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$14 / 144 pp / paper
isbn 1-933254-17-3 (Small Press Distribution)
isbn 0-939010-90-9 (Consortium)
Ugly Duckling Presse |
Review by Jeremy Hawkins
Mariana Marin’s “Elegy II” asks, “Do you wring the poem’s neck / when you discover it inscribes itself even without you?” The words seem to have anticipated the publication of Marin’s first volume in English, Paper Children, arriving some four years after her death; these poems carry on without the poet and continue inscribing themselves. And yet to attribute the inscription to a life force within the poetry would be counter to the logic developed in the work of this Romanian poet. In “The Water Tower,” Marin declares herself:
Here I am,
slowly turning the machinery of my sickened glance
toward the corkscrewing sounds
which will bring my celestial idiom to its close.
While poetry can be seen as “celestial idiom,” here it is fashioned from “the machinery of my sickened glance.” More than the channeling of divine inspiration, for Marin, poetry is an industry of horror. It is the undeniable urge to look into the face of that which will destroy us and to see our destruction undeterred by our attentions. As such, the seeming immortality of the poems independently inscribing themselves loses its idyllic sheen to imply something more macabre.
When we consider Anna Akhmatova’s opening to her long poem, “Requiem,” and her anecdote about a woman in a prison queue asking “Can you describe this?,” it becomes clear that she held some belief or hope in how poetry can function as witness. There appears no such solace for Mariana Marin. Instead she felt the insanity of the enterprise, writing “What madness, you tell yourself too late, / to survive happily articulating / the misfortunes of others!” And the question has been raised again and again: how sick are the arts that feed off of suffering and do little to stem it? Tony Harrison’s poem, “The Heartless Art,” condemns the poet’s cold collecting of material for elegy as his friend convalesces toward death. Likewise, in “Elegy XIV” Marin questions the work of the artist who develops the personal aesthetic against a backdrop of inhumanity:
I had the courage to work at the very root of evil
and exactly there to establish the studios of
“the person who would draw nearer the self,”
who would conquer nothing but truth,
its own paltry tale.
Look at me!
I’m a little uglier and a little more absurd.
The poem uncovers the absurdity of lyric investigation that attempts to ignore its surroundings. There is something Faustian about making art in a country strangled by such oppression as Marin experienced in her lifetime, from the Romania of her youth in the 60s to the revolution of 1989, which saw dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife executed on public television. So it comes as no surprise that in a country that could (or would) hardly feed and clothe its citizens in the 80s, a poet might doubt the efficacy of her work, particularly a poet writing personal lyric in free verse. In this way, Marin reminds us of Marina Tsvetaeva and her self-torture through lyricism. As in Tsvetaeva, we feel from the work of Marin the prevalent rendering of art as self-devouring, feeding on the life and sanity of the artist. Accordingly, Marin describes in “On the Fifth Floor,” “Poetry, / when inside your skull, like a miracle, / you feast on yourself.” In “Leprosarium,” this same idea grafts onto the common practice of mining childhood as she mocks, “But what could be prettier / than a childhood diced small / that in time would satisfy ravenous memory!” In both examples she renders the consumption of art and artist, which helps to explain how at no point in the book do we find the metaphor of the gift. Poetry is not a gift; it is a cannibalizing habit and a vice that the poet embraces as often as she desires escape.
One cannot ignore however, that throughout Paper Children, Marin presides over an idea of loss that suggests some former ideal. There are hints of what is “gone,” though it never becomes clear whether the speaker of the poems grieves the absence. Sometimes the absence is of love, as seen in poems like “The Web of Water,” which can only be dignified by selective memories of the moment. But other poems, such as “Language Written Under the Eyelids,” speak directly to something missing in poetry:
The age of the sublime, seductive poem
is gone.
Blackest thought and barbed wire
will remember only these elegies
and a ferocious solitude,
seductive, sublime…
Here Marin points to a past age where the poem’s sublimity still persisted (for poet and reader alike, one would imagine), but which has given way to a new age where solitude has taken that role. If solitude once acted as the site of the work of poetry, for Marin it has become the end in itself. And what of memory? All that is remembered are the elegies, twenty of which are featured in this volume and mourn poetry as much as any human addressee.
In the midst of such darkness and pessimism, one must ask, why write? Camus suggested that making art amounted to the finest form of resistance, if only against the absurd, but Marin’s belief in a past age suggests that she wanted more than resistance. She writes in “Elegy IV,” “I wanted to discover the ephemeral boundary / where imagination diverges from experience.” We could read this as a transcendentalist belief in poetic intuition, though it suggests as much about a desire to escape experience as to transcend it. Marin distinguished herself in “Letters to Emil” as “one of those / who saw (not merely dreamed) / ravens butchering an immense wintry field.” She witnessed real violence as opposed to the suffering of the imagination that might be called common in elegy, with the distance between subject and object manufactured in the work rather than immanent. Yet surely something in poetry mitigated the pain?
To decide, we can only hope that Adam Sorkin will continue his long commitment to translating twentieth century Romanian poetry. Though sparing in hope, this volume presents as a great gift to any English readers of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and one of Marin’s own favorites, Anne Sexton. Paper Children easily grapples with many of the same themes as in the work of these poets, with as critical an imagination and a voice as distinct. In fact, it is shocking that from her several books published in Romanian, we have only this collection. It is beautiful—from the design, to Sorkin’s economy in preserving the language (you don’t need to know Romanian to see he dodges the trap of relying on synonym to polish over Marin’s obsessions)—but represents only a fraction of her work. Poetry of this quality and incision deserves to be translated to the last word. Not that we should expect to find a sudden glimmer of hope, after all, Marin herself warns, “Illumination should not be confused with salvation.” Perhaps, though, we could learn more about the startling mind that continues writing poetry in the moment of despair. And, even if perhaps Mariana Marin never wholly accepted the role of poetry as witness, we can take her ambivalences into ourselves to elegize the elegizer who wrote:
Oh, the guilt and horror
before so many strangled truths!
Who will testify
about the crimes committed against us?
Today’s simple words,
screwed into our only body
which can be given over to death,
will they, I wonder, make us good?
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