N I C H I T A D A N I L O V

SECOND-HAND SOULS
SELECTED WRITING

T R A N S L AT E D FROM

THE ROMANIAN

AND INTRODUCED

BY SEAN COTTER

TWISTED SPOON PRESS

PRAGUE / 2003
 Copyright © 1993, 1999, 2000, 2003 by Nichita Danilov
Introduction and translation copyright © 2003 by Sean Cotter
This edition © 2003 by Twisted Spoon Press

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions. This book, or parts thereof, may not be
used or reproduced in any form, except in the context of reviews,
without written permission from the publisher.

isbn 80-86264-08-4
 9
Tr a n s l a t o r ’s I n t r o d u c t i o n

21
N i n e Va r i a t i o n s f o r t h e O r g a n

Kiril / 22 • Cyril / 23
Ferapont / 26 • Ferapont / 27
Lazăr / 30 • Lazarus / 31
Daniel / 32 • Daniel / 33
Celălalt Kiril / 34 • The Other Cyril / 35
Atichin / 36 • Atikin / 37
Celălalt Ferapont / 38 • The Other Ferapont / 39
Celălalt Lazăr / 40 • The Other Lazarus / 41
Coborârea lui Daniel / 42 • Daniel’s Descent / 43

45
Selected Poetr y

Senin / 46 • Serenity / 47
Din timp în timp / 48 • From Time to Time / 49
Lied (II) / 50 • Lied (II) / 51
Lied (V) / 52 • Lied (V) / 53
Neantul / 54 • The Void / 55
Despre poezie / 56 • On Poetry / 57
Poem / 58 • Poem / 59
Scurt poem de dragoste / 60 • Short Love Poem / 61
Chip orb / 62 • Blind Face / 63
 Căderea / 64 • The Fall / 65
Portret al artistului la tinereţe / 68 • Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / 69
Celui care vine / 72 • To the One Who Will Come / 73
Finita la commedia / 74 • Finita la commedia / 75
Peisaj cu îngeri orbi / 80 • Scene with Blind Angels / 81
Apus / 82 • West toward the Sun / 83
Răstingnire / 84 • Crucifixion / 85
Iluminare / 86 • Enlightenment / 87
Îngerul / 88 • The Angel / 89
Nimicul / 92 • Nothingness / 93
Peisaj diurn / 94 • Diurnal Scene / 95
Din nou, Ferapont / 98 • Again, Ferapont / 99
Profetul / 102 • The Prophet / 103
Trup / 104 • Body / 105
Lan / 106 • Field / 107
Second-Hand / 108 • Second-Hand / 109
Îngerul / 112 • The Angel / 113
Anatol / 114 • Anatol / 115
Invocaţie / 118 • Invocation / 119
Somn / 120 • Sleep / 121
Poem în O / 122 • Poem in O / 123
Apele sufletului / 124 • Waters of the Soul / 125
Peisaj cu mâini şi aripi / 126 • Scene with Hands and Wings / 127

129
Selected Prose

On Writers / 131
In the Author’s Cell / 135
Sound and Space / 139
How Much Fiction is There in a Poetic Text? / 142
T R A N S L AT O R ’ S I N T R O D U C T I O N

We lack, in translations of East European literature following

1989, a sense of the importance of religion to these writers.
Whether due to our more secular interests, or to the patterns
established by officially atheist Communist governments, we
have avoided exploring this aspect of literary experience, an
aspect whose importance we can gauge by the centrality of the
terms “Catholic,” “Orthodox,” and “Muslim” in the Balkan
conflicts. The fall of the Communist governments removed the
censorship that suppressed discussion of this topic with the
West, and this change has given us the opportunity to explore
East European spirituality more fully. When we examine the
religion and literature of the region, we find a relationship more
complex than we may have at first expected. This complexity
holds especially true in the case of Romania, where for forty
years the Orthodox Church provided a sense of Romanian iden-
tity, sometimes resistant to and sometimes complicit with a
strongly nationalist Communist government.
These considerations become more entangled in the case of
Nichita Danilov, a poet from the city of Iaşi ( Jassy), in the region
of northeast Romania called Moldavia. Iaşi is the home of Mihai
Eminescu, Romania’s national poet, and the city has long been
a center for the nation’s literary production. Danilov, however,
is not ethnically Romanian. He belongs to the Lippovan Slavic
minority, a group which settled in Moldavia and the Danube
delta in the eighteenth century, having fled Russian persecution
after the Orthodox Church schism. Although Danilov was raised

9
speaking both Russian and Romanian, he writes solely in the
latter language.
The Lippovan identity as religious dissenters has been instru-
mental in constructing Danilov’s own identity. His mystical
vision of religious experience seems to inform all his poems,
even those that do not contain explicitly religious imagery. The
imagery itself can be located in the Romanian engagement with
Surrealism, which has provided Danilov a mode for describing
an ineffable God. In his poetry and theoretical writings, he
argues that the divine is manifest in this world through surre-
alistic moments, that is, through jarring juxtapositions.
Danilov’s poetic technique is an imitation of this image of God.
Not only does his poetry express his relationship with the
divine, but it also demonstrates his relationship with the day-
to-day world. He is conscious of the jarring effect his technique
can have on the reader, and he words his poems carefully to bal-
ance that effect. At no time do we see Danilov detached from his
relationship with others, writing purely for God or for his own
amusement. He is constantly writing in the tension he feels
between the divine world and our own.
Danilov, an Orthodox Christian, understands the divine as
the Creator God of Genesis. The world in which we live is the
“created” world. Danilov also refers to another world, one where
the divine resides. Because the divine is the Creator and not the
created, he calls the divine realm the “uncreated.” His poetry is
a kind of prophecy, not of a world to come, but of the simulta-
neous existence of another world. The poems take place in a
world similar to but other than ours. Familiar images, such as a
window lit at night or a man playing chess, are set against an

10
indefinite, monochrome landscape; they are suspended in front
of green and black fields, void of intelligible detail. His prophecy
is a vision of our world sustained by these voids.
The presence of another world in Danilov’s poetry has more
than an aesthetic significance. In his critical writings he states
that he has in fact experienced an other world. He describes
visions, hallucinations that offer a writer what he needs:

Maybe hallucination encompasses more reality than

simple perception. Hallucination makes other doors
on the universe swing open. We move beyond the
world of the senses. Time acquires another dimension
and space another configuration.*

The other world in Danilov’s poetry is written in relationship to

the other world he has experienced. His poems are not directly
a description of that world, but they are analogous to it. By cre-
ating another world in his poetry, Danilov argues for the actual
presence of a world outside of the one we perceive from day to
day. He does not describe that world because the uncreated is
always other than this one, which means it is also other than the
words of his poetry.
This world is made essentially other by its ineffability. Danilov
places himself in the tradition of negative theologians, such as
Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Pseudo-Dionysius.
This tradition describes the divine in negative terms: it is “not
a part of non-existence nor is it a part of being” — Danilov
quotes the Areopagite — it is “ineffable and unknowable.” For

* Apocalipsa de carton 29 (Iaşi, Romania: Institutul European, 1993). All of the

prose citations in this essay are taken from this collection.

11
Danilov, the world “beyond the world we perceive” is a void, as
in the title of his major collection, The Void above All Things.
Because the divine is ineffable, no poem he writes will be an
adequate expression of its nature.
But his vision also includes a radical skepticism. The major
distinction between Danilov and traditional negative theology
is his emphasis on the impossibility of meaningful communica-
tion with the divine at any level. Meister Eckhart, for example,
presents a dialogic relationship with the uncreated, in which the
mystic is pecking his way out of his shell, while, on the other side,
God is pecking in. For Danilov, however, we have no way to
peck. The most we can do is passively wait for a divine eruption
in this world, the nature and timing of which are impossible to
predict.
When these eruptions do occur, more often than not they
confirm the incommensurability of the uncreated and created
worlds. Danilov uses the angel, the traditional image of com-
munication between earth and heaven, to show how unsuitable
these worlds are to each other. In one poem, an angel realizes
he is in the created world and hangs himself from his halo. The
earth is so harsh that even divine beings suffer. They are driven
to drink:

But what kind of angels are these?

Some are drunk, like they’re
coming from a party.
Some walk around the house
smoking and shouting, others sit
at my table and play a game of chance. (“The Fall”)

12
Danilov’s angels are far from Dante’s spiritual guides, far
from Rilke’s terrible presences. His angels are incapable of
functioning in this world. They arrive as incarnations of
incommensurability. Even though the angels come from the
divine, they are corrupted, sometimes battered by their contact
with the created world. “To The One Who Will Come” sounds
like a warning from one angel to his successor:

You need a heart of stone

to live on earth,
and sometimes it is better
not even to have a stone.

This bitterness results in brooding figures such as “The Angel,”

who stays in his room, smoking cigars and gambling, or the
mob of decadent angels who take over Lazarus’s apartment in
“The Fall.” Danilov finds the created world “a place of perpet-
ual suffering.” The suffering is too intense, even for the divine.
The exact nature of suffering in Danilov’s poetry is exem-
plified in his poem “Crucifixion,” where he pictures Christ,
another mediating figure, questioning God:

Father, I bit into our bread

our daily bread
and I found a tooth.
So I’m asking you, Father:
What kind of bread is this?

In this revision of the story, Christ’s moment of doubt in

Gethsemane is caused by the unexpected appearance of teeth
inside a loaf of holy bread. The fact that this surreal eruption

13
occurs in “our daily bread,” the place of holy nourishment,
makes the irony of a believer’s relationship with God all the
more apparent. The suffering that Danilov describes is not the
result of the absence of the divine in this world, a simpler and
maybe preferable situation. Rather, suffering is a result of the
world being in an inscrutable, unpredictable relationship with
God. Danilov describes this situation in images of his angels
playing games of chance:

They will play dice for a week.

Then, cards, for a month, day and night. (“The Angel”)

Other angels hold my mouth open

and fill it with champagne . . .
The rest keep throwing dice
at the table. (“The Fall”)

As a pastime for someone with divine knowledge, these games

make little sense: presumably the angels would know already
what the next card or roll of the dice would be. They must enjoy
instead the tumbling of the dice, the chaotic shuffling of the
cards. At his most jaded, Danilov suggests that the divine treats
the created world like a deck of cards. The unpredictability of
the world is something that the divine has introduced, for its
own pleasure.
Danilov identifies all kinds of shocking interruptions of our
world as emanations of the uncreated. For him, nothing
expresses the interaction of the divine and the created better
than Dalí’s surrealism:

Yes, the uncreated exists, you only need eyes to see it

14
 . . . We have to include Dalí, without a doubt, among
those who have seen it recently. Recall the flaming
giraffe. What is in each drawer of the giraffe’s chest, if
not the uncreated? (122)

The divine is marked by its frustration of our expectations. “The

Void” treats this problem directly. The poem’s speaker, having
witnessed a manifestation of the uncreated, asks a question with
appropriate gravity:

A hole opened in the sky above him

so he could speak with the void.
He shouted: What is evil?
Truth? Good?

The divine does not respond with the same seriousness:

After three days a response came:

a soft giggle
followed by a snicker.

Despite this response, the speaker must show reverence to the

divine. The divine has the prerogative to change, while the
person must be passive. The speaker continues with the same
kind of questions:

He asked: What is wisdom?

Love? The Soul?
After three days a response came:
a goat’s soft bleat,
followed by a horse’s
cackle, an ox’s squeak,
a dog’s croak, and so on.

15
The divine responds by unexpectedly juxtaposing incompatible
terms, croaking being as foreign to a dog as burning is to a
giraffe. The tears that appear in Danilov’s poems, such as those
of Daniel in Nine Variations for the Organ, are often tears of frus-
tration with the incommensurability of a person’s reverence and
the divine’s caprice. This frustration with divine ineffability
appears in Danilov’s prose as well:

Is the uncreated a thing or a being? Soul or puppet?

Who or what? Half goat, three quarters ram, and four
quarters teaspoon! Don’t ask me what it looks like! I
don’t know anything about it! I have never seen it, and
I never will! (122)

Danilov’s work describes a person called to a holy world that

functions by rules he cannot understand.
We realize the depth of this suffering when we read
Danilov’s descriptions of his work as a poet. Danilov depends
on his relationship with the uncreated world. The poet must
constantly attend to the void, he argues, because the uncreated
world is the source of creativity. To create a poem is to “take
words from the void . . . and transfer them into [the] work (29).”
Any creativity in the created world comes from an interruption
by the uncreated (the creating) world. Danilov pictures the poet
as a man who fishes, his hook resting age after age in a body of
clear water that is void of fish. There are no fish in this world,
but eventually a fish inexplicably appears at the end of the line,
in the same way that a tooth appears in Christ’s bread.
Despite his frustration, Danilov must embrace the otherness
of the divine. He therefore transforms his frustration with the

16
divine into a poetic practice. He imitates the unpredictability of
the uncreated. We can see the resemblance of the uncreated and
the poet by juxtaposing this description of the former:

The uncreated can take different forms. If the poet

[Emil Brumaru] will be good enough to slide open the
drawer of his memory, he will see the “uncreated” in
all its brilliance: a short creature with a red crest and
little yellow boots, walking from one end of the office
to the other. (122)

with this picture of the poet as a similarly eccentric creature:

With pants made of billiard felt, with a pink jacket and

blue shirt, a tie painted by a friend, an immense som-
brero, a snarled beard pulled into a sharp point, and an
enormous blue hoop in one ear . . . (14)

The poet in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is also dis-

tinguished by his appearance:

His head is shaved, his face is hairy,

a cigar between his teeth.
He tips his hat to show
a 100 lei note stuck to his head.

He dresses like this to shock

your fat little hearts.

Just as the divine is marked by its surrealism, the poet is

marked by his eccentricity. Both shock the world.
What restrains Danilov from extending this rationale to

17
the ruptured literary language common in Romanian post-
modernism, and what distinguishes him from simple sadism, is
his conviction that poetry wields a real power over the reader.
He feels a responsibility to take great care over the language and
images of his poems. We see his carefulness in his ars poetica, “On
Poetry.” Here he describes an eccentrically dressed saddle-maker
named Johann, a craftsman, as is the poet. “Every harness” that
Johann makes he tests “first on himself.” After he puts on fancy
clothes, he harnesses himself to a carriage for a short trip:

Only if the harness didn’t bruise his chest

would he put it on the horse.
Where can you find people like that today?

The answer, of course, is that poets are like that. Danilov sees
himself as a craftsman, a creator of poems. But the poems he
creates might bruise his reader. After all, this creation involves
the most powerful energies that we can imagine, the power, for
example, to set fire to a giraffe. The poet cannot ask his reader
to empathize with an object that might do him real harm.
Danilov therefore states that the language and form of the poem
should be carefully constructed, contending that the poet

. . . should take care not to use [words] in such a way

that they collapse without a purpose and without a
form. He has the duty to make a wall of the words
which came to him from the superior forces of the
spirit in the moment of inspiration, a wall more
durable than the Great Wall of China. (29)

18
He is arguing here against a poetry that is not carefully con-
structed, a poetry that does not take its relationship with the
reader seriously. Danilov’s own clear sentence structure and
simple forms are an attempt to avoid bruising his reader, an
attempt to fulfill this duty.
Like his skeptical theology, Danilov’s understanding of a
poem’s capacity to bruise has a radical edge. He argues that the
words of a poem have the potential to bruise not only our aes-
thetic sensibilities, but also our bodies. He tells of writing a
prose poem about a man with three black holes in his head:

Not long after, an inexplicable anxiety caused my

hair to fall out of my head in three places, each the
size of a large coin.
I burned the text in an open place — in a rowboat
on Lake Ciric — and I scattered the ashes over the
water. (The poem was not that great, I had found it by
chance in my coat pocket. I put a lighter to it and held
the burning end of the paper over the waves until it all
had turned to ash.) Not more than a week later, my
hair began to grow back. Within a month you couldn’t
see where it had fallen out.

The words that a poet employs can have a physical effect, and
not only on the person who writes them and those who read
them, but also on those who have not read them. Danilov tells
us that during a train trip, after his hair had grown back, he
overhears an anecdote that brings the prose poem to his mind
for the first time in several months:

The man who told it, an engineer for the roads around

19
 Dorohoi, had three bald spots on his head. I wanted to
ask him if by chance he had been swimming in Lake
Ciric, where I had scattered the ash of my poem about
Hans, but I held myself back. (21)

The poet may actually have the same power as his angel coun-
terpart: he may introduce unpredictability into the world
through his poetry just as he imagines the angels do through
their gambling. This combination of uncertainty and potency
makes the careful construction of a poem an ethical concern.
Beyond demonstrating that the writer is always in relationship
with the two worlds of the uncreated and the created, beyond
arguing that in this relationship the poem should avoid bruising
its reader (or non-reader), Danilov does not describe the precise
boundaries of his ethics. In fact, given the relationship of the two
worlds, he cannot describe the boundaries precisely. He states
that the poet’s words come from his encounter with the uncre-
ated, but their appearance is inexplicable: like catching a fish in
an empty pond. He suggests that the poet has a “responsibility”
to the world around him, but his power is unpredictable. We do
not know just how or when the poet can be said to affect the
world. Danilov’s ethics is a peculiar combination of potency and
confusion: the great power of his creativity is circumscribed by
a spiritual mystery. In the same way that Danilov writes in the
tension between the uncreated and the created worlds, he writes
in an ethics whose restrictions are unknowable by their nature.
With this situation in mind, we can better understand the spir-
itual frustration we find in many of these poems.

Sean Cotter

20
N i n e Va r i a t i o n s f o r t h e O r g a n

Truly, the best part of everything can be expressed in many

words, few words, or none, because it is ineffable and unknow-
able. It is supernatural, transcendent, manifesting itself
directly and completely to those who are able to rise above both
impure things and pure things, to climb the most holy peaks,
leave behind divine light and heavenly sounds and words, and
become one with the dark, where he who is above all things is
truly found. We say that this part is neither the soul nor the
mind . . . It is neither number nor order, neither greatness nor
smallness, neither equality nor inequality, neither likeness nor
unlikeness . . . It is not part of non-existence nor is it part of
being: beings do not know it, as it is in itself, neither does it
know beings as they are.
dionysius the areopagite
KIRIL

Călugărul Kiril stă în interiorul unei fântâni şi scrie la o

neagră psaltire. Aici vieţuieşte de pe vremea lui Constantin. În
jurul lui apa s-a dat puţin la o parte. Totuşi înăuntrul fântânii e
umed şi frig. Din când în când îşi încălzeşte mâinile la un
opaiţ. Pe masa sa are un blid, iar în dreapta un fel de pasăre
oarbă care ciuguleşte meiul din blid.

Eu stau aplecat peste fântână şi-l urmăresc foarte atent: tot

ce scrie el, eu transcriu într-o altă psaltire. Din când în când, el
îşi ridică ochii spre mine, dar nu-mi spune nimic.

Câteodată apa devine cam tulbure şi nu pot vedea ce scrie

el. Atunci trebuie să m-aplec tot mai mult peste margine.
Altădată apa devine vâscoasă ca lutul şi crapă.
Altădată e fierbinte ca lava şi împroaşcă afară foc.
Apoi se răceşte treptat şi se preface în piatră,
atuncea aştept. Mă aşez în dreptul fântânii şi aştept
până piatra devine iar apă.
Altădată începe să ningă.
Fulgi mari cad în fântână, dar nu se topesc cum ar fi fost
normal să se topească la contactul cu apa, ci se prefac în bănuţi
de-argint şi de-aramă şi se lipesc pe
ţeasta rasă a călugărului Kiril.

El scrie fără să simtă ceva. Eu îl urmăresc foarte atent: nu

trebuie să-mi scape nici un cuvânt. Tot ce scrie el, eu transcriu
într-o altă psaltire, dar nu cu
cerneală, ci cu nisip.

22
CYRIL

Cyril the monk lives inside a well and writes a black psalter.
He has lived there since the age of Constantine. Around him,
the water has parted, leaving the walls wet and cold. He warms
his hands from time to time at a stone lamp. On the right
corner of his table, a blind bird pecks at a small plate of seeds.

I lean over the side of the well, and watch him, very care-
fully: everything that he writes, I copy into another psalter.
Occasionally he raises his eyes toward me, but he does not
say anything.

Sometimes the water ripples, and I cannot see what he is

writing. Then I have to lean farther over the edge.
Other times the water thickens into clay, then cracks.
Other times it boils like lava and spits fire.
Then it slowly cools into stone,
and I wait. I sit on the well and wait
for the stone to turn back into water.
Sometimes it snows.
Large flakes fall into the well. They do not melt, as they
normally do when they touch water. Instead they turn into
silver and copper coins and stick
to the shaved scalp of Cyril the monk.

Cyril writes, but without feeling. I watch him very carefully:

I cannot miss a word. Everything he writes, I copy into another
psalter, using not
ink, but sand.

23
 Am în faţa mea o clepsidră şi-mi moi pana în nisipul care se
scurge din ea. Pentru asta trebuie, într-adevăr, să fiu deosebit
de atent; orice boare de vânt
îmi poate da peste cap tot ce am scris.
Deasupra mea stă aplecat altcineva şi transcrie tot ce scriu
eu. Dacă îmi ridic cumva ochii spre el, îşi vâră imediat nasul în
carte şi se preface că-i absorbit de lectură.
Seamănă binişor cu mine şi cu Kiril.
De multe ori se apleacă atât de mult peste margine, încât îi
strig să fie atent, să aibă grijă să nu se prăbuşească în puţ. Dar el
râde, hohoteşte ca un nebun.
El este fratele Ferapont.

24
 In front of me is an hourglass. I dip my quill in the stream
of falling sand. I have to be exceptionally careful: any breath
of wind
would erase everything I have written.
Someone else leans over me, copying what I write. If I look
at him, he immediately puts his nose in his book, as if he is
absorbed in reading.
He looks a little like both Cyril and me.
He often leans dangerously far over the well’s edge. I yell
at him to be careful not to fall down the shaft. He giggles at
me like a crazy man.
He is Brother Ferapont.

25
FERAPONT

Deasupra mea stă fratele Ferapont. Şi-a lăsat o barbă până

la brâu. El veghează peste tot ce scriu eu. Poartă un fel de
rubaşcă şi e încins la mijloc cu o frânghie din
scoarţă de tei. Seamănă mult cu
Fiodor Mihailovici Dostoievski.

Dacă fac cumva o micuţă greşeală de stil, el îmi scapă o

pietricică în cap.
„Fii atent, fii atent, frate Nichita, îmi spune. Fii atent, toate
astea s-ar putea să te coste scump.”
Când nu ştiu exact unde să pun virgulă şi ezit între un
punct şi o virgulă, el mă corectează.
„Toate astea nu mai au nici o importanţă, îi spun.
În psaltirea modernă nu se mai folosesc multe semne de
punctuaţie.”
„Tu, totuşi, să le foloseşti, să le foloseşti. Nu se ştie nimic
niciodată. Cine ştie ce vremuri mai vin! Trebuie să fii foarte
atent şi prevăzător. De asemeni, ar trebui să posteşti mai mult
şi mai mult să te concentrezi asupra ta. Mai puţin să visezi la
femei. Să fii un adevărat egumen.”
„Toate astea nu mai au importanţă acum, îi răspund.
Vremurile sânt altfel, s-au schimbat mult. Lumea nu mai
posteşte. Cât despre femei . . .”
„Tu, totuşi, să nu uiţi niciodată ce-ţi spun! Să fii foarte,
foarte atent . . .”

Fratele Ferapont are ochi albaştri şi blânzi.

26
FERAPONT

Above me is Brother Ferapont. His beard reaches down to

his waist. He sees everything that I write. His linen shirt is
tied around the middle with rope made
of linden bark. He looks very much like
Feodor Mihailovich Dostoevsky.

If I commit a small stylistic mistake, he drops a pebble on

my head.
“Be careful, be careful, Brother Nichita,” he says, “Be
careful, that could be a costly mistake.”
If I don’t know exactly where to put a comma, or if I
hesitate between a period and a comma, he corrects me.
“None of this matters at all,” I tell him,
“In the modern Psalter, many punctuation marks are no
longer used.”
“Still, you should use them. You should. You never know.
Who knows what the future will bring! You have to be very
cautious, very careful. And another thing, you should fast
more, attend more to yourself. Spend less time looking at
women. If you want to become a Superior.”
“None of this matters now,” I respond,
“The times have changed, it’s very different now. People
don’t fast any more. And about women . . .”
“Even so, don’t forget what I’m telling you. Be very, very
careful . . .”

Brother Ferapont has soft, blue eyes.

27
 Deşi e trist nu l-am văzut plângând niciodată.
Are o voce groasă şi cântă tot felul de psalmi.
Aş vrea să-mi moi pana şi să scriu cu tristeţea acestor
priviri. Dar el stă mult deasupra mea şi oricât de sus mi-aş
ridica mâna, tot nu i-aş putea atinge ochii.
Deasupra fratelui Ferapont stă fratele Lazăr.

28
 Although he is a sad man, I have never seen him cry.
He has a deep, rich voice, and he knows many psalms.
I would like to wet my quill in the sadness of his gaze. But
he is so far above me. However high I raise my hand, I cannot
reach his eyes.
Above Brother Ferapont is Brother Lazarus.

29
L A Z Ă R

Deasupra fratelui Ferapont stă fratele Lazăr.

Deasupra fratelui Lazăr nu mai e nimeni. El e într-adevăr
foarte singur. Nu priveşte nici în afară, nici înăuntru, dar vede
tot. Deasupra lui
nu mai e nici un puţ.
El e mai trist decât însuşi Cristos. În fiecare zi putrezeşte
câte puţin şi pică-n fântână.
Fratele Ferapont îşi moaie pana
în rănile lui şi-şi scrie psaltirea.
Rănile lui sunt limpezi ca nişte fântâni
şi nu putrezesc, nici nu dor. El nu scrie.
doar sângele lui izvorăşte din răni
şi umple toată fântâna.
Ochiul lui trist ajunge până la mine,
până la mine şi glasul lui blând; el nu m-a mustrat
niciodată.
Într-una din rănile sale e şi fântâna în care scriu eu. Din
când în când îşi deschide ochii şi-l priveşte pe celălalt Lazăr, pe
cel din adânc.
Celălalt e la fel de slab ca şi dânsul.

30
LAZARUS

Above Brother Ferapont is Brother Lazarus.

There is no one above Brother Lazarus. He is truly alone.
He looks neither outside nor inside, but he sees everything.
Above him
there is no more well.
Brother Lazarus is sadder than Christ. Every day, part of
his body rots off and falls down through the well.
Brother Ferapont writes his psalter
after wetting his quill in Lazarus’s wounds.
His wounds are as clear as well-water.
They do not fester. He writes nothing.
But the blood that flows from his wounds
fills the well.
His sad gaze reaches down to me,
his voice reaches down softly. He has never chided me.
The well where I write is deep in one of his wounds. He
opens his eyes, from time to time, to look at the Lazarus in
the depths.
The other Lazarus is as feeble as this one.

31
DANIEL

Fratele Daniel e încă foarte tânăr şi rătăceşte pe câmpia din

jur. El încă n-a coborât în fântână.
Nu i-a crescut nici mustaţa.
Are un păr cânepiu şi nu ştie ce e femeia.
Acum simte un fel de greutate în piept şi rătăceşte pe
câmpie. Din când în când scoate o mică psaltire şi-o răsfoieşte
fără să înţeleagă ceva. E însoţit permanent de o pasăre. Un fel
de şoim, numai că are cap de leu şi coadă de şarpe.
Ea stă pe umărul său drept şi are ochii foarte strălucitori.
Ştie să citească şi-l învaţă să descifreze psaltirea.

Când îşi deschide aripile, lasă să se întrevadă pe sub

subsuori un trup de femeie. Se hrăneşte cu nisip şi bea apă
din rănile fratelui Lazăr.
Aduce cu pasărea fratelui Kiril,
numai că e de câteva ori mai înţeleaptă.

La fiecare lună nouă coboară în puţ

şi aduce câte o nouă psaltire. Ea este pasărea înţelepciunii.

Acum se sfârşeşte luna april şi începe să amurgească.

32
DANIEL

Brother Daniel is still very young. He passes the days play-

ing outside in the fields. He has yet to descend into the well.
His whiskers have not started to grow.
He has golden hair. He does not know what a woman is.
While playing in the fields, he feels a kind of weight on
his chest. He occasionally takes out a small psalter and leafs
through it, but he does not understand anything. He is
accompanied at all times by a bird: a kind of falcon, but
with the head of a lion and a serpent’s tail.
The bird is perched on his right shoulder. Its eyes glow.
It can read and teaches Daniel to decipher the psalter.

Under the falcon’s wings, the body of a woman shows

through the feathers. The falcon feeds on sand and drinks
the water from Brother Lazarus’s wounds.
It looks a bit like Cyril’s bird
just many times wiser.

On every new moon it flies into the well,

in its beak a new psalter for Brother Cyril.

Now, at the end of April, the fogs are gathering.

33
C E L Ă L A L T K I R I L

Dedesubtul fratelui Kiril e un alt frate Kiril.

El stă într-un alt puţ şi scrie o altă psaltire.
Scrie invers de cum scrie celălalt frate Kiril. Cu o mână
scrie şi cu alta numără bănuţii de-aramă
ce cad din buzunarul primului Kiril. El e foarte slab
şi nu mănâncă decât o dată la şapte zile.

Un şobolan i-a ros sandalele şi acum îi roade talpa de la

piciorul stâng. Dar el nu simte nici o durere. Nici
sângele nu-i curge din rană, de parcă ar fi mort.
Are o bărbuţă sură şi-un nas ca un cioc.

Pleoapele i s-au înroşit de-atâta scris şi mâna îi tremură la

fiecare literă. E ceva mai bătrân decât primul Kiril şi mult mai
viclean decât dânsul.
Îşi numără pe-ascuns bănuţii de-aramă şi hohoteşte
subtil.
Mai mult se chiorăşte la lumina lunii şi scrie cu propriul
său sânge, atâta e de zgârcit! Scrie foarte mărunt, abia poţi
desluşi ce-a scris.
Dedesubtul lui scrie fratele Atichin.

34
THE OTHER CYRIL

Under Brother Cyril is another Brother Cyril,

in a different shaft and writing in a different psalter.
His writing is the reflection of the other Cyril’s. While
one hand writes, the other counts the silver coins
that fall from the first Cyril’s pocket. He is very thin
and eats only once every seven days.

A rat has chewed through the sole of his left sandal, and
now it gnaws at his foot. But he feels no pain. He
does not bleed. As if he were dead.
He has a gray beard and a beaked nose.

Constant writing has turned his eyelids red. His hand

shakes with every stroke. He is older than the first Cyril,
and much more cunning.
He counts the copper coins in his pocket and giggles.
Most of the time he stares out at the light of the moon.
He writes with his own blood, he is that cheap! He writes
with very small letters. You can barely make out what he has
written.
Below him writes Brother Atikin.

35
AT I C H I N

Fratele Atichin nu seamănă cu mine ci mai mult cu fratele

Ferapont, cel de deasupra mea.
El citeşte şi corectează tot ce scrie celălalt Kiril. Nu are
barbă, în schimb pletele îi atârnă până la chilia celui de-al
doilea Kiril.
De când scrie nu şi-a tăiat unghiile şi acum ele îi
intră în carne. Are în chilia sa o micuţă fereastră prin care
urmăreşte câmpia.

Pe câmpie rătăceşte acum celălalt Daniel.

Din când în când rupe câte o filă şi-o aruncă uşor pe

fereastră, apoi aşteaptă să treacă prin dreptul ei celălalt Daniel.
Dar acesta e prea absorbit de propriile sale gânduri ca să mai
vadă ceva şi în jur.
Doar pasărea sa le citeşte pe-ascuns, apoi le mestecă şi le
înghite pe loc, ca să nu afle nimic Daniel.
Fratele Atichin nu e zgârcit, în schimb visează mult la
femei. De multe ori pana lui o ia razna şi desenează
pe filă coapse şi sâni de femeie.

În mâna sa dreaptă ţine o micuţă lupă,

dedesubtul lui scrie celălalt Ferapont.

36
AT I K I N

Brother Atikin does not resemble me; he looks like Brother

Ferapont above me.
He reads and corrects the writing of the other Cyril. He
has no beard. Instead, his hair hangs from his head down to
the cell of the second Cyril.
He hasn’t cut his nails since he began to write. Now they
are so long
they curve back into his fingers. A small window in his cell
lets him see the fields outside.

On the fields, the other Daniel is playing.

Every once in a while Atikin will tear a page from his

psalter and toss it through the window. Then he waits for
the other Daniel to walk past it. But Daniel is too absorbed
in his own thoughts to see anything around him.
The bird hides somewhere and reads the page. When he
finishes reading, he eats the paper, so Daniel won’t discover it.
Brother Atikin is not cheap. His problem is dreams of
women. Often his quill will go astray and draw
on the page, a woman’s thighs and breasts.

In his right hand he holds a tiny magnifying glass.

Below him writes the other Ferapont.

37
C E L Ă L A L T F E R A P O N T

Celălalt Ferapont seamănă pe jumătate cu mine, pe

jumătate cu primul frate Ferapont. Ochiul său drept e aidoma
cu ochiul meu drept. Celălalt e albastru
şi seamănă cu cel al lui Ferapont.
El stă cu capul în piept şi pare că meditează profund
la ceva. E mult mai întunecat decât primul frate
Ferapont.

Pe spate are o pereche de aripi şi-o cruce care-l apasă greu

înăuntru. Poartă barbă şi seamănă cu un păianjen. El stă şi
transcrie tot ce a scris Atichin. Are o faţă întunecată şi nu
l-am văzut
zâmbind niciodată.
E un adevărat gramatic.

Înainte de-a aşterne o frază, o cumpăneşte adânc, o

întoarce de pe o parte pe alta, o răsuceşte în fel şi chip,
apoi o trece citeţ în psaltire. Scrisul lui
e foarte îngrijit.
El transcrie în aur psaltirea.
După ce scrie o pagină, îi dă foc la opaiţ, iar cenuşa o
presoară pe trupul lui Lazăr. Pe rănile
celuilalt Lazăr.

38
THE OTHER FERAPONT

The other Ferapont looks half like me and half like the
first Ferapont. His right eye is like mine. The blue one
looks like Ferapont’s.
His head rests on his chest, as if he were meditating deeply
on something. His skin is much darker than the first
Brother Ferapont.

In between his wings, a heavy cross presses on his back. He

wears a beard and looks like a peasant. He copies everything
that Atikin writes. His face is dark; I have never seen him
smile.
He is truly a grammarian.

Before writing down a certain phrase, he contemplates it

from one end to the other, he twists it and turns it, then writes
it carefully in the psalter. His handwriting
is exceptionally neat.
He writes his psalter in golden ink.
After he has written a page, he burns it at the stone lamp.
The ash falls on Lazarus’s body. Into the wounds
of the other Lazarus.

39
C E L Ă L A L T L A Z Ă R

Dedesubtul celuilalt Ferapont e celălalt Lazăr

Dedesubtul celuilalt Lazăr nu mai e nimeni. Cenuşa picură
pe rănile lui şi-i acoperă trupul. El nu scrie la nici o psaltire. E
prea slab ca să mai poată scrie ceva.

Nici nu are destulă putere să-şi ţină ochii deschişi.

Din când în când aruncă o privire celuilalt Lazăr, apoi îşi
închide pleoapele obosite şi-şi întoarce faţa în altă parte.
Cenuşa îi acoperă rănile.
Fiecare rană a lui e ca o fântână.
Într-una din rănile sale
stau eu şi-mi continui psaltirea.

Trupul lui e numai piele şi os.

E chiar mai palid decât însuşi Cristos. Îşi mişcă
încet buzele albe şi şopteşte abia:
„Apă, apă . . . puţină apă . . .” Atât.
Celălalt Ferapont îşi arde liniştit psaltirea şi în loc de apă îi
presară cenuşă pe răni. În această cenuşă
îmi moi pana şi-mi continui psaltirea.

Fratele Daniel nu ştie nimic din toate acestea.

Acum el abia a-nvăţat să citească. Trece cu o mică psaltire
în mâini şi-i silabiseşte buchiile.
E sfârşitul lunii april şi-n curând va fi noapte.
Pasărea de pe umărul lui a zburat.
El îmi va continua psaltirea.

40
THE OTHER LAZARUS

Under the other Ferapont is the other Lazarus.

Under the other Lazarus there is no one else. Ash falls on
his wounds, ash falls over his entire body. He writes nothing.
He is too weak.

Too weak to keep his eyes open.

From time to time he glances at the other Lazarus, then he
closes his tired eyes and turns his face away.
Ash covers his wounds.
Each of his wounds is a well.
Deep inside one of his wounds
I am writing my psalter.

He is just skin and bones.

He is paler than Christ. He nibbles at his white lips and
whispers:
“Water, water, . . . a little water . . .” Nothing more.
The other Ferapont quietly burns his psalter. Ash falls on
Lazarus’s wounds instead of water. I wet my quill
in this ash to continue my psalter.

Brother Daniel knows none of this.

He has just learned to read. He walks with a small psalter
in his hands, mouthing the syllables.
The end of April; it will soon be night.
The bird has flown from his shoulder.
Daniel will continue my psalter.

41
COBORÂREA LUI DANIEL

Se sfârşea luna april şi începea luna martie.

Daniel se apropie de fântână. Privi înăuntrul ei şi se trase
câţiva paşi înapoi. Era într-o noapte de vineri
spre luni. Îşi închise ochii şi se-aplecă peste marginea
ei: nici cu ochii închişi nu putu scăpa de chipul
celuilalt Daniel.
Luni stătu toată ziua şi plânse
aplecat peste celălalt Daniel.
Trupul i se înverzi şi pielea i se acoperi cu solzi ca de şarpe.
Îi crescură pene pe mâini, numai aripile nu voiră să-i crească.
Stătu toată ziua şi plânse.
Dedesubtul lui plângea celălalt Daniel.

Îşi smulgea solzii de pe trup şi penele, îşi sfâşia

aura şi plângea, aplecându-se tot mai mult peste
Daniel
Din puţ îi privea cu o oarecare tristeţe călugărul Kiril. Îşi
muia pana în lacrimile lor şi-şi continua liniştit psaltirea. Îşi
încălzea din timp în timp mâinile la opaiţ
şi-şi continua lucrul.
Pasărea lui oarbă ciugulea în continuare meiul din
blid. Pasărea de pe umărul lui Daniel zburase demult.

Era o sâmbătă neagră, fără sfârşit.

42
D A N I E L’ S D E S C E N T

April ended and March began.

Daniel approached the edge of the well. He peered inside,
then moved away. It was the night of a Friday
before Monday. He closed his eyes and leaned over
the side of the well: even with his eyes shut, he could not
escape the face
of the other Daniel.
He stayed all Monday and cried,
leaning over the other Daniel.
His body turned green and his skin grew scales like a
snake. Feathers grew out of his hands. The wings did not
grow. He was at the well all day, crying.
Beneath him the other Daniel cried.

He picked off the scales and plucked the feathers. He

snuffed out
his halo and cried, leaning farther and farther over
Daniel.
Brother Cyril looked up at them from the shaft, somewhat
sad. He wet his quill in their tears and quietly continued his
psalter. From time to time he warmed his hands at the stone
lamp
and continued his work.
His blind bird continued to peck at the grain.
The bird on Daniel’s shoulder had flown long ago.

It was a black Saturday that would never end.

43
Selected Poetr y
SENIN

Cu ochii goi şi privirea stinsă

mă voi pierde încet în patria mea.
Sfâşiat de nostalgia unui câmp alb,
desculţ voi păşi prin zăpadă.

Orb la hotarele ei, mult timp

fără un cuvânt voi privi în afară.
Însoţit de un stol negru,
povara unei tristeţi fără margini,

cu capul în piept voi traversa încet câmpul nins.

Cerşetor pe drumurile ei,

mă voi pierde umil şi tăcut.
Prin târguri străvechi, prin sate pustii
voi merge cu ochii în lacrimi.

Cer albastru, cer roşu ca lacrima,

încet, încet te întuneci!

46
SERENITY

With my eyes empty, my sight extinguished,

I will sink into my country.
I will walk barefoot through the snow,
torn with longing for an old white field.

I will stare at the edge of the field

blind, not speaking a word.
With black sheep behind me,
burdened by a sorrow without borders,

I will cross the field of snow, my chin nodding against my chest.

I will disappear, humble and silent,
a beggar on the side of the road.
Through ancient towns, through empty villages
I will walk with my eyes in tears.

Sky blue, sky as red as a tear

you go dark slowly, so slowly . . .

47