Nathaniel Smith
Introduction: IOAN ES. POP In the United States, poetry that comments seriously on the state of the world and the human condition has long been on the decline, except for some notable literatures like those of social justice and feminism. Not so in many countries that have lived through fascist or communist regimes, for the police state often brings out the more subtle forms of expression, like poetry and song, which are unchokable cries of resistance, require no complicated infrastructure to produce and distribute, and have their ways of eluding censorship. The works of Ioan Es. Pop presented here combine a trenchant world view, political commentary, quotidian realism, and irony in ways that can remind the English-speaking reader of William Blake or Allen Ginsberg. Although the association may seem daring, his leaps of metaphor and simile also recall Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose divine windhover metamorphosed, in the witches' brew of the twentieth century, into the Satanic "big, bitter bird of the sea" hovering over "15 oltetului st., room 305," Pop's name for a 1994 cycle of poems, from which we have translated all except one prose poem. In that unlikely Bucharest refuge from the week of drudgery, a group of unmarried workers, the serfs of late twentieth-century neo-feudalism, struggle, assisted by alcohol and despair, against the terrible realities of their life. In their bachelor dormitory, everything happens and nothing happens. What happens is drinking, forgetfulness of the day and the week, longing, and intrigue. In "the group photograph" we meet those who live together here: the speaker, still worrying (needlessly) about spies; Zoli of Hungarian name and red beard; Hans of the German name who lost his money and Tereza; Mitru, unemployed; and, to complete the menagerie, the secretive and dangerous "cross spider." What doesn't happen is change from outside. The society and regime, linked to "our beloved gadafi," are static, seemingly unmovable. We hear only an echo of reality, "the odor of smoke and noise of guns / from the catalaunian plains" (the place in France where Attila the Hun suffered his only military defeat in the year 451). Perhaps, with persistence and the self-preserving though also self-destructive life style that Pop details, the workers of Oltetului St. would be able to hold out until a new Catalaunian showdown, until the flight of the superintendent-emperor "flea" and the collapse of all his bosses. Those who do wander into this microcosm are absorbed into the drama. A surprise visitor, Christ, staggers in to find in recrucifixion some respite from the crazed world outside. Like that divine visionary, the "bachelors" have no illusions about the happiness of this world ("zoli"): nothing is to be believed, and the state-promised chloroform ("i still think...") will end no pain. All that will surely endure is the drinking, the "sceptic" tank (for scepticism saves), and disappointment. In Pop's memorable imagery, the room is a boat, the walls are a veil or shroud (the Romanian word means both), and in the morning the apartment shakes its inhabitants loose as from the pockets of a wrinkled shirt. Sunday, after a hard weekend of oblivion, these tipsy sailors scan the horizon for a boat from an exotic, unknown Corinth. A watermelon becomes a baby whose blood becomes holy water. Bearded juniper trees have made a pilgrimage to seek out "the miraculous birth" (in the words of another poet whom we can easily evoke here, W. H. Auden, who also took an interest in suffering). A bird, in good medieval fashion, speaks its mind, only to receive the appropriate reply, borrowed from Poe's raven, "nevermore." |
