Romanian Poet Quotes

The Romanians really do lead the world when it comes to cursing. “What have you got for me?” I asked a woman from Transylvania who was now living in Vienna. “Shove your hand up my ass and jerk off my shit,” she offered. I was stunned. “Anyone else would say, ‘Shove your hand up my ass,’ and then run out of imagination,” I told her. “You people, though, you just keep going. And that’s what makes you the champions you are.” Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to drive, I thought, watching as she walked out the door and onto the unsuspecting streets of Vienna, this poet, this queen, this glittering jewel in a city of flint.

However, at times, sadness and sorrow overtake this unusually sensitive poet, who expresses her despair, her fright and inability to cope with the utter hopelessness of life at the time. I am the Rain was written on August 8, 1941. I still remember that summer, when we, the Jewish population, were forced to stay in our houses, except for two hours a day, forced to wear a yellow star on our clothing and we did not know whether we would live another day. At night, one heard shooting and could not tell whether the Germans or the Romanians were killing people in our street or a block away. That was the summer when they burnt the Temple, when the flames lit the night with a fire that was to extinguish the Jewish life in our town, our own lives. This was the atmosphere in which the poem, which follows, was written.

Good, because writers and artists are the backbone of our country. Don’t forget who we are. . . There’s a poet in the soul of every Romanian. Stories are not the enemy.

That guy says your colleague has cigarettes they cut our bellies and we start clucking. he puts our 100-lei bills into piles. if i’m like other poets i should have room. i stand up and run away with the ATM. a few hens get after us. my colleague says he’s been smoking the same cigarette for three days. he takes a drag and puts a cap on it for later. we butter him up and promise him the moon and the stars if he’d just let us have a drag. we feel like kissing him long and hard on his snout to take the cigarette smoke off the roof of his mouth. and we’re so sorry that the cigarette must burn to smoulder so that we’ve something to drag on. our colleague secretly smokes in his palms. because we think that such a crappy life only in prison, not even in death. (translated from the Romanian by Diana Manole)