EUGEN JEBELEANU

Back with my poetry series. Cha! Here's the poet I picked for my poetry workshop project:


EUGEN JEBELEANU (1911-1991), one of Romania's most important and challenging 20th century poets, is virtually unknown in the West. He published more than 12 collections of poems, received numerous prestigious European literary awards (including the Italian Taormina Prize, and the Austrian Herder Prize), and in the 1970s was nominated by the Romanian Academy for the Nobel Prize.


FLOWERS AT THE STATUE OF EMINESCU

Why you would find this useful, nobody knows.
Meaning it isn't useful at all.
The poetry of poverty
is getting stronger everywhere.
The only strong ones
are those who can mount.
The horses get weaker and weaker,
and the horsemen more and more bestial.
And the ribs of the horses
are solar jewels
in the prison of dead visions.
And we deserve all these things
because we have earned them.
Now you are bronze,
and you don't care about anything.
Or, maybe, I don't know ...
Because, last night
it seemed to me that
cautiously rotating
your infinite
oceanic
eyes
you pulled one carnation
from the wreath caressing your back
and swallowed it
secretly.

DIDO

Immobile
you are more beautiful
than in life.

Sublime.
Death found you
a perfect rhyme.

If you could see yourself
you would not want
ever
to have lived.


DIALECTICS

I learned from the water
how not to flow
I learned from the plow
how not to plow
and from life I learned
how to disappear



read more translations here:
http://www.slope.org/archive/seven/eugen.html

thanks, Slope! a dog could truly do my job!