Friday, 20 June 2008

ana blandiana

Perhaps Someone is Dreaming Me

Perhaps someone is dreaming me -
That's why my gestures
Are so soft
And unfinished,
With their aim forgotten
Half-way,
Grotesquely,
That's why my outlines get blurred
Second by second
And my deeds melt...
And perhaps the one who's dreaming me
From time to time is plucked
From sleep,
Awoken,
Carried by force into
His true life,
That's why I darken
Suspended sometimes
As from a thread that melts with snow,
Without knowing
If he will fall asleep again
So that something might happen to me
Again.

trans Peter jay and Anca Cristofovici
Posted by at
Labels: ,

3 comments:

Marion McCready said...

oh I like this alot!

21 June 2008 at 18:05
Roxana said...

nice to see some activity here again :-)
so I gather that you like what you are reading. I think her poetry translates very well into english. and I know you don't like to relate the works to the real person who signs as the author, but in her case it's just so amazing, if you could see and hear her talk, it is exactly like her self-portrait here, she is so beautiful and with soft-gestures and the most frail and dreamy voice I've ever heard. to think that she could also be so courageous as to stand up against the communist regime by herself and provide such a moral example to everybody through her whole life. as you can see, I am quite in awe of her :-)

21 June 2008 at 22:54
swiss said...

i did have a look at some biographical information about her but i think it's almost impossible for us here to imagine what it was like for her to write under the conditions of the old regime. i'm thinking of a poem like totul, which here, looks like a list but when you get some insight into it, see the reaction about it!

i wrote something about this in one of my hungarian titled poems a while back but again, that's all very well, and i can do so because i know a few people here who grew up in the east, but to us, who can say anything, it seems so very distant and strange

22 June 2008 at 10:08

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)