II. Bucharest-Budapest, nicăieri mai acasă
Mai mişc din mâini şi din picioare, uneori,
dar sexul, ca un ac strâmb de busolă,
arată tot spre România; zac
în Buda, pe-un pat dublu, plutind lat
în aerul condiţionat supt de
pe dunăre şi parcă mă înec
în limbile de dublaj ale filmelor
când citesc buzele plesnind sub sticla
acvariului cu numai paişpe posturi...
parcă nicăieri nu ne-am simţit mai acasă.
Asta de unde ai mai scos-o?, aud,
aşa aş crede, de fapt e-o replică
de undeva din noapte, în ungureşte...
sau e muzica zidurilor pe întuneric.
Tatăl lui Joszef
Attila era puţin
român: complet maghiar.
Andras Gerevich erezie, Tiresias se însoară
Maşina gonind
un zumzăit de viespe —
trupul sub haine.
Ne aciuasem la crâşma Corvinus
de pe Király ucza —
colegul de vin roşu într-una
tachina, Dunărea
da, e a vostră (cuvântu cică-i dacic, tralala), dar rahatul
e-al nostru, din amonte,
deci, poftă bună. Şi-apoi ciocnea
cu mine, drăgăstos:
e limpede? Şi conspiram să vină
ziua... Zicea maghiarul:
ne umplem cu vin, cuvinte
şi timp şi-ncet lumina
o să apară
ieşindu-ne pe nas — astfel vom mirosi soarele.
din poemul Europa. Epitlam țigănesc
MARGENTO
Listen to the poem performed by the author and his band:
In simplest terms, there is no one like Chris Tanasescu active in contemporary Romanian poetry—or, possibly anywhere. His poetics is fueled by notions of community at both the most immediate and most abstract level, and his poems, like their author, stay constantly in motion. Chris borrows equally from his vast familiarity with poetries east and west, channeling Jerome Rothenberg one minute and the surrealist master Gellu Naum the next. He infuses his poetry, in equal measure, with the manic energy of his performance-poetry band MARGENTO and his continuing fascination with complex mathematics. All of these intricacies plays out at the sentence level, where Chris toys relentlessly with language and context, bending words and sounds to refract the many dimensions of his poetry, from the personal and (or) political to the satiric or romantic. All of these things are present in the content of Chris's poems, but they come across even more vividly in the language he uses, which I've done my level best to convey here.
[Editor's note: The audio recording above consists of music composed and performed by Costin Dumitrache and Valentin Baicu, and vocals by Chris Tanasescu.]
[Editor's note: The audio recording above consists of music composed and performed by Costin Dumitrache and Valentin Baicu, and vocals by Chris Tanasescu.]
MARGENTO (Chris Tănăsescu), Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, is a computational poet, performer, and academic active in Europe and North America. While continuing his work on the Graph Poem project, he is currently editing a computationally assembled Belgian poetry anthology.
Martin Woodside is a writer, translator, and a founding member of Calypso Editions. He has published five books for children, a chapbook of poetry, Stationary Landscapes, and an anthology of Romanian poetry in translation, Of Gentle Wolves. He spent 2009-10 on a Fulbright Scholarship in Romania, studying contemporary Romanian poetry, and he is currently a David K. Sengstack Fellow at Rutgers-Camden.
