Posts featuring C.D. Zeletin

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by C.D. Zeletin

We find Elysium in each other, / It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, Asymptote remembers the life and work of acclaimed Romanian poet C.D. Zeletin. The three selections below exemplify Zeletin’s prosodic brilliance and his masterful juxtaposition of nature with emotional memory.

Translator and our own Assistant Editor Andreea Scridon honours the late poet:

“C.D. Zeletin, born Constantin Dimoftache (1935 – 2020), was a Romanian poet, essayist, translator, and medic. He was a professor of biophysics at Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest. He published forty books during his lifetime, including translations of Michelangelo, Baudelaire, and Verlaine into Romanian (among many others), as well as his own poetry. He was awarded a series of international prizes for his work, and was decorated with the Order of Cultural Merit by the Romanian state. Zeletin died on February 18, 2020, exactly one year after we published a story on his work. We mourn his loss with immense regret.”

It’s no longer enough for the soul

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say just: you, you, you, and you,
so it seems to me, in these strange timely spheres,
that in you I enumerate my hours and my years,
and you, from my ever weaker hesitation
grow of yourself an independent incarnation.
We find Elysium in each other,
It is your moment that, in my time, I discover.
To left and right, look up or down
you move, I move, we live without duration,
the sunbaked sweetness of stagnation . . .
Our lives braid into one another—a rope for a maroon
strewn out between the frigate and pontoon,
through which there is no chance in storms
to hide our grain of sand’s small form.
By memory we rise and fall at helm,
encountering the venom of the same realm,
of pleasure locked in a kiss,
as butterflies over a flower’s deep abyss.

It’s no longer enough for the soul, it’s true
to say: you, you, you, and you . . . READ MORE…

Finding Medical Precision in the Art of Translation: C.D. Zeletin

Translation is nothing less than a discovery, the study of a microbe through a microscope's lens.

In today’s world, where the study of science and the humanities are considered as oppositional, the art of translation lies arguably somewhere in the middle. In this essay, Asymptote’s Andreea Scridon profiles Romanian writer and doctor C.D. Zeletin, who challenged this false dichotomy, and through his work in both medicine and literature, showed the possibilities of inter-disciplinary cross-pollination.

I first heard of C.D. Zeletin in my Translation Studies course in Bucharest. I was spending a month in the city, just catching the brutal beginning of winter among the greys and blues of its urban landscape, and, sheltered in the seminar room from the iciness of the rough wind that is known to blow over the region’s plains, this was one of the lessons that I was enjoying most.

C.D. Zeletin, my professor told me, was a doctor. As he rode the trolleybus to the Pediatric Hospital every day, he would translate Michelangelo’s sonnets mentally, from Italian to Romanian, presumably wearing his white coat and gazing out the window. Eventually, the written product of this passion would see the light of day, published several years after its conception as Poezii [Poems]. These translations are considered, in fact, elegant and successful. The collection won the 1965 Edinburgh Book Award and Gold Medal. It would have a reverberative effect for generations of readers and poets to come; rather than adhering to Renaissance models strictly, the translation resembles a more personal search, thus producing an inventive and original approach that speaks to twentieth and twenty-first-century readers.

READ MORE…