Daniela Nicolaescu's debut collection is a stirring ethereal whirlwind that remains rooted in the earth, corporeal. It is divided into parts, Earth, Water, Air, Fire; and the fast-paced movement continues through raw earthly experience, watery furlings, twisting back and forth, airy imagining, fiery feeling.
It assembles poems over a decade of writing, from 2012 to 2023, across Romania, Italy, England and France. It is a bilingual edition, in English and French, but as a "free translation" (as the author terms it), almost entirely translated by Nicolaescu, it does not read as a parallel translation; instead the translations vary throughout, in what is kept and what is left aside in either language. Some keep the essence or atmosphere of the poem but leave wide gaps between the direct meanings of the words themselves. In this way the poems live in harmony, co-exist in the collection, but are also very much independent of each other.
I read this as a subtle commentary on translation too: the translator's difficult debates with themselves and others before having to make the final decision of how they read the piece in one language, and what they will offer from it into the other. Down to word-level, sentence, atmosphere as a whole; which word is kept for the translation if a double meaning doesn't work; or histories contained in a word, cultural or literary reference, unique to the one language. Ultimately translation is of course a reading by the translator, while keeping horizons as open as possible during the process to embrace other possible readings, and attempt to put something of that palimpsest into the final translation from which the process behind has vanished, other than explanatory notes. But there are no explanatory notes in Nicolaescu's collection, other than the introductory note, crediting the two poems translated by Radu Bata, and calling the rest translations freely adapted from personal interpretation. Inevitably, as the writer of the poems, and the translator, proximity to the text could not be closer.
Collected across many years, and across diverse locations, the poems reflect on versions of the self across time, and the person that moves forward, containing or dismissing the voices, memories, experiences of before. It considers the natural change and continuity happening to the individual on a universal basis. The poems are also very much contemporary, reflecting and speaking of our age. In 'Therapeutic exercise', there is a paralleling of the mind to a computer; a memory that can be removed like deleting a typo: "Your body is a memory, / from which I will discreetly fade away / as if removing a typo" (101).
This also contemplates the body becoming memory, and the memory as being something written. Several of Nicolaescu's poems pay explicit attention to the nature of the written word, as well as the relationship between the body and language. In 'Ungraspable':
Years ago, I stared at blank walls
until I could listen to
the sound of my mind
projected onto them.
Silent walls like pages
that could not have been turned —
playgrounds for ideas
to jingle and merge.
I wanted to be real
in the eyes of my shadows,
staring at me from the distance, but nothing fits in the body
— smell, flesh, or voice —
ghostly mind haunting the walls,
the pages of an elusive existence.
(97)
There is a paralleling of "walls" and "pages", which reminds me, although in a very different tone, of Apollinaire's 'A La Santé' (1913) written while he was imprisoned, noting his naked vulnerability ("I’m bored between these completely naked walls / Painted in pale colours / A fly with little steps roams upon the paper / Through my uneven lines"); as well as Henry Howard Earl of Surrey in England in the sixteenth century in 'So cruel prison how could betide' (1557), where the walls enclosing the poet remind him of previous encounters in this space, and reflect his memories back and him ("The void walls eke that harbored us each night, / Wherewith, alas, revive within my breast [...] The secret thoughts imparted with such trust, / The wanton talk, the divers change of play"). Here Nicolaescu appears to follow in this poetic tradition, where room and mind are paralleled, and walls with pages; it contemplates how the thought becomes a word, written onto the page. The line breaks show a sensitivity to the visual appearance of the poem as it corresponds to its meaning: "walls" and "pages" placed at the end of the line, faces the 'silent' and 'blank' white space of the page. Does this imprison the thought, or free the word? It plays between the silence of the mind and the sound of the spoken, between the shadows of thought and the flesh of the word, the movement of page in motion as it is being read, and its stillness, like a wall, before it is turned, or before the book is opened.
There is a very physical grappling with language that is reflected in harsh bodily metaphors. In 'To inhabit a language", for example, the poet writes:
To inhabit a language
is to perform an operation
in the night, without an anaesthetic,
wearing gloves like a surgeon
(171)
The image is visceral, painful, and asks how one really holds a language; how it may be entered as a space, or held as a material, or broken apart and examined.
Then the spaces between, the divisions and contradictions between languages, between selves across different languages and locations, come to a fore in 'The Distance to Cross':
Solitude inserts itself into the space
between
your dry clothes and your wet body
between
two foreign words
that can't speak through gestures.
Between you and the other,
two tectonic plates collide.
(201)
It delicately locates solitude between opposites "dry" and "wet", but between entities that also appear connected or attached, as clothes resting on the body, especially a wet body, would give the impression of something clinging. The "foreign words" are treated like 'bodies' too, treated as bodies that have the potential of voice, but cannot gesture, cannot communicate between then; and so, however close they are placed, the space between them is vast. The poem looks at distance between bodies, perhaps always foreign, even our body to ourself, different across different times, different across different countries, different across different languages. How do you word your body, see yourself within or outside a language, native or foreign?
Nicolaescu's collection Hyperboréen took me on a captivating disquiet journey through the visceral and dreamy, and an introspective look into identity through language, contemplating the location of the self between foreign worlds.
The book launch for Hyperboréen will be held at Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds on 7th September 2024.
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