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1 One fine day, Kosef J found himself released from prison. It all started with the rattling of the chains that secured the two locks on the elevator. Then the doors at the very end of the corridor were flung open. Lastly, there was some swearing followed by the creaking of the breakfast trolley. But only when the two elderly prison guards walked past Kosef J’s cell without even breaking stride did he realize that something unusual was about to happen.  In the first few...

A hidden gem of Romanian literature, unknown abroad and a specialized taste at home, Mircea Horia Simionescu’s Onomasticon offers English-language readers a festival of delight. An invented dictionary of first names, its entries vacillate between brief descriptions (a gnomic utterance, an image, or sometimes only a street address) and long, more-or-less realistic narratives inspired (however distantly) by the name. While the invented reference book may remind readers of Jorge Luis...

Hope returned that afternoon when the stranger showed her the photograph of an old house in Bessarabia. The real-estate agency’s closing had been a disaster. Marina had been trying to turn ruin into a passing dilemma for weeks, so when the new client popped out of nowhere, she took it as a sign. He was a distinguished gentleman of uncertain age. Unlike so many others, he was determined to buy. He had an old-timey air, and it seemed right to meet over tea in the airy garden of a...

The shovels’ dull thud mixed with the steady patter of rain. The trench deepened. Squishing through mud, the three workers vanished into its depths. By now there was nothing to see from the street but sodden earflaps and peaks of caps. Black dirt shot through the air. Smaller clods rolled on the asphalt. The rift was almost half a meter long. In the ditch, the workers unearthed a length of pipe, like the belly of an antediluvian fish. “Nice hole, huh? Go check we got what we...

In the spring of 2005 an exorcism took place in a small, unfinished monastery in Vaslui County in northwestern Romania. Casting out demons is more common in Romania than in the West, but there was nothing typical about this rite. A single priest officiated, whereas Church policy requires three. The person undergoing the ritual is generally a willing, quiet participant, accompanied by family. On this occasion, the hallucinating and unwilling victim lay restrained on an improvised stretcher...

Very early in the morning, Ion would help Mrs. Ignătescu put the carpets onto the frame in the yard and beat them with a switch or a stick. The dust rose and spread through the yard like mist—the rabbits took fright and scattered, while the chickens withdrew indignantly to their coops at the far end. Mrs. Ignătescu’s dogs barked. The racket woke all the tenants. Mrs. Năstase brought her carpets as well. A window opened, and a shrill voice inside maintained that...

In 1966, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu issued Decree 770, criminalizing abortion. After that, women found their own ways to end unwanted pregnancies, no matter the risk. With money and contacts, one could arrange curettage—then the procedure would be performed without anesthesia in a garage or on a kitchen table. On rare occasions, a gynecologist would assist. Most women learned to terminate a pregnancy on their own. A catheter was introduced into the uterus. Through it,...

1. it’s rumored that the amigo, the good buddy came to town. so people hurry to see for themselves and for a minute we begin to believe as well. but in the square there’s only a man more foolish and more down on his luck than we. he stands in the middle of the square his hand held out and says he’s our buddy, the amigo. everyone standing in line curses him because now, at christmas, we hoped a different buddy would appear, the true friend. this guy calls himself...

A plump face, an old suit with a too-long skirt, her hair permed.  Nana looked like that when she’d met us, at the beginning of the first year at the university.  Older than she would seem ten years later, when, thanks to me, she’d meet her future husband.  Was he the first?  The second?  I'll never know. When she still put her hair in rag curlers she brought from home, those evenings in the cramped room stinking of crowded bodies, of Nivea cream...

Father went to war. Then he died in the war. When our neighbors found out the news, they looked at us, Mother and me, with pity. Later on they found out that Father did not die but he had eloped with a woman from over there where the war had taken him. This is why he never came back. Then the neighbors started looking at us, Mother and me, as if we were traitors. Contemptuously and repugnantly. Although I wasn’t at fault, we also started feeling as if we were traitors. Let us be...

how many words do we need to make ourselves clear? in cubicles and cells papered with thick letters we throw each other all-purpose slogans air balls that slam us in the chest, knock us down flying erratically— awkward counterfeits in the absence of genuine wings used only in commercials for organic chickens raised by fake farmers somewhere between Earth and Mars for how long can the orphic whispers distract death from its course over bright cliffs where trembling...

what would the savior have looked like grown old? would he still have lent his severe, nostalgic face to the builders of churches to the arrogant destroyers in quest of myths or guilty would he have healed his own joints letting the water remain water while the blind fumbled along their way? would he have given his last son to doubt or in the evening laying his head on Magdalene’s knees would he have seen the earth as round spinning on her index finger? Translation...

and so mopete has stopped in a bewitched interval of his soul, for him as if on a magic mountain where it's snowing everywhere, while many just sit and gaze out the window, boring themselves, idly elaborating theories about time. you can travel the well-worn path from the rooms on the ground floor— the dining room, for instance—to the rooms with numbers on the door where, from the terrace, you can admire the noble stillness of snow in the valley. and so mopete...

mopete, listening as a friend of his quotes wassily kandinsky, has a strange vision, a figment of his solitude—an ancient hypostasis, blotches without a trace of reality thrown upon the canvas on which, however, young nefa shines. young nefa: she is now very much not here—mopete will never invoke her name again. there seems to be nothing good in store for mopete. it's a desert, sort of, through which he keeps trudging on and on. right above his head, the...

vasilescu's father's friend has left the seaside to go to a monastery in the north. there in the mountains he wants to empty his mind of thought until it comes to entertain a notion of that provisional shadow cast by conscience, with its bitter residue of worldly time, like fruit kernels that pile up in a heap and make him count them, so that, here among the hills, he no longer can keep straight whether this evening is for real, or whether that tree elongated in shadow...

vasilescu's father's friend is playing with a beach ball. tentatively, he throws it toward the sea, gathers it in the shadow cast by his body, not minding the waves at his feet now breaking against the shingle. bandages of comfort unroll around him, around the wound of his thoughts open to the sun. after dinner he withdraws and, sitting in the shade, meditates. he reflects to himself that where this soon will have led, now that he's reached the limit, must be the sun...

mopete went to the theatre today. he took a girl, and vasilescu's father's friend saw him—called hello to him, too—mopete threw a meaningful, if too obvious glance at the girl beside him, and with a fixed look walked right by. the play proved to be of great interest. the girl at mopete's side—she wasn't young nefa—listened totally absorbed. mopete said to himself—now he'll have turned round to look at you—and put on an...

in the cellar, my father dead for so many years among madmen and deaf mutes their pants pockets stuffed with money and passports outside, lonely horses shod with crescent moons and crosses I feel seasick I am a tiny insect a stowaway on a wooden schooner exquisitely made by the master directly in a brandy bottle Translations of "surd ca o bute," "după pompei," "claustrofobie." Copyright 2006 Mariana Dan. Translations copyright 2008 by Mariana Dan and Adam...

for ioan flora store windows in which I can see you as a blur– the animals make way for me to kiss the glass. you're deaf as a log I ask myself why you ever came here to cry over the human race. my armful of roses smears red into the sky. I worry my dress will snag on a thorn. shouldn't it have taken place in an oyster? in a snail? or in freight cars where cattle wait without water? you'd rather be eating chicken livers with onion and...

An expansion of plants with water fingers Drink this and look The laced skirts of raw milk The subterranean giants drowned in the azure And lakes open mouths have remained frozen Four oxen under a tree, defying reality Kneel down and adorn their horns With flowers of deadly nightshade Through clouds passes the perfection of weeping And young lambs suck teats of rain The planet of sleep settles over fields The spring's current carries last reflexes Like the last words of a...

And I felt your pure and sad soul As you'd feel the moon float in silence     Behind drawn curtains. And I felt your poor and bashful soul, Like a beggar, hand stretched at the gate,     Not daring to knock and to enter, And I felt your tender and humble soul Like a tear that doesn't venture across the threshold of the lids, And I felt your soul, cringed and damped by pain Like a handkerchief in a hand tears are dripping into, While today,...

Don't you hear—the door of the next compartment just opened? It has to be a ticket taker. Who else gets the words out like that? Everything so clear and distinct: —Gutten Tag, geben Sie mir bitte! Feverish, tense, you try to calm your rapid breathing. Your glance fixes sideways at the dark, shining window. Only, you can't see the landscapes coursing into the night. You're in an express, an intercity. —Den Fahrschein Bitte! You pat your pockets as if...

In the seed of lilies I buried you serenely we loved each other in old belfries years unravel like old lace I look for you everywhere, God but you know it's too little I buried you in November when school girls went to lunch they didn't know you were in the wagon else they would have cried the pain was overthrown into the parents like defeated floodgates would tumble of paper, your old flesh how else would it be?—yellow and sad and I loved you in the...

House under construction with dried branches, like spiders, in your scaffolding Rise to skies with serenity Until the clouds will have served as curtains And the stars: relief for lamps on balconies in the evening. Between two chestnut trees burdened like discharged patients Grew the Jewish cemetery - out of boulders; On the outskirts of town, on a hill, Crawl graves like worms. The yellow dogcart waits for us at the train station In me reeds get torn with a paper rustle...

Life is full of unexplainable things. But, moreover, it is full of me. To be better heard, I repeat, ladies: it is full of me. From this you will deduce that I too am one of those unexplainable things, irremediably unexplainable. You are wrong, ladies, you are wrong like some weeds that think it rains when a cow urinates over them. You are some weeds too. When God shouts, or vice versa, you think I'm yelling, and you applaud. Ladies: the time has come for you to re-educate yourselves....

Dilapidated wall I asked myself Today why she Didn't hang herself Lea, the blonde Lea At night with a rope She'd have dangled Like a ripe pear And the street dogs Would have barked People would have gathered To see her And they'd have shouted "Watch that she doesn't fall" I'd have Locked the gate I'd have mounted a ladder And would've taken her down Like a ripe pear Like a dead girl And would have laid her to rest In a...

From the trees planted by dusk in our rooms that were set on fire we'll slowly untie the glass pigeons, that eternal foliage; they'll grow rustling on our shoulders and arms, and there will be no wind, but rather a pool of shadows, in which you cannot take root, a frozen lake, in which the drowned are competing for the crown of scales, and life is the boat at the shore, abandoned by its oars. A voice will come to us from the flames to stain its silver with blood, to...

On the intergalactic station Malmorius, Jaspar the Terrible feverishly prepares for the decisive attack. Who knows where in the Central Desert of Athyria, Commander Z. checks the converters one by one, the battery of star-cannon, reversing the thrusters, planning the defense of the Planet. These are the moments of unbearable tension, an uncertain hour when the Universe strains at its hinges: first Nestor Pentacephalus is fatally shot (only three microns to impact but,...

Friend Midear, you won't understand but listen The pain I cannot weep into a handkerchief The words are somber like a procession of kings For your soul with sad, dry lakes I called you with lots of love Your breasts are flowers without pots And they sting raspberries with a taste of milk The pillow cloud the freshness of a night Orange peels in your hair, stud farms in your desire Sun in your eyes, craving on your lips The flesh smells like hay after rain Ripe...

Author's note Ernesto Sábato's novel Abaddón el exterminador (1974) includes a dense epistolary chapter addressed to a virtual fellow writer, which begins "Dear, distant young man..." This response (published March 20, 1984, in the Romanian literary monthly Vatra) borrows ideas, themes, and even expressions from that and other novels by Ernesto Sábato, using them as references for a publicly declared solidarity. But the "open letter" to...

Love's mint has grown like an angel's finger. To believe: out of the earth an arm twisted by silence still rises, a shoulder burned by torrid extinguished lights, a face, the eyes blindfolded by sight's black veil, a large wing of lead and another one of leaves, a body, weary in the repose washed by the waters. To see how it floats among grasses with spread out wings, how it climbs a mistletoe ladder to a glass house, where with very large steps a sea plant...

Just as the sun rises every day, giving its light to the earth, so day after day, year in, year out, we Roma travel on, without knowing where we are headed but following the road that lies before us. A people of the road! Always our heart sings its sorrow in the teardrop of a song from beneath our soles, from the very earth. Grass blades turn green, trees' buds adorn themselves under the blue gaze of the sky, the world blossoms from the green of the leaf to the red of...

The Gypsy Princess and the Nightingale The truth is that, in the days of yore, the Gypsies had a country. Now they keep searching for it in vain, the wheels of their wagons wearing ruts in the roads as they travel them back and forth, looking for a hidden spot of earth somewhere under an out-of-the-way patch of sky. Only in their souls does the hope still exist that one day they will find their country. Then they will gather together from the farthest corners of the world where they...

It was simple it was evening it was October, Beretta, mon amour. You didn't even realize how I transmute from a mole, hounded through galleries of all sorts (oh, where did the euglena viridis about which I dreamed so much run to!) an astrology full of marrow and without regrets. It was evening. I was diaphanous. Chemical. Fire grass. Retching. While steaming amid the zodiac it was so much October and so much evening, Beretta, mon amour . . . It was.

It is bitter, each Passover, to read, in the luxury and voluptuousness of being The solitude of the four boards from the palm slapped over the cheek the morning tear urged against the abandonment of oneself and the shoe of the clown inside your brain -this is how he began each of his holidays, my friend, Mynheer. They say that in olden days bitter herbs saved him while his own skin was his tent and the vinegar from the clay burned the entrails severed from the psalms....

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...

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...

“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...

The pond of your breasts My pillow shall be; Your eyes my moons Like silver shine. Wait, my girl! Don't go away: What if I will not see you, Ever again?

By chance, the first roulette player I ever saw escaped with his life. Since then, for many years in a row, I attended hundreds of roulettes and I saw many times an image that cannot be described: the human brain, the only veritably divine substance, the alchemical gold which contains everything, scattered on the walls and on the floor, mixed up with splinters of skull. Think about bullfighting or gladiators and you will understand why this game soon infused my blood and changed my life....