganu-Bresch

Kubla  wrote this poem after seeing my pictures, I am both honoured and grateful:

your hair blown across your face

I see the white of your eyes from a distance I see the hair blown across your face and how you blow this sunset to pieces how your hair shades your face and what I would give to live in that shade under the shade of your hair blown across your face

witness this blown sunset witness too the falling shadows after the shade after the visible white of your 

eyes have shaded everything that lives inside me and now the peripheral night is gathering its 

gloomy shade but what can it know of a face that is shaded by 

hair what does it know of shade and hair and your 

face and the visible invisible white of your eyes

your lips too are covered with the blown strands of your hair that has blown this sunset to pieces 

and has shaded every shade into nothingness and 

how silent everything seems now and how loud this silence 

is

duck series

I see them clearly in the transparent air
a line of grey and silver ducks
they walk slowly into the distant time
of the lake, free from doubt or regret,
they return home, each one smaller
than the one before it,
a quiet death in each footstep.
















Acum, pe-ntregul câmp n-ai să citeşti
Decât cuneiforme păsăreşti.

Dar spre-a fi scrise, trebuia să vină
Din cer, transport de linişti şi lumină.

Atâta alb, atâta dăruire,
Ca un ecou din nemărginire.

Atâta alb, tot alb jur împrejur,
Dând celor vii şi mai exact contur.

Miron Radu Paraschivescu (Zăpezi)

Th’entire field has turned, from tree to tree,
Into a bird cuneiform marquee.

One needs, however, to properly write,
A heavenly cargo of quiet and light.

Such selfless white, such generosity,
--A boundless echo from infinity.

So white, so white is all around, so pure,
Giving the living a finer contour.


Snow
trans. by Cristina Hanganu-Bresch

petals

I am fascinated by this 99th pensum revolution of everyday life:

"there were days too
when nothing needed to be said
when the game was simply
to watch the petals fall"

Most surprisingly, I had exactly the same thought - or, should I say, feeling - when I looked at this picture of mine. I say 'surprisingly' because of the obvious difference in style and tone that separates the two photos. His maintains a very characteristic Japanese sensitivity - what could be more Japanese than this image of idling away one's time by contemplating the fall of petals? I think of a passage in a novel by Mishima in which the hero has an insight into the nature of things that is to change the course of his life while looking at the fallen petals floating on the water of a bowl. An insignificant detail, which goes practically unnoticed.

I also wonder about this 'too'. What if one would or could discard it, and make each day just that, a simple game of watching petals fall? What could be said about such a life? (and I don't even dare ask: how could be such a life lived?)

Yet when I took the picture I didn't think about any of these questions. I stood there in amazement at such a marvellous impossibility brought forth by life in my parents' garden, that a tulip could bend over a fern and its red embrace the green and the petals fall in exactly that place, which, by its very nature, seemed to constitute a kind of shelter for the frailty of this world.

And yet - another yet, as if one followed a spiral down to the core of things - when I changed the focus and looked closer, I stood there thoughtless, connected as if by a strange musical tune to the pure vibration of colours and patterns unfolding before my eyes.

"Art, in short, has no other goal, no other meaning than to express those subjective determinations that constitute the ground of our being and perhaps of being itself, the soul of things and of the universe—if it is true that all entities, all objective appearances have their own inner resonance and initially repose within it. It is because this subjective dimension of Being is identical to the essence of the universe and the abstract content, in other words absolutely real, that art wants to express it, that Kandinsky could call it “cosmic depth” and say that “the genesis of a work of art is of a cosmic character.”

The aim of art is indeed not to express a subjective state understood as a state of fact, a state of affairs, and it is in this sense that Kandinsky could say, “I do not paint the states of the soul.” Art paints life, in other words a capacity for growth, for life as subjectivity, that is as experiencing itself, is the power of attaining oneself and thus of expanding oneself at each moment. That is why each eye wants to see further and each force swells, becoming more efficient and stronger. Art is the endless attempt to resume carrying each of life’s powers to its highest degree of intensity and thus of pleasure, it is the response given by life to its most intimate essence and to the will which inhabits it—to its desire for excess (surpassement)."

excerpts from Michel Henry, Kandinsky and the Meaning of the Work of Art, translated by Michael Tweed and generously made available by pensum here

two autumns

yuku ware ni
todomaru nare ni
aki futatsu

Buson

for the one leaving
for the one staying
two autumns

erasing that tree

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light.

from a poem by Robert Hass

I wanted to write about these lines that I had received some days ago, from somebody who is very dear to me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with something more beautiful (and 'beautiful' means here 'round', or 'whole', too) than the gift that I had been given along with this poem, and which is this small confession:

'I want all the little details of the world, I want to see them and touch them with something like love, the woodpecker and the knots and hollows of the birch - but, at the same time, I long for that “undivided light” so much that my eyes fill with tears and I ache with a feeling like thirst. I fear myself a little, because I think I might be willing to erase the birch and the woodpecker (a terrible, terrible thought) if that meant I could stand in this light.'

Tonight, looking at the tree in this picture, my friend's words have come back to me (they hadn't left me at all, to tell the truth). I remember how I stood on the shore of the frozen lake and opened the back side of my camera, slowly, letting the light in. The unbearable light of the winter sun.

And then other words have come, ancient words, that I had thought long forgotten, the words of the God echoing thus, in my mind:

'The Blessed Lord said: There is a banyan tree which has its roots upward and its branches down and whose leaves are the Vedic hymns. One who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas.

The branches of this tree extend downward and upward, nourished by the three modes of material nature. The twigs are the objects of the senses. This tree also has roots going down, and these are bound to the fruitive actions of human society.

The real form of this tree cannot be perceived in this world. No one can understand where it ends, where it begins, or where its foundation is. But with determination one must cut down this tree with the weapon of detachment. So doing, one must seek that place from which, having once gone, one never returns, and there surrender to that Supreme Personality of Godhead from whom everything has began and in whom everything is abiding since time immemorial.'

Bhagavad Gita, from Chapter 15