Rice Pudding in the Praterstrasse
We were living between heaven and hell literally,
we were slender, nervous, we’d silence
each other with a silky tenderness,
we’d wipe our nightmares,
we’d make our beds, our boots,
we’d go skating on goddamn ice of life.
Sometimes we’d notice reality.
Then something would squat
in the darkest corner of the house
and would begin to whimper in our chests.
He was a reality-cub, just like us.
Alone and sad, whispering through tears
“Take me also between heaven and hell!
This puddle in which I live made me tired.
I can’t even eat my rice pudding anymore,
it’s tasteless because of all the crushed rubbish,
all the smug and cold words”.
What to do with a reality-cub
who whimpers in your chest?
We took it with us, between heaven and hell.
He seems happier since then
or, anyway, more balanced.
He eagerly eats his rice pudding
and which is odd for a reality-cub,
he dreams with his eyes open
and bursts out laughing.
It’s contagious.
.
Orez cu lapte în Praterstrasse
Trăiam între rai și iad la propriu,
eram supli, nervoși, ne tăceam
cu o mătăsoasă duioșie unul pe altul,
ne ștergeam coșmarurile,
ne făceam paturile, ghetele,
ne dam pe gheața ei de viață.
Uneori observam realitatea.
Atunci, ceva se ghemuia
în colțul cel mai umbros al casei
și începea să ne scâncească la piept.
Era un pui de realitate, ca și noi.
Singur și trist, șoptea printre lacrimi
„Luați-mă și pe mine între rai și iad!
Băltoaca asta în care trăiesc m-a obosit.
Nu-mi mai pot mânca nici măcar orezul cu lapte,
nu mai are gust de atâtea gunoaie pisate,
de atâtea cuvinte îngâmfate și reci.”
Ce să faci cu un pui de realitate
care-ți scâncește la piept?
L-am luat cu noi, între rai și iad.
Pare mai vesel de atunci
sau, oricum, mai echilibrat.
Își mănâncă pofticios orezul cu lapte
și, lucru rar la un pui de realitate,
visează cu ochii deschiși
și se prăpădește de râs.
E molipsitor.
Translator’s Note
Disappeared prematurely, the writer Mariana Marin leaves behind a complex poetic creation in which, thematically speaking, the tireless search for truth remains constant, a subjective truth that can rise to the height of the moral value that determines the vertical walk of the being.
Crossed by an elegiac, touching lyrical tone, Mariana Marin’s poetry becomes a testimony of a special sensitivity in the context of Romanian poetry from ’80s that imposed itself as a fundamental aesthetic landmark in a literature intensely persecuted by those creations with social themes, subordinated to communist ideology, which undermined the moral and artistic authority of writers:
“In the rose garden of the hospital
he himself had come; the truth revealed
and with cracked eyes. (His ways were cold and sharp!)
Of course, let’s watch it!
Of course, let me get his hands on it now!
To swallow it with my happy memory. “
(The last love poem in the rose garden)
Speaking of the essence of her poetry, her search for the truth with the means specific to literature, the critics see in Mariana Marin’s ideas an attitude of rejection of Dostoevsky’s postulate that beauty will save the world and an obvious admiration for the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard who considers that any aesthetic experience is valued only by synthesis with the ethical one without considering the religious component of this synthesis.
Poetry, from this perspective, also has the role of rejecting the warm, comforting truths, considering this type of discourse even a form of brainwashing with artistic means:
“Without my friends – the young German poets from Romania –
subjectivity would have sucked its finger even now
in the face of reality. Slightly grumpy and terrified by its own shadow,
it would have never understood why
poetry was invaded by the smell of butchers
and of the dissection rooms with continuous program
Without them it would have been harder.
It would have grown on my brain the little bourgeois mushroom
reading under the umbrella (with a real intellectual interest!)
the novels of the obsessive decade
or the issue of South American prose…”
(Without them)
Mariana Marin’s lyrical thread has its essence in the tragic and Dionysian, both concepts in the sense that Nietzsche gives, she talks about freedom in a period of “terror of history”, as Mircea Eliade said, a freedom that opens the perspective of the vertically flight, untouched by the disgusting garment of partisanship and compromise. Through the process of duplication, choosing one of the most touching faces in history, that of Anne Frank, the ironic, reluctant, and rhetorical poet Mariana Marin wonders about the truth that haunts her throughout the work, truth behind which the reader can identify a dubbed voice, which answers in a whisper:
“Where is the generation?
to tell me
about how I confuse ethics with aesthetics?”
(A.F. speaks)
