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One day the Great Theme will arrive, opening the windows, it will sit down at our table, will drink the intact wine, will shake us to the core. The most beautiful Mediterranean civilization will have by then long flung itself in the sea; while the thirteen months of the Ethiopian calendar will have long set on fire our Flemish obscurity. One day the Great Theme will arrive the very image of a child in...

I can't reread my old poems the being that wrote them distanced herself from me, with my very own hand I chased her away. I couldn't stand to see her wallowing in this reality without churches without God I replaced myself with another, but at vespers time I look for a green expanse concealed inside my mind or some tree bark and I make the pagan sign of the cross. At times reality...

We could have talked. We could have mixed our tears seed saliva sweat We could have combined book and flesh thought and guilt Oho! how we might have dissolved ourselves united as brothers Yes. As brother and sister: incestuous twins we could have tested limit after limit Shoulder to shoulder brothers ready to face fear at dawn death that keeps growing and growing life yet to...

I've been here too. In the blank white patch (hic sunt leones) on the map. Here. In the heart of the phosphorous flame in the core of the star of insomnia of the absence of meaning here where huge dogs prowl Yes. In the heart of the wish to die What incandescence. What incandescence What huge ravenous dogs race in circles around me race in circles around you You are...

When Gabriel left his country for the first time he was 55 years old. At first he thought he was lucky to have escaped the communist hell. In his own city of Sighet it had become impossible for him to practice his watch-repair trade. His shop, like many other private enterprises, was confiscated by the state and he was forced to work for many years as a night watchman. His wife Lea-who had been deported to Transnistria in her youth-insisted they emigrate to Israel, but when they finally...

For many, Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language. Few are aware of his lifelong fascination with computers. The heroes' glory might be measured by the length of the streets that they are allotted postmortem. If one judges this way, Sergeant Levarda must have been a mere novice in the hero business. "Novice" seems an overstatement, if one considers that three cars parked one after the other sufficed to cover the whole length (and width) of that street. Should we...

Will I still be able to write the poems that I never wrote all these years of ashes and smoke? Will I still find a strand of youth concealed between the world's words without nights of tar to drown it, without thick locks to fasten the ants sketched in my thoughts by illness? If only I had a civilized technique for survival, (I hear it haunts us, it isn't a ghost, it walks around here on earth!) If only I knew how to lose my shadow on time if only I knew how to point...

I am alive. Alive. My fingers look like nine little soldiers doing their drill in front of the window. In the building across the street a dustcloth waves at me. The hand doing the dusting is invisible. Only the dancing dustcloth. If I turn my back to it, I see an empty room. The wooden floor creaks and sags. How will I sleep here? I moved four hours ago. Or maybe five? The first thing I did when I came into the room was to line up my cosmetics on the floor. The bright bottles gave...

Editor's Note: The novel To Live in Sin (1996) is dedicated to the pogrom of the Romanian Jewish population in Jassy, June 29, 1941. This mass murder (over 10,000 victims), and the deportation of the Jewish population of the Bukovina region to Transnistria, in Ukraine, are the "contribution" of Romania under the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Marshal Antonescu to the Final Solution. These crimes were committed with terrible cruelty and they happened before the famous Wansee Conference....

I enter the room beside you. Take off my overcoat. Drop my handbag on the bed With bewildered gestures I take off my glasses Indecisive I stand fidgeting. I love you and feel frightened. I watch you waiting for you to decide what you'll do with this object (warm slender vertical) that I am We're talking together. I watch you. I do not touch you It's warm and we go on talking together. You do...

I rather suspect that when Sofia Coppola made her movie Lost in Translation, she prayed that it might turn out to be, if nothing else, a succès d'estime. Had that turned out to be true, her hopes would have had a nicely linguistic irony all of their own, since the French phrase is barely translatable itself, and refers to a phenomenon-an artistic creation unlikely to make much money but loved by the wiser critics-that, incredibly, is matched by no handy off-the-shelf equivalent...

And our house is down there too. See it, down there? There, just behind the school, there, I say pointing, but nobody answers, and when I stop talking I can hear only the sound of air around me, wind, it's blustery and I zip up my jacket, peer over the edge, it's a long way down, and there below me the lights have come on, and I turn up the gas so that the balloon keeps rising, it's not snowing, I am on the way up, the snow has stopped and below me, down there, is the motorway....

“Gabriela Adamesteanu . . . is the preeminent voice among contemporary Romanian women novelists.”—Norman Manea   Strada Coriolan She treads carefully on the uneven stones in the yard, which are still coated with morning frost. Her swollen feet are painful, even though she rubbed some alcohol on them last night and has put on thick woollen stockings. The weather seems to be turning. Dizzy from the cold air, she stops for a moment to catch her breath, pulls her right...

A few days ago I was taking a walk, somewhere around The New Times, rushing ahead with my fists crammed into the pockets of my jacket. The industrial landscape was so dire it almost made you cry. Despite the fact that the sun was out it was very cold, the November morning frost hadn't melted yet. I was thinking about all sorts of literary drivel, when I heard someone call my name: "Hey Mircea, how are you, darling?" A massive and silvery BMW had stopped by the side of the...

Author's Note: This biographical portrait of my son, who was born on August 24, 1977, in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, and who died on March 1, 2003, in his native town, not yet twenty-six, was written during the forty days after his death, the forty symbolic days of observance that follow everyone's death. Throughout those days I was unable to do anything else apart from thinking of him as I wrote, transcribing fragments from my intermittently kept diaries and trying to capture the...

Like the desert the northern landscape makes for absolutism. Except that in the north the desert is green and full of water. And there are no temptations, no roundnesses or curves. The land is flat, which makes people extremely visible, and that in turn is visible in their behaviour. The Dutch are not much for contact; they are for confrontation. They bore their luminous eyes into those of another and weigh his soul. They have no hiding places. Not even their houses. They leave their...

I saw a ghost pass in the mirror Someone whispered something in my ear I said a word, and left. Graves scattered with the mandrake seeds. A bleating sound entered the assembly. Gardens remained hanging. Straw was scattered with the words. No fruit is left there. Someone climbed on the shoulders of another Someone descended to the netherworld. Other things are happening in secret I don't know what they are- This is everything.

Ha Jin has this to say about Gao Ertai's work: "Among numerous memoirs by Chinese authors, In Search of My Homeland stands out as an eloquent testimony to the violation and destruction of humanity. This revered scholar of aesthetic theories has written not only about his personal suffering in the remote labor camps and the political persecution he and his family experienced, but also about the fates of many common people. His style is fortified by concision, elegance, restraint, and...

Ascetic he emerges from its belly to the grave. His days are not entered on the calendar and he does not gather the things that are scattered. Earthquakes do not shake him nor wink at death without him. Was he born before the earth or after her wails? A wind blew by and did not shake the tree. They said: It was no wind but his sighing. He is the unsettled Chaldean and it was no tree but the elongated roots of his village. Dried out he releases water into the fields then...

One evening, after weeks of something like forty jars of vitamins and dozens of liters of strawberry juice, the Bird asks: "Would you mind if I got married?" In that marrying, Beck sees his enemy's final victory. They were man and wife already, without having to get married. "Why?" he asks. "Why get married? It's been fine, it will keep being fine for years." "Not to you," she says, "to someone else." Someone else, two words that pretty much sum up their relationship. It...

1 Yes, I did write in my letter that I would wait for you forever I didn't mean exactly "forever" I just included it for the rhythm. 2 No, he was not among them. There were so many of them! More than I've seen in my life on any television screen. And yet he was not among them he has eyes and gestures and anxiety but he was not among them. 3 It has no carvings or hands. It always remains there in front of the television this empty chair. 4 I dream...

In the Jewish parliament The walls are burning. People are learning Talmud, arguing over commentaries. Suddenly--quiet, please! A gentile comes in And says in gentile-ese: Gentlemen, That's the kind of world this is. The learners split into equal parties Forbidding, permitting, and deriving. What did the gentile mean when he said "The kind of world it is"? They grab their heads. Oh, dearest God, the kind of world this is! The right says: It may not suit the...

The happiness of refusing happiness The joy of refusing joy Passionately keeping passion back Proudly breaking pride in ecstasy. Night in the forest on trouble's path All rustling has become one tree One secret calling cry for help One star glowing, a small eye. What's sense here? I don't know why-- Still walking, now I'm at the door Chaos behind. The door's a lamp Inside the cry of help before. The mussar house inside of me Murmurs, mirage of...

Will nothing of my earthly fame endure? Not even flowers, not even songs! What can my heart do? In vain we have sprung forth, we have come to be on earth. Let us enjoy ourselves, my friends, let us embrace here, as we walk the flowered earth. Let no one bring an end to the flowered earth, let no one bring an end to flowers and songs; they shall endure in the house of the Giver of Life. Earth is the place of the fleeting moment. Is it the same in the place where one...

1 In 1930, in September, on a boat trip to Cairo, I fell into the Mediterranean Sea; I fell with a mighty splash, since at the time the sea was smooth, unruffled by any wave. Nevertheless, my fall was noticed only a minute later, after the ship had already sailed a kilometer and a half on-and when it was finally turned around and sent back in my direction, the agitated captain gave it too much speed and the immense vessel's momentum carried it past the place where I was choking on...