Featured in the British magazine ACUMEN / Publicat în revista britanică Acumen

Onorat și foarte bucuros să fiu inclus cu un poem, "Fleeting Connections", în numărul 112 al excelentei reviste britanice ACUMEN. Poemul, cu titlul în original "Legături pasagere", face parte din volumul "Metode simple de încetinire a timpului" (Eikon, 2019). Mulțumesc Cristinei Savin pentru traducere! Și editorilor!

Honored and very happy to be included with a poem, "Fleeting Connections", in the Issue 112 of the excellent British magazine ACUMEN. The poem, originally titled "Legături pasagere", is part of the volume "Metode simple de încetinire a timpului"/ Simple Methods of Slowing Down Time (Eikon, 2019). Thanks to Cristina Savin for the translation! And to the editors!

On Vasile Baghiu's poetry: Translating Alienation – Between Escapism And Adventure by Cristina Savin (Coolabah, Nr 30, 2021)

 

Translating Alienation – Between Escapism And Adventure by Cristina Savin (Coolabah, Nr 30, 2021)

Coolabah, Nr 30, 2021, ISSN 1988-5946, Observatori: Centre d’Estudis Australians i Transnacionals / Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona (Copyright © 2021 Cristina   Savin).  

The text and the translated poems can be find in the magazine Coolabah HERE

 

The poems translated have been selected from Vasile Baghiu’s debut poetry collection The taste of alienation. Published in 1994, the collection represents the genesis of Baghiu’s story of poetic chimerism that spans three decades and eight volumes of poems. But the first chimeric ideas materialised, quietly, six years before The taste of alienation saw the light of day, at the height of the totalitarian regime in his native Romania. At the time, the poet was working as a nurse in a tuberculosis sanatorium, consumed by a sense of isolation in the depths of which he had a life-altering, liberating epiphany that shaped his identity and his understanding of the world.  He  realised  that  he  could  be  someone  else,  that  he  could  escape  the  personal, geographical and intellectual constraints imposed by the regime, and could virtually live a parallel life. And so poetic chimerism was born, as a means of evading ‘les maux de la société’, as  a  form  of  personal  freedom  made  possible  through  imagination  and  the  re-creation,  in writing, of imaginary travels through space and time.

When asked about the concept that he coined, poetic chimerism, Baghiu portrays it not as a literary style, but as a way of life that he devised with the help of poetry. (1) This way of life infuses his entire oeuvre –poetry and prose –because many aspects of his existence, including his irrepressible desire to travel and understand the world, are intimately connected with poetic chimerism. Based on Jules de Gaultier’s philosophical system, the concept is a cross between bovarysme and literature that brings together four defining elements, all born out of a sense of despair: imaginary journey, transfiguration, disease and science. (2)

Imaginary journey denotes a way of escaping the socio-political constraints and the cultural provincialism of the time, and led to the creation of Himerus Alter, an alter-ego, a universal, stateless citizen, who, unlike the poet, was able to travel without restraint through space and time. The presence of the second element, disease, is made possible by the poet’s work as a nurse and  represents  a  reality  devoid  ofthe  superficiality  that  marked  the  intellectual  and literary landscape of the time. Baghiu’s poems are imbued with an obsession for illness, in the same way the lungs of thepatientshe cared for, while he worked at the sanatorium, were infused with bacilli. (3) As the poems translated attest, patients emerge as a true measure of lyricism. (4) The third element of transfiguration is the symbolic space where new experiences are created,  where  the  poet  becomes  someone  else  and  poetry  metamorphoses  into  an expression of estrangement. Science, the fourth and final element, turns into poetic adventure and infuses the poetic space with quarks, DNA, chemical elements, theorems and magnetic fields. (5)

CONTENT WITH VERY LITTLE (text and video-recording)

CONTENT WITH VERY LITTLE by Vasile Baghiu

The limitless grandeur of our time

grows from an insatiable appetite for success,

when we still question whether we have witnessed the hemiplegic symptoms at the table deliberately set to find a miraculous cure, but also to host a picnic, under venerable trees in Retiro, Madrid, where we arrived almost by chance, driven by the anxiety that prevents us from being content with very little, as many others enjoy pleasures for free. Did you catch the false note hit by that diligent pupil who used to practice stubbornly on the piano as we heard him over morning coffee in our little corner warmed up by contentment, smiles and an outdoor electric heater? It is only a breeze of the unprecedented facets of failure now, a quick review of the weak points on the road to achieving success at any cost, strangely similar to a spectacular failure. Ungrateful towards any act of kindness, we collect our thoughts and anxieties and we walk down the streets leading nowhere, at least for us, for we are strangers even in the most familiar place. Translated by Cristina Savin First appeared on "Parallel Texts. Words Reflected", in 2020. Link to the blog HERE

“Unwritten poetry”: an interview with Vasile Baghiu, by Christian Griffiths/ TransCollaborate, June 2021

“Unwritten poetry”: an interview with Vasile Baghiu 

by Christian Griffiths/ TransCollaborate, June 2021

[The interview can be accessed on TransCollaborate page HERE] 

What is unique or characteristic about Romanian literature/poetry?

Well, it’s not easy to clarify the identity elements of any “national” literature. Obviously, the first characteristic of Romanian literature/poetry is the Romanian language. This is important, I think, because all languages are unique, and Romanian is no exception. Our poetry is infused with local themes, and it breathes a ”Romanian air”, but from time to time Romanian literature goes beyond the borders and attracts the world’s attention, as was with the case of avant-garde experiments, including Dadaism, or with the international validation of some writers (Cioran, Ionesco, Eliade) who emigrated to the West after the Second World War. More recen
tly, during the last 20 years, some Romanian writers have been translated and have ended up achieving a certain level of validation through Europe.

The internet and all the new possibilities of communication support the visibility of Romanian literature/poetry as an important piece in the European puzzle. I think that, despite its local flavor, recent Romanian literature/poetry of today is more synchronized with what is written everywhere else, because many Romanian writers have travelled much more than they could in the communist era. They’ve made contact with other writers from all over the world, and they’ve also obtained access to international bibliographical resources. So, even though it illustrates the turmoils, frustrations and pains of a society borne out of a dictatorship, Romanian literature/poetry is somehow alive and authentic, and has that universal potential that’s already produced a deserving echo beyond Romanian readers.

The improved profile of Romanian literature and poetry throughout the world hasn’t just come from institutional/official initiatives; I think it’s also come through all the interpersonal connections that writers themselves can make with the literary milieus of other cultural spaces. In the excellent book Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury 2018), it’s argued that “small” literatures are “parts and details of the general landscape”, and they deserve the same attention as “central” literatures. Each local literature is a “world literature”, and belongs to the world.

A poem in The Orange Room Review

IN THE CROWD 

by Vasile Baghiu 

                     Link to the page in The Orange Room Review

A Japanese man

took photos of

the crowd sur le Quai du Mont Blanc,
in Geneva.
 
It caught me too
when I was admiring the huge
artesian well.
 
I thought then for a second
I would remain
in an album,
somewhere in a house
in Tokyo,
or elsewhere,
and nobody would ever know
who I was.

VASILE BAGHIU (b. 1965) is a Romanian writer, author of six books of poetry, a collection of short stories and a novel published in his country. He has been awarded a few “writers-in-residence” grants, in Germany, Austria, Scotland and Switzerland. Some of his poems written in English can be read in “Poetic Diversity”, “The Blue House”, “Subtle Tea”, “Magma Poetry” and “Southern Ocean Review”. Co-author of “Transatlantic Crossings: The Constant Language of Poetry,” a poetry book released in 2006 by TJMF Publishing. Vasile lives with his wife, daughter and son in Romania, working in the education for health field and completing his studies in psychology.

On Vasile Baghiu’s poetic chimerism

 

On Vasile Baghiu’s poetic chimerism

                                                      by Cristina Savin

                                                       Link to the page on Poetry in Process

At the heart of Baghiu’s poetry and process there exists a concept coined by the poet himself, chimerism. The concept encapsulates a tendency to escape everyday realities and to create a parallel universe, a counter-reality in which the poet lives. Baghiu remembers the defining moment where it all began. On 21 August 1988, a day that changed his life, he was working as a nurse in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Romania. He was smoking, enjoying Chinese tea and reading Flaubert’s The Art of Travel. In the background, a radio station was broadcasting in Italian. A foreign voice insinuated into his, a voice that seized his throat and his vocal chords making him talk about things he had never lived or seen. The world around him came to a standstill. He was overcome with a sense of tranquillity, inner peace and detachment from everyone and everything. He likes to call it ataraxia, some sort of poetic trance.

He came to the realisation that, instead of living isolated in the sanatorium, surrounded by dying people, he could be someone else, someone residing in Palermo for example, or in any other city, and he could write from that person’s perspective.And so he began to write.Through poetry he became someone else. Baghiu created an imaginary world, a parallel reality, in which his poems materialised.

Image on a Film, a poem in Magma Poetry

 

Image On A Film

by Vasile Baghiu 

(self-translation)

Link to the page in Magma Poetry No 31, 2005

There is something obviously lyrical
In the roses carefully placed on the stone,
Letting me see, among leaves, thorns and petals,
Just some fragments of the inscription

I try to catch a good moment
In which I can find myself alone
In the middle of a hospitable circle of friends.

My heart beats sometimes
Like it did when I took your hand for the first time.

There are gestures which are not lost, yet,
They have remained on the pellicle,
But I cannot distinguish the people
Who were very close to us in another time.

The film lies in a drawer,
And only a few of us
Would be interested in making photos from it again.

Held up to a window's light,
I once saw, through its transparency, some flowers,
Possibly roses with thorns,
Like these already withered.

I saw smiles, champagne, confetti,
All above our heads,
Surrounded by an invisible aura.

It Is Me Who Is Breathing Here, a poem in Magma Poetry

It Is Me Who Is Breathing Here

by Vasile Baghiu 

(self-translation)

Link to the page in Magma Poetry No 31, 2005 

When I feel my life is like
a heap of overturned tables and chairs
in a house somewhere in Checnya,
then I know the moment is critical.
But I also heard that science has advanced nowadays
and figures out even soul problems.
My difficulty is that I cannot find my soul
for very long periods of time.
It is easy for everybody to understand
when I speak about such simple things as the soul,
because it is like when I talk about football or
weather,
or even upon some poems from school books.
I lose and find again
not only something which belongs to me,
so that they know it is me who is breathing here,
but also how much of me has been left.
Yesterday, when a strange person
gave me a map to simplify what I was looking for,
I felt he had smiled at me,
not exactly to me,
but to someone who was behind
and plucked me by the sleeve,
like a child,
impatient to go further.

Four translated poems in Cordite Poetry Review

4 Translated Vasile Baghiu Poems

Translated from Romanian by Cristina Savin

Link to the page in The Cordite Poetry Review

The following four poems have been selected from two volumes of poetry: Rătăcirile Doamnei Bovary [Madame Bovary’s Wanderings] and Cât de departe am mers [How Far We’ve Gone], published in 1996 and 2008 respectively. Vasile Baghiu coined the term ‘chimerism’ – a cross between bovarysme and literature – which he defined as a kind of escapism; the creation of a parallel universe or counter-reality through which to escape the everyday struggles of 1980s Communist Romania. Four elements are intrinsic to the concept of chimerism: ‘imaginary journey’, as a means of evading the socio-political constraints and the cultural provincialism of the time; ‘disease’, as a reality devoid of superficiality and flippancy; ‘transfiguration’, as a way of creating new experiences; and ‘science’, as poetic adventure in a space that has rarely been explored through poetic means. The driving force and key inspiration behind chimerism, as Baghiu himself confessed when I interviewed him in 2017, was Thomas Mann’s bildungsroman The Magic Mountain, along with poems depicting sickness and human suffering, which Baghiu read throughout his teenage years.