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      • Issue XXX February 2020
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  • Collaborations
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  • Interviews
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    • 2010-2013 >
      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-2(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-3(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-5(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-6(Sylvia Plath)
      • Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas >
        • Chapter-1(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-2(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-3(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-4(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-5(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-6(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-7(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-8(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-9(Rabindranath Tagore)
      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions

Poems by ​Cosmin Perța 

​ 
Pandemic postlude
 
I
 
Nimic nu s-a clintit în cerul acesta de gheață carbonică,
Inima mea.
Aceeași lume mizeră, aceeași vară toridă, munți de PET-uri peste
O vegetație timidă.
Ne umplem rezervoarele cu petrol să căutăm izbăvirea,
Ne-așternem la drum, sute și mii de kilometri de ceață-nainte,
Fără nicio siguranță, fără niciun viitor,
Doar senzația aceea de uscat din esofag,
Doar picioarele care oscilează mecanic între ambreiaj și accelerație,
Amintirea unei copilării oarecare ce se derulează cu repeziciune la
Liziera privirii, în colțul de fugă al ochiului.
Masca mea este pielea mea, voi intra în casele voastre și nu mă veți recunoaște.
Vom mânca și vom bea împreună, îmi veți spune istorioare cu copiii voștri și
Eu voi zâmbi amuzat, vom deschide a treia sticlă de vin și cu ochii mici și
Împăienjeniți mă veți privi ca pe un drag și vechi prieten
Și nu mă veți recunoaște.
Nu există salvare, deși ne amăgim în fiecare dimineață că e acolo,
Pentru a avea putere pentru încă un croasant și o cană de cafea,
Pentru alte 8 ore de muncă.
Ne amăgim că există solidaritate, pentru a nu ne simți atât de inutili și abandonați,
Ca în primele secunde de viață, când doctorul taie cu foarfeca chirurgicală
Cordonul ombilical. Dar voi nu mă cunoașteți.
Masca mea e toată existența mea, o serie continuă de prefaceri și eschive
Menite să mă protejeze de voi, rasă de ucigași slinoși,
Care crede că totul li se cuvine.
Nu suntem prieteni și nici nu vom fi, singurul meu răspuns e drumul.
Călătoria perpetuă, dintr-o lume în alta, dintr-o viață în alta, dintr-o impostură în alta.
Departe de voi și apucăturile voastre psihopate. Departe de lumile pe care le-ați construit
Pe cadavre.
Ambreiaj și accelerație. Nimic nu contează.
Doar fisurile tot mai adânci și mai dese
Din cerul acesta de gheață carbonică,
Inima mea.
 
 
II
 
Am trecut pe lângă școala cu igrasie în care ne-am pregătit pentru viață,
Pe lângă parcurile în care sporovăiam despre cel mai bun viitor posibil
Cu scântei în priviri,
Pe lângă apartamentul înghesuit în care ne-am crescut copiii,
Și toate sunt goale și triste acum.
Niciun trecut și niciun viitor,
Doar un prezent infinit și fără de șansă.
Ca nemuritorii aceia din filme care după sute și sute de ani se roagă
Să moară cumva
Pentru că nu mai pot suporta.
O baltă proteică în care viața se naște-ncontinuu,
Dar totuși, nu este viață.
O rază rătăcită de soare pe un perete umbros acoperit de iederă,
Vezi micii acarieni cum se ascund din calea ei, îngropându-se adânc în tencuială,
Vezi toată istoria acelui perete,
Cu toate poveștile pe care le-a ocrotit zeci de ani,
Măcinată și aproape de prăbușire
Și nu-ți mai spune nimic.
 
Un portret al unui bărbat îmbătrânit prematur
Sprijinit de geamul spart, privind în exterior.
Și portretul ei, de cealaltă parte, sprijinit de o cutie de tablă răsturnată,
În care un buchet de flori uscate de câțiva ani buni încă palpită.
Ea se uită înăuntru. Ea zâmbește din ramă
Și pânzele de păianjen se-adună concentric în jurul ei,
Lăsându-i doar zâmbetul acela plin de încredere la vedere.
Te strecori înapoi prin ierburile sălbatice ce-ți ajung până la brâu,
Te strecori ca și cum ai fi vrut să nu vezi nimic,
Ca și cum ai greșit și ai acționat o zonă melancolică din creier
De care în noua viață nu mai ai nevoie.
Fiecare pe cont propriu,
Fiecare doar pentru el. E singura soluție rațională.
O tristețe inutilă. O amintire inutilă. Totul trebuie uitat
Și totul trebuie să fie lipsit de emoție în noua ta viață
Pentru a supraviețui.
Pentru a
Supraviețui.
Pentru
A
Supraviețui.
 
 
 
 
 
Pandemic Postlude
 
I
 
Nothing stirred in this dry ice sky,
My heart.
The same miserable world, same unbearable summer, plastic mountains over
Bashful vegetation.
We fill the gas tanks to seek deliverance,
We begin down the road, hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fog ahead,
No certainty, no future,
Just the feeling of a dry throat,
Just the feet monotonously oscillating between the clutch and the gas,
The memory of an average childhood on fast-forward at
the edge of sight, in the corner, the vanishing point of the eye.
My mask is my skin, I’ll walk into your houses and you won’t know it’s me.
We’ll eat and drink together, you’ll tell me all about your children and
I’ll smile in amusement, we’ll open the third bottle of wine and, with shrunken, glazed over
Eyes, you’ll see me as a dear old friend
Without knowing it’s me.
There is no way out, although every morning we convince ourselves that there is
So we can eat another croissant, drink another cup of coffee,
Work another 8 hours.
We convince ourselves that there’s solidarity so we feel less dispensable, abandoned,
Like in the first seconds of life, when the doctor cuts the umbilical cord
With surgical scissors. But you don’t know it’s me.
My mask is my entire existence, a perpetual series of faking it and dodging
Trying to protect myself from all of you, a race of murderous scum
Who feel entitled to anything.
We aren’t friends and we never will be; the road is the only answer.
Travelling endlessly from one world to the next, one life to the next, one fraud to the next.
Far away from you and all your psychotic successes. Far away from the worlds you’ve built
on dead bodies.
Clutch and gas. It doesn’t matter.
There are only the deepening and sprawling cracks
In this dry ice sky,
My heart.
 
II
I passed the school with black mold where we prepared ourselves for life,
Next to the parks where we buzzed about the brightest future
With a twinkle in our eyes,
Next to the crowded apartment where we raised our children,
Where now everything’s empty and somber.
No past and no future,
Only an infinite, hopeless present.
Like those immortals in movies who beg after hundreds of years
To die somehow
Because they can’t go on.
A protean puddle which continually gives life.
But it isn’t really life.
A stray beam of sunlight on a shaded wall covered with vines,
You see the small mites hiding in its path, burrowing deep into the mortar,
You see the whole history of the wall,
All the stories it boarded up for years and years,
Corroded, ready to collapse,
It doesn’t mean anything to you now.
 
A portrait of a man aged beyond his years
Propped up by a broken window, looking outside.
And her portrait, on the other side, held up by a tin box turned over
With a bouquet of flowers, dried up for years but still pulsating.
She looks inside. She smiles in the frame
And the spiderwebs spin in circles around her,
Covering everything but her confident smile.
You slide back through the wild grass up to your waist,
You slide as if you were trying not to see anything,
like you got it wrong and turned on a melancholy area of your brain
Which you won’t be needing in the new life.
Everyone on their own,
Every man for himself. It’s the only rational solution.
Sorrow worthless. Memory worthless. Everything needs to be forgotten
And everything needs to be emptied of emotion in your new life
To survive.
To
Survive.
To
Sur
Vive.
 
 
translated from the romanian into english by Andrew Davidson-Novosivschei
Picture
Cosmin Perța was born in Viseu de Sus, Maramures, in 1982. He is a poet, prose writer, drama writer and essayist. He graduated from the Literature Faculty of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj. He went on to take an MA in Contemporary Literature at Bucharest University, followed by a PhD with a thesis on the subject of the fantastic in East-European literature. His poems have been translated into eleven languages and some of his novels are currently being translated into four languages. In the Romanian and foreign press there are more than three hundred reviews and references to his work. In the last ten years he has been awarded some of the most prestigious Romanian literary prizes.

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​VerseVille (formerly The Enchanting Verses Literary Review) © 2008-2022    ISSN 0974-3057 Published from India. 

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  • Home
  • About Us
    • Contact
    • Media Coverages
    • Copyright Notice
    • VerseVille Blog
  • Submissions
    • Poetry and Essays Guidelines
    • Book Review Guidelines
    • Research Series Guidelines
  • Masthead
  • Editions
    • 2011 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XIV November 2011
    • 2012 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XV March 2012
      • ISSUE-XVI July 2012
      • ISSUE-XVII November 2012
    • 2013 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XVIII April 2013
      • ISSUE XIX November 2013
    • 2014 Issues >
      • ISSUE XX May 2014
    • 2015 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXI February 2015
      • Contemporary Indian English Poetry ISSUE XXII November 2015
    • 2016 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIII August 2016
      • Poetry From Ireland ISSUE XXIV December 2016
    • 2017 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXV August 2017
      • ISSUE XXVI December 2017
    • 2018 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXVII July 2018
      • ISSUE XXVIII November 2018
    • 2019 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIX July 2019
    • 2020 ISSUES >
      • Issue XXX February 2020
      • ISSUE XXXI December 2020
    • 2021 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXXII August 2021
    • 2022 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXXIII June 2022
      • ISSUE XXXIV December 2022
  • Collaborations
    • Macedonian Collaboration
    • Collaboration with Dutch Foundation for Literature
  • Interviews
  • Prose on Poetry and Poets
    • 2010-2013 >
      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-2(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-3(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-5(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-6(Sylvia Plath)
      • Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas >
        • Chapter-1(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-2(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-3(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-4(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-5(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-6(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-7(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-8(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-9(Rabindranath Tagore)
      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions