Paul Doru Mugur, Adam J. Sorkin, Claudia Serea, eds. The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry. Greenfield: Talisman House Publishers, 2011. 370 pp. $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-58498-088-9.

Reviewed by Gene Tanta (University of Maryland - University College)
Published on H-Romania (July, 2015)
Commissioned by R. Chris Davis (Lone Star College - Kingwood)

Learning to Mourn Better: Reading Postcommunist Romanian Poetry in Translation

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of crony capitalism. But what is crony capitalism to poetry or poetry to crony capitalism? Poetry—whether confessional or conceptual—is part of the commodities basket comprising the meaning of a culture. Thus, a poetry anthology such as The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry, regardless of whether this is a good or bad thing, plays its role on the stage of globalization. The language of poetry sledgehammers the stage while the language of transnational capital waxes the stage. Or is it the other way around? In any regard, this stage also showcases our contemporary human condition, nudging poets and translators and reviewers to broach their political and aesthetic questions. What is lost and what is gained in translation? What is the Anglophone reader’s best-case scenario in reading such poems? How can reading contemporary Romanian poetry in English translation matter?

Edited by Paul Doru Mugur with Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea and translated by Sorkin and Serea with several of the authors, The Vanishing Point That Whistles includes Mugur’s insightful preface of recent Romanian poetry contextualized within the wider sociopolitical scene. His overview offers a clear glimpse into Romania’s social and economic hopes and despondencies by relating these to the poetry that came after Romania’s brief literary postmodernism: “The poetry included in this volume reflects the alienation and the crisis of communication brought by the so-called ‘transition’ period of the last twenty years in Romania from the beginning of the postcommunist period in 1990 to the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This twenty-year span was defined not only by uncertainty and fears, social inequities and misery, but also by both an enthusiasm and a hope for the future that the recent inclusion of Romania in the European Union made real” (p. 5).

In these translated poems, the reader finds a case study of how postmodernist deconstruction’s driving forces collapse the metaphysics of history, the author, and other ideological categories by facing the mirror of language against the mirror of language—reflecting both toward and away from the infinitesimal differences translation demands. To focus on content, for instance, some of the deeply self-reflective work in this anthology begins in self-indulgence, trekking outward toward the other in the phenomenal world. And some of it begins, out there, in the realm of historical personae and ends, in here, with a personified, if deeply compounded, self. It is transition (as much as the frustration of transition), after all, that makes us question the idea of a unitary self cozily tucked in its set of habits called home.

Physically, Talisman House has put forth another handsome object—light blue skies take up the top half of the cover while a gray beach with heavy waves washes toward our feet on the bottom half of the cover. Beneath the horizon, the cover shows a lone person taking a long walk on a beach, either at sunrise or sunset—it is difficult to tell the coming and going of time solely by the light flashing on a beachhead. The Romanian writers’ names provide the book’s organizational structure, with a generous sampling of about 10 pages of poetry per name, bringing the book to its inch-wide spine of 366 pages.

As Mugur, a medical doctor, alludes to in the introduction, many recent poets have announced the death of literary postmodernism and the subsequent quick births of conceptual writing, fracturism, flarf, post-avant poetries, slow poetry, and so on.[1] But does the age of deconstruction really mean the death of capital letter History, Metaphysics, God, Self, etc., in contemporary Romanian poetry? To put it another way: What should a world-curious reader read, if nothing matters ... since, after all, there has been a worldwide conceptual regime change and the center has, for decades now, been outed as a colonial/autocratic trope? In a world of many Englishes, does the unrequited narrator even expect an audience? What topics and themes do self-conscious (and history-aware) poets write about after the theory that the center does not hold has passed over our bodies like a wave of Yeatsian emotion? And how in the world does one translate in such a polycentric world?

If genre boundaries still hold any water and poetry performs what philosophy posits, a critical reader might ask: Are we there yet? Has Romania’s transition out of communism become Romania’s transformation into a postcommunist nation? There is no answer as of yet from the fracking industry. Another lynchpin theme occurring in this fine collection has to do with postcommunist Romanian poetry’s rejection of the ’80s generation’s postmodern language-gyre and subsequent fascination with the radical banality of the “fracturist” movement that took place near the fin de millennium. But how can banality be radical? Banality is radicalized when readers are rhetorically coerced by brutally confessional poetry into seeing the self as a set of inhabited ideas, stuck in the spin cycle of one’s everyday life habits. By representing the postcommunist Romanian quotidian, these poems demonstrate that art is life—as Marcel Duchamp also demonstrated with his readymades—and, because art is life, anything can trigger engagement.

Describing this tendency toward a confessional and biographical break with coy intertextuality alluded to above, Dumitru Crudu, the fracturist movement’s cofounder, writes in 1998: “‘in order for literature to be truthful, believable and irreducible to the fireworks of a superficial non-conformism, it should have an existential and biographical motivation.... The fracturist proposal was to move the accent from the object to the one who writes. Only the reactions of the one who writes are important and not the object he/she describes.... Only thus can we reinvent emotion, only thus can we reinvent the primary thrill of the Real’” (translated from the original Romanian, p. 5).

Of course, Romanian writers’ tendency to mediate literary experience through the kaleidoscope of identity politics differs from—even if it is hard for Anglophones not to read it in tandem with—the North American confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman (whom I have compared with Mircea Ivănescu).[2] Romanian “fracturism” and, beyond this post-’89 movement, the general Romanian population need to be heard, need to confess the emotional and cultural duress still festering from the curtained shame trials and so many other daily tribulations of a utopia on rations. Poetry provides the deeply desired mimetic relief while simultaneously also providing the bons mots used to encode past traumas. That formerly communist Romanians need to tell their story not only shirks postmodernism’s stereotypical focus on the arbitrary relations between sign and signified but also attempts to break from a neoliberal postcommunist transition period to a postcommunist transformation period. This way poetry is giving trauma its witness. 

However, multifarious corruption should temper any new utopian thinking about the talking cure leading to economic titivation. Romanian poets’ ironic responses during the ’80s, for instance, have transitioned to a more sincere set of responses to history in the wake of Nicolae Ceauşescu and, now, under the waning reach of monopolistic capitalism. Once the simple object of derision has been removed, so too must go the slew of pleasures associated with its ridicule. And so the sincere confession about what it was like to be there in utopia is ongoing—as is the trauma of recounting it and reflecting on it. Perhaps, it would not be too much to call it nostalgia for irony when someone yearns for the good old days of communism when one was assured of a job and a (socially engineered) place in the world. To lose one’s social and poetic privilege to be ironic may be worse than to lose one’s right to confess one’s truth. So there’s that.

Throughout the postcommunist Romanian experience, this “local I” may be seen as a rebuttal to the totalitarian “we.” I have not defined what I mean by this “local I” above but I have alluded to the concept throughout as the rhetorical gesture pinning together the multiple facets in the biographical tendency to use isometric personae to describe the everyday. Poets’ deployment of this “local I” may be seen as a shift toward intimacy, privacy, subjectivity, sociality, self-regard, or body consciousness simply because Ceauşescu’s mythology of socialist science demanded—and attempted to enforce—comradeship, objectivity, and a general devaluation of individual self-determination. In no way do I endorse the myth of Romanian exceptionalism or that of any other nation. However, Romania’s geographical location as a happens-to-be-in-the-way-of-imperial-powers region may have helped to create the historical situations that have given rise to its existential ironies. To wit: understanding that banal human experience never stops mattering in politics or in art would seem to account for these poems’ intense flirtation with the void’s reciprocal gaze; this obstinate relativism, also seen in the work of earlier Romanian writers, such as Urmuz and Tristan Tzara, in all its wry humor and cloying self-pity, is part of the Romanian existential condition. A condition apart, like every other condition.

Perhaps the amplest and most agile poems in the collection, Ruxandra Cesereanu’s poems as thrown into the English by Sorkin and Mugur, lose the least and gain the most in the haggling between languages that is translation: “I loved to the hilt I loved by heft / the brandy in my body became a horse tipsy with grace / deformity straightened its stilts of fire / vultures and ravens may devour me / lest I ax to bits the burden of my lust / kiss me until my teeth fall out / scratch me down to the bare bone / pull my hair light my fire take me to make a sinner of / because my poor inside-out heart has dried up like a glove” (pp. 88-89). And here is some more of Cesereanu’s scandalous existential riffing on meaninglessness: “The gospels are perfumed with resin, / flies come in rainbows from the next world /as it will never be. / Only in russian roulette can death be left to the mercy of chance” (p. 93). And more: “I babble and I’m naked before god / I pray because I’ve no choice / I no longer have anywhere to go” (p. 95). And, perhaps as cultural allusion to communist Romania’s torture practices of using a pair of pliers to extract the toenails and fingernails of dissidents: “why would I seek god to pull his fingernails out one by one” (p. 95).

The uses of the first-person pronoun “I”—or even the poets’ actual names, as in the poems of Cristian Popescu, O. Nimigean, and Radu Andriescu—succeed more as artifacts of our shared humanity (whatever that may mean in these, by some accounts, postcolonial days) rather than irony, even if irony cannot help but throw its sparks in the gaps between authorial intention and persona. Take Andriescu’s remarkable poem “Satin” as an example of the sophisticated play between emotional declension and emotional investment: “Satin, there was a time when I imagined life as permanent floating. / Such premature happiness. / I used to say time is a sort of sled run / that packs your pants with snow and your soul with fire. / Satin, it seems many others imagined / much the same thing. When I’d wake up / my mouth was blue with ink, / how about that?— / like a kid absorbed in thought, making believe, / lost between the lines, messing with his Chinese pen / until its nib splits away” (pp. 61-62).

These poems use the everyday—brandy, fingernails, daydreaming—as rhetorical devices to show the shifting social relations in the Romanian grain by opening the door to endearing, if solipsistic, navel-gazing. It has been my experience that all poetry starts in the navel—the seat of biography. Best not to end there though. 

The cultural ramifications taking place as a result of Romania’s political shifting from Marxist-Leninist socialism to Stalinist socialism to another ideological spectrum enlarge these translations’ social and aesthetic relevance to our English-language understandings of Romania’s ongoing transition. Taken as a whole, these poems are socially relevant and beautiful because they offer a reading of history that refuses to be hailed as just one thing: biography or literature. In the rich traditions of poetry’s negative relationships to ideology, these works not only document Romania’s transition into a different social order but also, because they are poems, perform the new social order. After all, navel-gazing and self-reflection are the privileged provisions of individual, not collective, consciousness.

Constantin Acosmei combines intense introspection with sensitive phenomenological description in the meditative and unpresupposing vernacular of an Andrei Tarkovsky scene: “(I hide behind / you covering / your ears with my hands / I wait for you to set / your glass of lemonade / on the terracotta shelf / I take your hand / and invite you to walk with me / beside the dresser / one shoe on / and the other foot bare)” (p. 84).

Above, I have referred to Romanians’ disposition for staring into the void. Staring blankly hypnotized by a Pepsi commercial is one thing, but poets and artists tend to do more than passively consume the Real. They tend to bring back—surprising and, sometimes, even shocking their readers—rich news from the front of nothingness. Here, Mihai Ignat uses surrealist associations (or “reality as a special effect,” as Mugur argues in his preface [p. 3]) and a pace-quickening disregard for conventional punctuation to share a feeling: “I know what it is to fall into the abyss / but I don’t know another two thousand things / hunger made a stopover in 1992 / even in my stomach” (p. 120). And here’s another feeling: “I’m dogmatic and my spontaneity / has closed for renovation. / My name isn’t an inheritance / but a gift” (p. 122). And some humor about not having money or a lover: “I don’t have a bank account I don’t have savings stashed in an old sock / I don’t have a rainy-day fund I don’t have / any means of survival / yet despite this I continue to read fiction / as if my life depended on it. / As I’ve said, / I’d like to have a trust fund and make love” (p. 123).

Adina Dabija, yet another standout poet, writes about a historical topic with a feminist—this is my body and not the state’s body—twist. The following scene relates one of the six instances in post-’89 Romanian history, when politicians directed miners[3] to brutalize, beat, and generally intimidate protesters: “the cops who block / their pouring into Bucharest, / where women are waiting to go out / to a movie, a triage, a coup d’état. / Me, I’ll fight. I do a striptease on the Bucharest-Piteşti highway / and throw down my silk stockings as a barricade against the invaders” (p. 140).

Razvan Ţupa, an important component of the contemporary Romanian poetry scene, has been editing, organizing, and hosting activities that include blog discussions, interactive salons, poetry readings, and critical roundtable interviews. By stretching the possibilities of what poetry can mean with his application of relational aesthetics,[4] Ţupa complicates any easy or fetishistic or Orientalist reading of recent Romanian poetry: “a romanian body is the other / to whom you transfer all that you are / you always had a cousin at school / who’d seen who’d done it all he was the romanian body / for each of us who’d trafficked in luxury cars for each / of us as our debt as our possibility” (pp. 245-246).

My favorite new find within the pages of The Vanishing Point That Whistles is Elena Vlădăreanu because of the force with which she mixes unhedged biographical events with precise perception. Look at and listen to her masterful visual and sonic sense of scale, pitch, and moral core: “15 years ago a young woman in germany or great britain / was watching a story on children in romania / probably waiting as I am now / for the reporter to hand the child a drop of clean water / I wish I cared but I don’t / they’re so far away / they’re so fucking far away / I go round the sun in my erratic / yet aseptic safety / I tell myself I’m being manipulated and I click off the tv” (p. 258).

I hope these excerpted poems and my responses to the ongoing questions about the meaning of socioeconomic progress and aesthetic purpose work to make readers feel invited to seek out this anthology and to do further reading. Reading contemporary Romanian poetry in English translation matters, as these poems illustrate the literary power of the contemporary poetic imaginary while also showcasing their social relevance as documents of a complex transitional moment. In addition to the poems highlighted in this review, the poems by Radu Vancu, Ioana Nicolaie, Svetlana Cârstean, and several others in The Vanishing Point That Whistles merit serious attention. While I understand that no anthology can include every worthy poet’s work, as a document of its moment, I was surprised by some key omissions, notably Chris Tănăsescu, Ioana Ieronim, Caius Dobrescu, Mariana Marin, and Andra Rotaru.

This review starts by asking if reading poetry in translation can matter and, if so, what might be the best-case scenario for Anglophone readers. Obviously, there is no one response since there is no one ideal reader of translated poetry. Perhaps, though, reading translated Romanian poetry can show readers how to mourn better for what must be lost in any transition. It is important to note, however, that source and target-language fidelities are not the only sites of potential loss, since irony and sincerity’s valances shift as historical moments shift. Certainly, this anthology is valuable for the aesthetic pleasures that may come about as the reader gets to know the Romanian other’s essence through literary effects and biographical details. However, it is equally valuable for showing the complex and ongoing transition between economic programs and sociopolitical directions. So, perhaps a productive approach to reading Romanian poetry in translation is to read it as a matter of learning to mourn better.

Notes

[1]. In defining “fracturism,” Mugur quotes (in translation) from Marius Ianuș and Dumitru Crudu’s “Manifestul Fracturist” (The fracturist manifesto): “‘fracturism is the first model of a radical break from postmodernism.’” Moreover, it is “‘a movement developed by writers who live as they write, excluding social lies from their poetry; the writers who adhere to this movement have no career expectations and ambitions, they do not perceive art as a form of business from which one can draw any profit’” (p. 5). The first, short version of the manifesto was written in September 1998 and published in the daily Monitorul de Brașov in October 1998; the extended version was published in the journal Paralela 45 1–2 (1999): 10–12. The Romanian-language text is also published online at http://www.poezie.ro/index.php/essay/202813/Manifestul_Fracturist.

[2]. Gene Tanta, “Gene Tanta on Mircea Ivănescu,” Montevidayo (blog), September 26, 2011, http://www.montevidayo.com/gene-on-mircea-ivanescu/.

[3]. Mining was one of Romania’s several industrial means of production nationalized, without compensation, by the incoming 1948 communist government.

[4]. For more context and a definition, see Kyle Chayka, “WTF is ... Relational Aesthetics,” Hyperallergic (blog), February 8, 2011, http://hyperallergic.com/18426/wtf-is-relational-aesthetics/.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-romania.

Citation: Gene Tanta. Review of Mugur, Paul Doru; Sorkin, Adam J.; Serea, Claudia, eds., The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry. H-Romania, H-Net Reviews. July, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43729

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