| Daria Ghiu |
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Bogdan Ghiu
OUR BONDAGE
While I’m writing, it’s you on the verso.
It’s you hiding out, and the page’s hiding you.
While writing I (for)see you, I see your panting body, uneven, still, flush to the ground.
I feel you. You prevent me from jotting down properly, beautifully.
Why hide away under my sheet of paper, and beyond?
Come out, on top of it, next to me, in my own stead!
You’re my sheet of paper’s scaffolding.
Our contact lies within this very sheet of paper.
The text I’m writing owes it (mainly) to your body shape.
LEGATURA DINTRE NOI
În timp ce scriu, de cealalta parte a paginii (pe verso) esti tu.
Te ascunzi si foaia te ascunde.
Scriind, te (pre)simt, îti simt trupul tremurator, inegal, nemiscat, una cu pamîntul.
Te pipai. Ma împiedici sa scriu corect, frumos.
De ce stai sub foaia mea de hîrtie, dincolo de ea?
Iesi afara, vino deasupra, lînga mine, în locul meu!
Îmi sustii foaia de hîrtie.
Contactul nostru e chiar aceasta foaie de hîrtie.
Textul pe care îl scriu se datoreaza (mai ales) reliefului trupului tau.
"When I started to realize little by little what life was all about, I was six years old. This was in ’89, when my father’s first book Manualul autorului (“The Author’s Handbook”) was published. In this book my father had a poem dedicated to me. It was more like a fairy tale with a forest, Woody the Woodpecker, many horses at a hippodrome and me, the small onlooker, curious and scared in the same time. That was the moment when I started to love poetry and the only thing I was reading all day long was this poem. Growing up, I’ve kept on reading poetry – it was and it is my favorite – and sometimes I turn back to my childhood’s poem. I’ve always thought that poetry can give you answers to all your questions and can solve all the problems somehow – because I opened my eyes and started to understand the world around me through poetry, through my father’s poetry.
That’s why nowadays I associate Romanian poetry (and poetry in general) with my dad’s name. Choosing "Our Bondage" for the poetry night was a hard decision. I particularly like this poem because I consider it a definition of poetry and of the poet. You can feel, while reading it, the painful dialogue that each artist has with himself, the dialogue that looks almost like an act of exorcism. "Our Bondage" is also one of the most emblematic poems for the art of my father, who has always been considered by the critics the meta-textualist of his generation, the so-called “generation of the ‘80s”."
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