This week’s Translation Tuesday brings you three poems from Romanian poet Traian T. Coșovei (1954-2014), a member of the 1980s generation of poets and a major influence on postmodern Romanian poetry. Of note in these selections is Coșovei’s use of indentation to flout the margin’s gravity, thereby providing the reader a sense of movement; given the speaker’s fixation on static moments in time, this motion feels paradoxical and almost dizzying. In “The Accursed Wheel,” the poet uses repetition, visceral and kinetic imagery, and rhythmic indentation to replicate a sense of thwarted progress. In “State of Mind,” autumnal imagery locates our speaker’s love amidst an awareness of the violent history that surrounds him. And in “The Last Supper,” a moment of heartbreak is preserved like a holy image when a scene of contemporary, mundane occurrences unfolds within a lover’s recollection as something almost eternal–again, repetition is deftly deployed to convey the speaker’s sense of temporality.
Translated from the Romanian by Andreea Iulia Scridon and Adam J. Sorkin
Traian T. Coșovei (1954 – 2014) was a Romanian poet of the 1980s generation. He was a founding member of the “Cenaclul de Luni” literary circle, a group that would eventually set the tone for much of postmodern Romanian poetry. He was the recipient of a series of prizes, including the Prize of the Romanian Academy and the International Nichita Stănescu Prize. Coșovei published over twenty books of poetry, literary criticism, and prose. A collection of Coșovei’s poetry (translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Andreea Scridon) is forthcoming in 2021 from Broken Sleep Books.
Adam J. Sorkin is publishing three books of translation in 2020: Ioana Ieronim’s Lavinia and Her Daughters (translated with Ieronim, Červená Barva Press); Aura Christi’s The God’s Orbit (translated with Petru Iamandi, Mica Press); and Mircea Cartarescu A Spider’s History of Love (with 7 co-translators, New Meridian Arts). Sorkin’s versions of Nicolae Coande, Denisa Comănescu, Emilian Galaicu-Păun, Mihail Gălățanu, Mircea Ivănescu, and George Vulturescu previously appeared in Asymptote in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2016.
Andreea Iulia Scridon is a Romanian-American writer and translator. She studied Comparative Literature at King’s College London and Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. She is assistant editor at Asymptote Journal, fiction editor at the Oxford Review of Books, contributing editor at E Ratio Poetry, and an occasional assessor for English PEN’s PEN Translates programme. Her translation of Ion D. Sîrbu’s short stories is forthcoming in 2021 with ABPress.
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