“Strangely seeming to count us ”

Abstract

special section After the Wall Fell November–December 2014 • 43 left Constantin Severin, Text and Time 81, oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm, 2011. Editorial note: From Zid şi neutrino (Editura Vlasie, 1997). Constantin Severin (constantinseverin.ro) is a Romanian writer and, as a visual artist, the founder and promoter of the awardwinning concept known as archetypal expressionism. He is the author of eight books of poetry, essays, and novels, and his poems have been published by major Romanian and international literary magazines. He is one of the editors of the French cultural magazine Levure littéraire. Carla Baricz is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Yale University. She is the assistant editor and translator of Romanian Writers on Writing. She has recent work in the LA Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Observator Cultural, and Magyar Lettre Internationale. strangely seeming to count us the leaves fall the houses are shaped like a brash thought in no one no one remains sometimes the poor hear the void in things the hands of the blind no longer matter their agility of pure bars caressing a word which thinks us with the nostalgia of the gods unborn too soon do we sink into the landscape of sleep and iron with fingers deafened by the cranial cutting edge of computers into a solitude of liquid helium and pulverized heart into the vacuous mouth of objects only the word can still save us the word that grinds its own shape with the intensity of a star breathing in its own catastrophe the word through which can be seen the violet ribs of children successive workers with darkened complexions resembling statistical figures the bandage of the wares masking the rotting canals we live approximately with an eye dissected by speed astounded we do not notice how the hunting dogs return their little Sumerian tablets around their necks who are you coming out of the net of time touching with a sprig of myrtle our space ah sleep raises cities on paralytic claws their music drifts from the future though the cybernetic bells snow a deaf blueness Translation from the Romanian By Carla Baricz Strangely seeming to count us . . .” Constantin Severin “ ...