The Barbarians' Return

By Mircea Dinescu

For the past 50 years, Mircea Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry’s most provocative and obstinately singular poets. After starting out as a love poet, or so he thought, he was surprised to discover that he had created a poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker in a factory producing bicycle parts who steals a tiny wheel one day; another time, a few nuts and bolts; then taking home a chain and a length of pipe; until finally realising that however he assembled these parts, instead of a bicycle the result was a Russian machine gun. The dictator at whom Dinescu shot his metaphors was eventually was eventually shot with real bullets by his own henchmen. Unlike Dinescu, those men were able to see the difference between a bicycle and a machine gun: later on, disguising themselves as anti-communists, they pedalled their bicycles into the brave new consumer society. A quarter of a century and more since the fall of communism, Mircea Dinescu still hesitates to think of himself as witness, judge or defendant. Like an agile monkey, he jumps into and out of the handbook of literature, just as into and out of the handbook of history, where he is mentioned on page 16, in the chapter entitled Revolutions. In December 1989, Dinescu was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world, with actor Ion Caramitru, that the dictator had fled. The country changed almost overnight from communist to capitalist, but Dinescu carried on doing what he’d always done: writing necessary poems that challenge all systems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Apr 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781780372051

Mircea Dinescu

Mircea Dinescu is one of Romania’s leading poets. By the late 1980s he and his work were seen as controversial and confrontational, and his final book before the revolution of 1989 could only be published abroad. In 1989 he was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world that the dictator had fled. Since then he has avoided compromising himself by writing for a satirical political magazine, has mocked at history by starring in a gastronomic TV show called Politics and Delicatessen, raised goats and set up his own personal winery.

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MIRCEA DINESCU

THE BARBARIANS’ RETURN

Translated by Adam J. Sorkin & Lidia Vianu 

For the past 50 years, Mircea Dinescu has been one of Romanian poetry’s most provocative and obstinately singular poets. After starting out as a love poet, or so he thought, he was surprised to discover that he had created a poetry of sly political allusion. He was like that communist worker in a factory producing bicycle parts who steals a tiny wheel one day; another time, a few nuts and bolts; then taking home a chain and a length of pipe; until finally realising that however he assembled these parts, instead of a bicycle the result was a Russian machine gun.

The dictator at whom Dinescu shot his metaphors was eventually shot with real bullets by his own henchmen. Unlike Dinescu, those men were able to see the difference between a bicycle and a machine gun: later on, disguising themselves as anti-communists, they pedalled their bicycles into the brave new consumer society.

A quarter of a century and more since the fall of communism, Mircea Dinescu still hesitates to think of himself as witness, judge or defendant. Like an agile monkey, he jumps into and out of the handbook of literature, just as into and out of the handbook of history, where he is mentioned on page 16, in the chapter entitled Revolutions.

In December 1989, Dinescu was liberated from house arrest by a large crowd in Bucharest who carried him triumphantly to the national television building. There he announced to his country and the world, with actor Ion Caramitru, that the dictator had fled. The country changed almost overnight from communist to capitalist, but Dinescu carried on doing what he’d always done: writing necessary poems that challenge all systems.

Cover painting (detail): Restoration (1994) by Stefan Câltia

Oil on canvas, 160 x 130cm (inventory no. 1294)

MIRCEA DINESCU

The Barbarians’ Return

SELECTED POEMS

Translated from the Romanian by

ADAM J. SORKIN & LIDIA VIANU

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The poems in this edition have been selected from Mircea Dinescu’s Romanian retrospective, Întoarcerea barbarilor: Versuri libere 2013–1973 (Editura Litera, Bucharest, 2014).

Six of the translations were previously published in the Romanian special issue of Poem 4.3-4 (September-December 2016).

The publication of this book was supported by a grant from the Romanian Cultural Insitute, Bucharest.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

A nutshell biography, by the poet himself

Discourse upon Europe’s reception of an eastern country

The fiancé’s hesitation

Letter to Václav Havel, thrown into the wastepaper basket

Right to free circulation

Pest control

The barbarians’ return

Drunk with Marx

Interview

Epistle about accepting reality with a somewhat metaphysical postscript

Short ceremony at the interment of a submarine from between the two world wars

Autumn show

Futile attempt to make a dinosaur move

Hens

Fictionalised story of a failed suicide

Autopsy of an angel

Nature’s democracy

Strolling player

One factory summons another

The avalanche

Winter indulgence

The hypocritical dead

A day without a sandwich

The sad hijacking of the suicide

A tune by Armstrong

Short extract from the secret files of the 100 Years’ War

Common cheek

Bach

Winter diary at the Pontus Euxinus

The death of Sunday

Jericho waltz

Birth of a definition

The prayer of the child fallen into a bull

Guernica

Is it guilt you want to know about?

Musical soirée

Death climbed to the roof of our house

Don’t worry

Give the kitchen table a chance

Pocket song

Meekly

Let me tell you: the scoundrel’s lost his sense of honour

The age of gods

Speech against revolt

Lord, who are they?

The discovery of America

Ship’s log

Seven drawers

Titanic waltz

Walls

Manuscript found in a lamp chimney

Brief report in support of Romanian language teachers who need more classes each week

Endless Sunday

The artist’s blessed sleep

The terror of common sense

How the natives on the reservation were deprived of the right