Paper Children

by Mariana Marin, Adam J. Sorkin (Translator, Introduction), Nina Cassian (Preface)

The age ofthe sublime, seductive poem
is gone.
Blackest thought and barbed wire
will remember only these elegies

and a ferocious solitude,
seductive, sublime…

—Mariana Marin (1956-2003)

Genres: Poetry, Romanian Literature

128 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2006

About the author

Mariana Marin a absolvit, în 1980, Facultatea de Litere a Universității din București (secția română-engleză), în studenție fiind membră a Cenaclului de Luni. Debutează un an mai târziu cu Un război de o sută de ani, distins cu premiul Uniunii Scriitorilor din România pentru debut, iar în 1982 este coautoare a unuia dintre cele două volume colective legendare ale Generației 80, Cinci. A fost profesoară de gimnaziu vreme de aproape un deceniu. În 1990 ajunge la Paris, de unde se va întoarce devenind redactor la „Contrapunct”, revistă fondată la câteva zile după Revoluția din decembrie 1989. Se îmbolnăvește de tuberculoză, de care se tratează în sanatoriul de la Moroieni. Revenită în București, publică, în 1999, una dintre cele mai puternice și mai tulburătoare cărți de poezie de la sfârșitul secolului trecut, Mutilarea artistului la tinerețe, pentru care îi este decernat Premiul Uniunii Scriitorilor din România și Premiul ASPRO. Moare în primăvara lui 2003, în urma unui accident vascular cerebral.

Antume: Un război de o sută de ani, Albatros, 1981; Axa, 2001; Cinci, Litera, 1982 (antologie colectivă, avându-i coautori pe Romulus Bucur, Bogdan Ghiu, Alexandru Mușina și Ion Bogdan Lefter, cu ilustrații de Tudor Jebeleanu); Aripa secretă, Cartea Românească, 1986; Atelierele, Cartea Românească, 1990; Mutilarea artistului la tinerețe, Editura Muzeului Literaturii Române, 1999; Zestrea de aur, Editura Muzeului Literaturii Române, 2002 (integrala poetică, inclusiv douăzeci și unu de poeme inedite, cu o prefață de Costi Rogozanu).

Postume: Scrisoare deschisă, Editura Casa Radio, 2014 (audiobook cuprinzând 27 de poeme rostite la radio între 1991 și 2002, cu ilustrații de Tudor Jebeleanu și o prefață de Nicolae Manolescu); O singurătate feroce, Editura Tracus Arte, 2015 (antologie alcătuită de Teodor Dună); La întretăierea drumurilor comerciale, Editura Cartier, 2021 (antologie alcătuită de Claudiu Komartin, cu o prefață de Teona Farmatu).

Traduceri: Au carrefour des grandes routes commerciales, EST, 1990 (traducere în limba franceză de Sebastian Reichmann); Les ateliers, EST, 1991 (traducere în limba franceză de Alain Paruit); Paper Children, Ugly Duckling Press, 2007 (traducere în limba engleză de Adam J. Sorkin, cu introduceri de Nina Cassian și Adam J. Sorkin); Zestrea de aur / La dote d’oro, Editura Pavesiana, 2013 (ediție bilingvă, traducere în limba italiană de Clara Mitola, cu o prefață de Claudiu Komartin).

Reviews

[Raluca Marcu · Rating 4 out of 5]

So sad it's so hard to find her books anywhere.

[Alexandru Madian · Rating 4 out of 5]

“One can readily see why many of the poems in Paper Children were once suppressed, although I would argue that Marin is not at heart a political poet. She is, however, unmistakably an angry one. Her poems have moments of difficulty, with demanding, at times opaque imagery and knots of syntax. As in the work of other late twentieth-century women poets in Romania, Marin’s poetry shows little tendency towards verbal wit and linguistic play. Rather, it is solemnly expressionistic in its mood of stoic resignation and attitude of moral condemnation as she perceives, and judges, the world through what she termed ‘the machinery of my sickened glance.’ Her imagination is engaged by the brutish, the ridiculous, the tragic, the macabre, rather than, say, by songs of love or erotic celebrations. Her somber poems have more the character of grave elegies, reflective meditations on the demise of the possibility of individual integrity, the denial of meaningful interpersonal connection. The landscape of Marin’s poetical universe is one of ideals mocked and mortality embraced, with the latter, as suggested by the feminine gender of the word death (moarte) in the Romanian language, sometimes conceptualized as a woman (…), but at other moments as an ambiguously unwanted male presence, causing love and erotic life to turn cynical and corrupt. ‘All night long death lay between my breasts,’ begins one of her most harrowing poems of love—that is, love lost and irretrievable” (p. xiii)

The Water Tower

A hundred years’ war
at the crossroads of the great trade routes —
I knew all too well what was in store for me!
Here I am,
slowly turning the machinery of my sickened glance
toward the corkscrewing sounds
which will bring my celestial idiom to its close.
Should I tell my tale of memory’s futility,
so terribly youthful at the heart of the facts?
Or (even better), of my secluded way
through the milky smog of the elements
one winter morning?
Should I stop fiction in its tracks
on these steps of the water tower
built between the two wars
castellated like a predictable recollection,
and just as sweet?
Or (even better) in contemporary catacombs
set in motion the machinery of my glance
toward the trembling and fright of those who read me?
But the facetious eye comes and taps me on the shoulder:
“Honey, I’ve seen plenty of others just like you!”

Even better this way,
nurturing the celestial seeding
around the water tower,
castellated and sweet,
every possible crime on its flags…
(p. 7)

Love Poem

I bring you back to mind
as dwarf vegetation
that began by spreading over the house
and choked the darkened shore
of my early childhood.
Just as, one fine day,
Andersen’s Man of Snow fell in love
with the flames in the stove,
so I too seek the truth
you hadn’t ever told me about
when you made up your mind to fling behind you
first a comb, then the wing of an ant,
the magical grass of the beasts,

and you became this same dwarf vegetation of
loneliness through which / I, the Man of Marble,
the Man of Iron, how can I get through to you?
(p. 15)

The Web of Water

When the silent woman comes and beheads the tulips:
Who wins?
Who loses?
Who stands by the window?
Who’ll be the first to say her name?
—Paul Celan, “Chanson of a Woman in Shadow”

Just as, years later,
I can’t let go of our image
(a young swimmer stepping from the water
to the riverbank
guided by the last glow of sunset,
I waiting for you on the shore,
then our play, the game of grinning death,
and the simplicity, above all the simplicity
of that dive into the heart of the elements),
so you in turn
shouldn’t hate me so much
for everything that could never happen
the exact same way again.
Remember only the web of weeds and water,
the swimmers in the heart
of sunset,
in the grave,
in the eye barely opened for an instant by death,
to which as yet they give no thought.
(p. 17)

House of Death

Between us no more than this remains;
just these paper children
we take across the street each morning.
A refusal to continue the species in any other way.
My refusal in times like these
to be yet another house of death.
(p. 19)

Destiny

They were in love,
but not because they saw each other only once in a while—
as was recorded much later.
They were in love because they had the very same fear
and the very same cruelty.
They took long walks in the old parts of town
and they rehearsed one another’s future.

/ dust and powder,
dust… /
(p. 21)

Illuminations

We understand ourselves more and more fully
in our empire of dry leaves,
and we take turns crowning each other
in the four decrepit chairs
from grandmother’s time.
Better than the buzz of power,
the sweat of weakness—you say,
and the teapot’s painted buds burst into bloom
(a necessity ultimately understandable
to our sickened eyes).
Each morning
we also cross the terrace,
length and width.
Better than the buzz of power,
the sweat of the rope—
I go on hearing, you go on hearing
what we’ve been,
what we’ll surely become,

necessities ultimately understandable
to living worms.
(p. 31)

Elegy III

We live a double life.
Here, the poem, the brutal dream, the lesson about verbs,
the rotary press of tomorrow and the day before.
Beyond the window, the ear of destiny
digging quietly in this autumn of cotton fluff.
High above everything, there exists
such a full-bellied equilibrium.
What madness, you tell yourself too late,
to survive happily articulating
the misfortunes of others!
But the ear of destiny
digs quietly in this autumn of cotton fluff
while you find yourself fitting mysteries
into fiction for the blind:
Here, the hero, aloof,
happy on a green roof
repeats after the magi under the eyelids.
There, someone who abandoned you
is lonesomely rearranging his own past.
In the mind, in one part of the skull,
rakes and saints battle and quarrel.
In death’s reciprocal angle,
liars and seers declaim and bustle.
Then you no longer know anything:
under the eyelids ice clogs the shore
as the rotary press of tomorrow and the day before
swallows the poem, the table, the brutal dream,
the lesson about verbs.
Your hands are empty and hang heavily down.
Here, blanched with terror.
Beyond the window digging quietly
in this autumn of cotton fluff.
(pp. 43-45)

Elegy IX

Oh, the guilt and horror
before so many strangled truths!
Who will testify
about the crimes committed against us?
Today’s simple words,
screwed into our only body
which can be given over to death,
will they, I wonder, make us good?
I am not a moral being.
Yet can anyone alive manage to remain
unsullied, maintain integrity?
Sometimes on tropical summer nights
when I climb down the evolutionary ladder of the species,
I see and think with a single eye in my forehead,
isolated and shattered.

Then I seem to hear curses and incantations
in a language in which we used to dream.
(p. 57)

Elegy XI

At a sanatorium in the mountains,
safe, ha! safe,
until one day (an ordinary day, of course,
like the day of our wedding)
I saw someone digging another face
into my young flesh.
With timidity at first. Later with indifference.
“Nothing can be more majestic than the spectacle
of a body engaged in dying,”
my new face seemed to whisper in my ear.
Nothing closer to the gods.
And so I started to live
behind two faces at once:
the first pale and lonely,
the other, the face you see,
on which, at any moment, I can display
many countenances, many eyes.
Look at me, then,
here at a sanatorium in the mountains
(safe, ha! so safe)
again taking refuge in an austere illusion,
swallowing the words of both faces,
talking with them and dreaming shamelessly,
in an ordinary way, of course,
as on the day of our death.
(p. 61)

Elegy XVIII

Fear is all that’s left at the end,
fear and my devastatingly certain impression
of the line
between a rotten apple and a firm one.
If I reached out
I might grasp the authenticity of my existence
between the chrome-plated chair and the window.
If I scourged my conscience
some good might come of it—
perhaps a fistful of aromatic ashes, fragrant sparks
that once again sail into the world.

But no one drags the chrome-plated chair close to the window.
This I know: the earth receives the bare raw flesh,
and never will it return into the world the same.
(p. 75)

Language Written Under the Eyelids

The age of the sublime, seductive poem
is gone.
Blackest thought and barbed wire
will remember only these elegies

and a ferocious solitude,
seductive, sublime…
(p. 81)

Letters to Emil

I

I think of you
lost in those cities of Europe
I’ll never be able to get to.
Once again, the revolution didn’t start this year
but we continue to wait,
all of us Decembrists,
because this December
we lacked snow
just as we lacked many other things.
Only last night
somebody told me
I’ve been lacking lyricism for a while now.
What should I have replied?
I am a left-wing poet,
because from the left there came
both my sense of suffocation mired in misery
and a thorough understanding of stark necessity:
/ mold of my sickened eyes, summon the blood of dawn! /
Maybe it’s true,
Europe keeps its eye on us.
But we don’t blithely forget Europe, either.
No longer ago than this moment,
as scavengers pick clean
what’s left to pick clean,
I think of you.
This hot tea
I hold between my hands
becomes my mode of resistance.

And how can I possibly tell you
how hard it is?

II

There is despair as well as playfulness
in what I don’t tell you.
A kind of spider’s nest
I work diligently to weave,
a kind of medieval plague.
More solitary and more secluded than ever,
I should believe that poetry eventually must arrive
to dwell even here
in these antiquated lands
where people persist in silence, silence…
If you look closely,
you’ll see libraries still shiver
at the memory of the tremulous, rarefied lady poets
who invaded our literature at the beginning of the century.

So painful…

And now, near its end,
I calmly gather my papers
and destroy any trace of sincerity,
any trace of what I’ve been waiting for.

If you pass the border of the Zone,
perhaps you’ll recognize me
as the years go by,
rowing without hurry, painfully…

III

I could never describe to you
that monstrous moment:
I had a vision of my inmost self
in a place growing spring green
where I could see the Law and the Wall,
and on them, hanged,
the poems with the ruby beak.
I had to pinch myself…
Try to stand by me now
because what I discovered is terrifying.
You know I am one of those
who saw (not merely dreamed)
ravens butchering an immense wintry field.
You know, too, I scorn
and cherish this sack of skin
inside which to the last breath I carry my death.

But if what I discovered
is the fact I’ll never be
free,
what could you do?
How would you comfort me?

IV

In a fever I kept experimenting with everything.
Everything was supposed to happen (so I thought),
and beyond my painful belief in poetry
nothing remained in the dregs of the day.
I tell you, I kept experimenting with everything.
I wanted to discover the ephemeral boundary
where imagination diverges from experience.
The eternal split
(dizzying, dazzling)
where I know I’m expected.
And I, exactly like that character
lived or just imagined by Rainer Maria Rilke—
do I believe that poetry is experience, to a lesser degree emotion?
I know when I write, my own personal memory finds itself fused
with memories from reading.
Yet illumination originates from ourselves alone;
it should not be confused with salvation.
Perhaps this is why poetry heralds its arrival
through an unnatural suspension of the breath,
after which it gets lost in those cities of Europe
I’ll never be able to get to.
And I must try to resist,
to resist it,
my hands cupped around bitter absence.

Illumination should not be confused with salvation.

V

At Mayerling, you tell me,
on the threshold of an imperial suicide,
whereas in the Torrid Zone there’s been no snow for quite some time:
clinging to the house walls, rejuvenated skeletons turn spring green
chained one next to the other.
We, too, one next to the other,
will soon hide in graves
dug by strangers and not under the snow.
There, we must crush our souls
and our beautiful brains
until we are no more
(alas, we’ll be no more),
these reeds once thought to think.
At Mayerling, you tell me,
while for a long time in the Torrid Zone I’ve merely been
the plaything of this chimera
that digs beneath my eyeholes a mole’s destiny.

At Mayerling,
on the threshold of an imperial suicide.

In the Torrid Zone, I remind you,
the suicide of a brain on the border of an empire

under the ever more luminous ground

while the mold of my sickened eye
is swilled by pigs in a bloodshot dawn.
(pp. 89-97)

On the Fifth Floor

Poetry,
when the putrefied loneliness of each morning
thunders inside your skull.
On the fifth floor of a drab apartment building
in a notorious proletarian district,
poetry restores to you the migratory instinct
of small gray birds.
How much love
“When must everything depart from us?
Does everything abandon us?”
(yes, time once held cherry trees and ivy).
In your rabbit-like shamelessness
what kind of death
did you make your bedfellow in these recent years?
Oh, poor earthbound terror!
Poetry,
when inside your skull, like a miracle,
you feast on yourself.
There will come a time for frost and for the snout,
a time for the whip that lashes your cheek
and for small gray pigs.
(p. 117)

The Studios

It will be dark in the studios from now on.
The artist will retreat into his corner
choked with weeds, among birds
that abandoned their prey after their maiden flight,
absentminded spiders, innocent bacteria—
throbbing upon the evolutionary ladder
and learning the dialect of classified beasts.
From now on he will be allowed to say anything
about his passion for orchids and butterflies.
And about the smirk
that wrenches his face at the smell of the news
seeped under the door.
Some will go on murmuring sweetly,
searching for his name in dictionaries.
(Can they be the dreamers?)
Others with magnifying glasses will investigate beneath his windows
through which no one knows what he might have thrown:
a lie, morality, rhetoric, spleen?
(These must surely be accountants.)
Most, however, will forget about him;
and at night if in sleep
they become convulsed by racking laughter,
it means they knew just what to forget.
Here in the studios
amidst a myriad of masts
pensive masts
from now on there will be
a bed, a table, and the paper
which right this instant is burning in your hands, worthy friend!
Because there it is, you know it yourself: Everything has already happened!

And the contortionism on the other side of the festering mirrors;
and the problem of the window that can’t be opened;
and the clattering;
and the smirk…

Oh sacramental hour of the setting sun

For whatever is poetry has been oblivion before
consumed in the ashes that gave it fire.

Music! Music!
(pp. 119-111)

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is evocative like a fist in the gut. Disturbing, eloquent, confusing, wrenching, and beautiful, often in the same poem.

[Naomi Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really more of a 3.5 than a 3, but it wasn't quite a 4 for me. I had not read anything specifically Romanian before, so that was lovely. Marin has a wonderful way with words and imagery. It is so dark, and bitter, and angry, and for good reason. Some really wonderful lines here. I would like to read it again one day.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry in translation is always difficult. I'm trying to think of the most successful poets in translation—Neruda? Rilke?—and there aren't many. Marin should be one of them, though:

If I bind one word to another
I endure death
from a scratchy, indistinct sound
that sets my hand on fire.
(from "Elegy VI")

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't really like this book but I think it's because I didn't grow up in Romania

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's intense. I'll even concede to being downright scared when it came to the bludgeoning and cudgeling and shaved dog puppet skulls. And out of this intensity marches a blunt, floundering self-consciousness as engaging as it is off-putting. Did I like what I read? Yes in a way. No in a way. But I'm glad to have read it.

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://zolandpoetry.com/reviews/Paper...

Merged review:

http://zolandpoetry.com/reviews/Paper...

[Simona · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredibly claustrophobic and haunting. at times, the language was incredibly beautiful. very evocative of that particular slice of time in eastern europe.

[Asa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paper cuts on your soul you didn’t know were bleeding – each poem a silent rebellion that refuses to clot.

[Heather]

“And you, do you hear the blizzard already sweeping away our future?”