Parrish Lantern's Casebook

“ What Should you understand? A biographythat hangs on my words like a ton of dynamite”Helena Stefoi.This is part of a poem by Helena Stefoi, a poet born in 1954 in Suceava county, Romania, and her poetry has a tough cutting structure and an aggressive style described as typical of the poetic voice of Romania around the 1980’s. This style was perceived as the poets only true weapon and defence against the stark background of fear and alienation prevalent in Romanian society. This poet and several other Romanian writers (Ioana Craciunescu, Ion Morar, Liviu Ioan Stoiciu ) featured in the book - Child of Europe (A New Anthology of East European Poetry) published in 1990 by Penguin International Poets (Ed: Michael March), which covered the whole of east Europe. The editor basically drew a line and used that as his criteria for who was in the book. The Romanian poets published in this book were all subject to communist rule under Nicolae Ceausescu, who’s regime was characterized by an increasingly brutal and repressive apparatus and, by some accounts, the most rigidly Stalinist regime in the Soviet bloc. It was also marked by a pervasive cult of personality, nationalism and a deterioration in foreign relations with the Western powers as well as the Soviet Union. This led eventually, to Ceausescu’s government being overthrown in the December 1989 revolution, after which he and his wife faced a hastily organised televised trial which ended with their execution. A year later Child of Europe was published.Move on twenty years, and Martin Woodside, editor of “Of Gentle Wolves - an Anthology of Romanian poetry”, was researching the material for this collection, at the same time as this country marked twenty years since the revolution of '89. Now a nation free of dictatorship and censorship, however also gone were the state funded publishing houses with their massive press runs of poetry books, eagerly awaited by a readership hungering for such work, in the preface of, Child In Europe Michael March wrote;“ Communist regimes were ripe for poetry. They even printed it at their own expense. There were numerous literary journals and young poets were published. Censorship was not acceptable, never enviable; but it was recognisable. With the lessening of borders, materialism will replace longing and poetry will suffer”.This left the contemporary poets operating bedroom presses & websites, the majority working in relative obscurity at the margins of society. Into this picture steps, Martin Woodside and Calypso Editions, an artist-run, cooperative press dedicated to publishing quality literary books of poetry and fiction with a global perspective. They believe that “By unearthing literary gems from previous generations, translating foreign writers into English with integrity, and providing a space for talented new voices” they can create an imprint that is committed to publishing books that will endure in both content and form, books that can serve as physical artefacts of beauty and wonder in a world of digital saturation. Excellence being their only criteria. Martin states in the Translators notes that;“In any anthology, there’s more left out than kept in, and this book stands as no exception. The poems here present a snapshot of Romanian poetry, one that gestures to a single truth: Romanian poets have been re-inventing poetry for as long as they’ve been writers from various generations working in various modes who all combine a strong grounding in tradition with the desire to innovate and the will to persevere.”And like a good snapshot, you want to find out more beyond the image fixed on the slide, here are two of the fourteen poets in this wonderful AnthologySumma Ethilica - Radu VancuOnce I wished with all my heart, almost religiously, to become a committed vodka drinker. I would have given even my soul for this.My alcoholism reared from the most respectable cultural sources: each glass of vodka made me think, above all, of Thomas Aquinas: 40 per cent liquid hell in iridescent light forced me to see the meaning of integritas, consonantia, claritas.Then suddenly you appeared before me, Cami, you painful teetotaller. Your missionary ways converted me to the monotheism of hops. Alcohol would now cap off at five per cent I resigned myself to this ethylene ice age because our love prefers proletarian sand in the urethra, cultivating in its place class hatred for the artistocratic cirrhosis. The only Marxist accent of a mystic love.I remember more of Thomas Aquinas having only my ever expansive belly to seriously rival the Angelic Doctor. But I accept this in good grace, because I have gone far enough to desire to be a good man, not an interesting one. For that, now, I would surely give my soul.Born in 1978 in Sibiu, Radu Vancu is a poet, literary critic and translator. He has published five books of poetry - Epistles to Camellia (2002), Biograph litteraria (2006), Happy Monster (2009), Sebastian in a dream (2010) Memories for my father ( 2010). He also published two essays, one on the work of one of the foremost contemporary Romanian poets, Mircea Ivanescu, called, Mircea Ivanescu - Poetry Absolute Discretion (2007), the other - on the poetry of Eminescu – Eminescu, Three essays(2011). Together with Claudiu Komartin, he was a contributor to the anthology, The Most Beautiful Poems in 2010 (2011), he is also a Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters and Arts and editor for magazines “Sibiu”, "Transylvania" and "International Poesis."The “integritas, consonantia, claritas.” line in the poem comes from a Thomas Aquinas quote “Ad Pulchritudinem Tria Requiruntur Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas.”, I looked this up, via the usual means, and found this translation by James Joyce "Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony and radiance". Radu Vancu finds it in the “40 per cent liquid hell in iridescent light” but he is saved from this by someone who converts him to a “monotheism of hops”. Through this he comes to understands the correct path to follow, and the realisation that his previous yearnings were bourgeois (the social class of capitalists) even aristocratic, in the process becoming “a good man if not an interesting one”. By reinterpreting the Marxist doctrine once prevalent in his homeland, the writer uses satire to say what he want’s about the society he lives in – creating a poem filled with humour and yet suffused with pathos like sunlight through good spirit.Shakespeare - Marin Sorescu Shakespeare created the world in seven days. On the first say he made the heavens, the mountains,and the abyss of the soul. On the second day he made rivers, seas, oceans And all the other feelings— Giving them to Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra and Ophelia, Othello and the rest, to master them, and their descendants For evermore. On the third day he brought the people together And taught them about taste The taste of happiness, of love, of despair The taste of jealousy, of glory, and still more tastes Until they went through them all.Then some latecomers arrived. The creator patted them sadly on the head Explaining the remaining roles were for Literary critics To challenge his good works.The fourth and fifth days he kept clear for laughs Clearing way for clowns Turning somersaults, And leaving the kings, emperors, And other poor wretches to their fun. The sixth day he reserved for administrative tasks: He let loose a tempest And taught King Lear To wear a crown of straw.Some spare parts remained from the world’s creation And so he made Richard III. On the seventh day he looked about for something to do. Theatre directors had plastered the land with posters And Shakespeare decided after all his hard work He deserved to see a show. but first,tired down to the bone He went off to die a little.Marin Sorescu was a Romanian poet, playwright, and novelist, certainly one of the most popular and better-known poets and perhaps one of the most translated Romanian writers of the latter half of the 20th century. More than a dozen books of his poetry and plays have appeared in English, mainly in the U.K. and in Ireland. He is author of more than twenty collections of poetry, among them Poems (1965), The Youth of Don Quixote (1968), Cough (1970), Fountains in the Sea (1982), Water of Life, Water of Death (1987), Poems Selected by Censorship (1991), and The Crossing (1994). His valedictory volume, The Bridge , published posthumously in 1997, was composed during the final two months of his life, while he knew he was dying of liver cancer. To weak commit them to paper himself, Sorescu often dictated the poems in this book to his wife, Virginia. Shortly after the fall of Communist dictatorship in 1989, Sorescu was Minister of Culture. On his poetry, Sorescu said, with characteristic irony: "Just as I can't give up smoking because I don't smoke, I can't give up writing because I have no talent." He often claimed a sense of alienation, saying "the spoken word is a crossed frontier. By the act of saying something, I fail to say many other things."Yet what he does manage to say astounds – Shakespeare as creator of the world is a fantastic idea, just think how much of our perception of the world is framed through the language of Shakespeare - we see, “the world as a stage”, a guest who is a glutton – “has eaten me out of house and home”, possibly because we prepared, “a dish fit for the gods” and “ since brevity is the soul of wit” I’ll leave the examples now and just state how I love the way this Poem plays out, with Olde William wanting to see a show, His? he doesn’t say, but first he’s bone tired and wants to die a little. This is poetry that resonates, that has within it’s conversational tone, a sense of irony that is universal, poetry described by Virgil Nemoianu as “rueful jocularity and the good-natured cynicism." that George Szirtes, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, stated that in Sorescu's voice he finds "the wry wisdom that sees through everything and yet continues to hope and despair." These are poets that are not chained to the past, yet have used their links with it as the tools with which to craft their own language, some of them working within a nation whose paranoia & ideology admitted no alternate vision, but by the use of myth and humour, with an understanding of their own history written and spoken they've revealed new vistas and in the process have created a poetry that is questing, as well as beautiful, that has an intelligence that shines yet doesn't glare.http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/n-n-t-h-o-l-o-g-y-o-f-r-o-m-n-i-n-p-o-e.html