Filed under: Peace Corps Romania | Tags: Coincidence, Craiova, Harlem, pallbearer, Peace Corps, poem, poet, Romania, story, Stănescu, Târgu Jiu, train, travel
I have recently been really digging a Romanian poet, Nichita Stănescu.
Stănescu was one of Romania’s most beloved contemporaries, and a lot of my Romanian friends (young and old, alike) can easily recall at least a few lines of their favorite Stănescu poem upon request. I’ve been strumming through some of Stănescu’s works online, and I still find the most exquisite to be “Poem” (curiously, the title is written in English):
POEM
Spune-mi, dacă te-aş prinde-ntr-o zi
şi ţi-aş săruta talpa piciorului,
nu-i aşa că ai şchiopăta puţin, după aceea,
de teamă să nu-mi striveşti sărutul?
As I was returning from Istanbul with Harlem, we sat in a hot train compartment, somewhere between the cities of Craiova and Târgu Jiu. With us were two young, beautiful, university students, and an old man. The man’s hair was frizzy and wild, and as he talked, a single tooth hooked out from the center of his upper gum into the air. The man happily drank from a two liter bottle of orange Fanta– but the soda had been poured away and replaced by a thick, crimson wine.
I softly spoke to Harlem in English– I have grown accustomed to casting out a bit of my English in trains. I am no longer deathly afraid of revealing my foreignness, and I’ve found that it’s a great way to meet people and have itsy-bitsy adventures that help pass the lethargy of ‘train-time.’ The old man took the bait, and asked where we were from.
As we conversed in one part English and two parts Romanian, somehow we came to that ubiquitous poet, Stănescu. The old man and I recited “Poem,” together. He chuckled happily, and then cocked his head and quickly fixed one of his squinting, wild eyes into mine.
“You know that I was a close friend of Stănescu,” the man asked, as if I was already well aware.
“Seriously?” I gasped. “Are you being sincere?”
“Yes,” the man said. “In fact, I helped to bury him, at the funeral.”
Some conversation continued on, but, as often happens to me, my mind overwhelmed my five senses. If I have ever asked you a simple question, and then forgot to listen to your answer (as I often do), this is what has occurred: a curtain of thought has been pulled down over the world in front of me. In that moment, I was contemplating this chance meeting with a man that had buried one of Romania’s greatest artists (and my favorite Romanian poet). I snapped back to attention as best I could, but I was still astonished at this coincidence. A buzzing smile soon fixed itself onto my head, and drowned out everything else occurring inside of me.
At the man’s station, he casually finished his two liter bottle of wine, and pulled an old baseball cap onto his head. He stood over Harlem and I, and put on his most serious of expressions. “We go different ways now,” the man said, “but our souls will know each other forever.” He then gave me his warmest smile, and was gone. Some slight doubt lingered in the compartment– were his words honest, or were they just the drunk ramblings of some (clearly adept) storyteller? To be honest, I harmlessly believed every single word that man said.
And now, for me, these words carry more powerful meaning than ever before:
POEM
Tell me, if one day I would catch you
and would kiss the sole of your foot,
is it not so, that you would limp a little, after that,
from apprehension so as not to crush my kiss?
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Love this.
Comment by caliheiny February 16, 2010 @ 7:19 pm