Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei
BuschekBooks, 2006
Read by Jenny Sampirisi
In her introduction to Occupational Sickness, translator Oana Avasilichioaei states that a translation is “a dialogue on paper. Between two languages. Between two generations. Between two cultures.” The result of that dialogue suggests that each of these linguistic rotations is routed in a translation of bodies.
Nichita Stanescu began writing in Romania in 1960 and published fifteen books of poetry in his lifetime. His poetry has been rendered in many languages, but English translations are rare. His work is at times surreal and, at others, comical, but always seated in the viscera, always embedded in the translations of body and place.
In “Self-portrait” he writes:
I am nothing but
a stain of blood
that talks.
And as we read through, it is clear that words, too, occupy this position. Man becomes a rock or a tree and this is treated with pain and longing. The rock or the tree bleeds. The man bleeds. Most importantly the words themselves seem enveloped by the flesh. Words bleed. And this is at the centre of Occupational Sickness. The physical anguish of words.
In one poem the cry “Mother, I fear words!” breaks through all the other listed fears so that we see words as potentially violent and transformative objects (and subjects in this case). In another poem a soldier dreams of a horse and when questioned by a child about the details of the horse, the soldier only repeats “a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse, a horse.” Signifier and signified tear from one another, leaving the word to carry the surreal emotional weight of the poem.
The body is central in Stanescu, but the body is not limited to an ego; it is also attributed to landscape and to words themselves. The sickness that infects the occupation of writing is the somatic nature of Stanescu’s words, the palpable blood-flow through them as they talk.
