Mierla Domesticita
Blackbird Once Wild, Now Tame
Poems by Nicolae Dabija
Translations by John FlynnProduced by Pure Heart Press, 2004
ISBN 0-9678242-3-0
76 pages, $11This is a dual text Romanian/English manuscript. (We only posted English translations below because the Romanian characters don't translate on the screen.) A Note From The Translator
Nicolae Dabija was born on July 15, 1948 in the village of Codreni, in the Cainari region of the Republic of Moldova. The Cainari region was part of Romania until June 28, 1940 when it was granted to Stalin by Hitler as part of the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact.
A 1972 graduate of the State University of Chisinau, he is the author of many volumes of poetry and essays, among them The Third Eye (1975), Pure Water (1980), In The Name of Orpheus (1983), The Unsigned Painting (1985), A Wing Under The Shirt (1989), Blackbird Once Wild, Now Tame (1992), The Teardrop That Can See (1994), Stone Egg (1995), and Freedom Has God’s Face (1997).
Volumes and collections of his verse have appeared in translation in ten different countries. He has translated into Romanian the works of Lorca, Jukovski, and Goethe. He has also authored a variety of high school textbooks on Romanian history and literature.
Since 1986, he has been the editor of Literature and Art, a weekly left-wing newspaper devoted to the democratization of Moldova, its continued independence, and the fight against a return to totalitarianism. Mr. Dabija was a representative in the first Moldovan Soviet parliament to be chosen in free elections.
He is also the president of the National Association of Moldovan Scientists, Scholars and Artists, and has received several local and international awards for his poetry. These include The Youth Award, in 1997, the proceeds of which were used for the digging of a new well in his native village, Codreni. He received the 1988 Moldovan National Poetry Prize, and the 1994 Columna Prize for Poetry from the Romanian Academy of Arts and Letters.
AGE OF TRANSITION
Okay, God, I’m now thirty-three years old
fit to be crucified
on the cross of the perfect poem
that may postpone winter for a while.I’m punished today for the blunder I’ll make tomorrow.
My blood still boils and revolts
while in my parents it simmers down as they age gracefully.
Where’s Judas to sell me for those thirty silver coins?Twilight like a rose-tinted moss
spreads over stone walls.
Death winks one gentle eye
and I continue learning to be,
to be….
MEMORIAL
Esteemed Director General
of the factory that produces poems,
excuse me for stealing from your time, I
your humble servant
wish to let you know
it’s not the fault of the poem
that paper on this planet has become so expensive.
Nor are the poets to be blamed
that there is less ink.
It’s not that pens are scarce in some places
due to their long verses.
Not healed by poetry
diseased for eternity
with our eyes fixed on the youngest star
we (Sancho Panzas and Don Quixotes, all)
are those who hope with a poem
to divert the attention of Death.
We pray, Director General
that you’ll hand out receipts
for innocent hopes, as well.
At the same time, we ask you
if it’s possible to confirm
with your official signature and seal
that in our century hate is useless,
and that from now on poetry must be known
by everyone on this planet.
With all my love and affection,
yours,Dabija N.
BLACKBIRD ONCE WILD, NOW TAME
See this bird, once wild, now raised on grain
long ago she forgot how to fly.
See how the humble wind startles
her greasy lethargic wings.
And in her eyes how the sky perishes.Mute, moving among other fowl
falling asleep upon her perch
this is the bird of senseless afternoons,
losing time searching for food
enduring the cruel jokes of children.Near that mound of grain
she sometimes sits as if stuffed by a taxidermist
the sky dumping her reflection
into her feeder.
More and more her music
sounds like a pig belching,
not the beautiful song of liberty she once stood for.It’s her eyes that give her away.
A breeze awakens her from a stupor,
this voiceless aviator
who renounced a boundless horizon
for a feeder full of grain.
In the summer of 1993, while living as the guest of Efim and Olga Onefrei, in the village of Gratieti, a young teacher of Romanian named Svetlana Onefrei introduced me to the poetry of Nicolae Dabija. I was seeking a Moldovan poet who had never appeared in translation in the West, and one who did not write in Russian, but in Romanian. Moldova had been an independent republic for a little over one year, and its people were embracing a return to the Latin alphabet, Romanian as its national language, and a version of its own history unaltered by a Soviet bias.
I found such a poet in Mr. Dabija, who follows the tradition of the great Romanian romantic, Mihail Eminescu (1850--1889). At times bucolic, and pious, he writes in formal meter, with rhyme, and often employs biblical, as well as natural imagery, such as the rose. He employs surrealism as part of a tradition in modern Romanian literature known best, I suppose, by western readers in the plays of Ionesco.
He also writes doinas, which are folk lamentations usually sung a capella or with an accompanying guitar, or pan flute. Lyrical and very sad, these doinas are an ancient part of both Romanian and Moldovan folk culture alike. Dabija’s poems, "My Lost Hotin Realm," "Doina," and "The Ballad of Toma Alimos" are all examples of doinas. In translating them, I tried to keep as much of the rhyme as possible. In all the other poems in this collection, I didn’t adhere to the rhyme scheme,choosing instead to translate with an ear to essential meaning and texture.
Once called Moldavia, the Republic of Moldova became independent in 1991 for the first time in its long history. Moldova has been a piece of territory ruled by Romans, Cossacks, Ottomans, and Stalinists (Soviets), to name a few. It was known as Bessarabia while under the rule of Czarist Russia from 1812 to 1918. From 1918 until 1944, it was handed over piece by piece to Soviet Russia as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It became a satellite republic of the USSR, providing wine, cognac, nuts, and exotic fruits.
Sections of Moldova were even granted to Ukraine when Stalin, as the anecdote goes, took his crayon and decided where Moldova should be. In his doina, My Lost Hotin Realm, Nicolae Dabija laments the true loss of the village of Hotin, which is now located in the Bukovina section of Ukraine. I had the chance to visit Hotin with a native, Constantin Colancha, and learned first-hand that in many of the villages of Bukovina, like Hotin, Romanian is the first language, and spoken at home. Naturally, Russian, and Ukrainian are spoken when appropriate, or necessary, due to survival. Hotin is also the site of the medieval Hotin Fortress, built on the Dneister River to protect Roman lands from marauding Turkish invaders.
Under Communist rule, the Romanian language which Moldovans have always used, was regarded as a kitchen language, labelled “Moldavian” by the Soviets and taught and printed only in the cyrillic alphabet. With Perestroika, and independence, Romanian in the Latin alphabet, labelled officially as such, has returned to Moldova as the state language.
It is common to hear Moldovans lament they do not know their native tongue as well as they know Russian. This need and desire for a return to a native language and identity is a theme throughout Mr. Dabija’s poetry. In "Sad Rain," Moldova is a country broken in half by its current western border, the Prut River, which divides Moldova from Romania.
In the book’s title poem, "Blackbird Once Wild, Now Tame," Mr. Dabija expresses anger and regret at what he sees as the passivity of the Moldovan people, who, he believes, have neglected their cultural heritage for a “feeder full of grain”. Obviously, as a conquered nation, Moldova seldom had much of a choice regarding acceptance or rejection of what the powers in Moscow provided for them. However, Nicolae Dabija, and many other Moldovans do not blame the Soviets entirely for a lack of action from their own people toward positive, constructive change. The blackbird, a symbol of freedom and independence in Moldovan folklore, should not be caged or domesticated. Moldova was conquered by the Soviets, as Mr. Dabija writes in Barbarians, but do the Moldovans try hard enough to turn their conquerors away? Though a market economy and friendly relations with a democratic Russian Federation may help Moldova advance and develop, does this newly formed republic benefit in the long run by neglecting its own ethnic heritage? And if it does, what will Moldovans lose versus what they may gain?
On one hand, Mr. Dabija’s politics are quite far to the left, and do not always sit well with former Soviet bureaucrats who nowadays may conveniently label themselves champions of Democracy. On the other hand, religion plays a large role in many of Dabija’s poems, and from a western point of view this could be construed as rather conservative. However, since religion was essentially forbidden during the Soviet Era, it has now become somewhat avant garde for artists from former Soviet bloc countries to use it in their work as a way to denounce and disassociate themselves with the atheism and oppression of the past.
These poems first appeared in 1992, in Mierla Domesticita, published by the Writer’s Union of Moldova as part of a series edited by Mr. Leo Butnaru, in the city of Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. I would like to thank Nicolae Dabija and Mr. Mihai Cimpoi for giving me permission to make these translations.
And it is my pleasure to thank Svetlana Onofrei for introducing me to Mr. Dabija’s work. I would also like to thank Nellie Miteveechi, Gheorghe Tolfan, Constantin Colancha, Pavel Pripa, Varvara Colibaba, Julia Igniatuc, Zina Borsch, Larisa Aladina, Ludmilla Cravchenko, Valentina Shmatova, Marianna Dabija and my incredibly lovely wife, Angelica. Without their assistance, friendship, linguistic knowledge, guidance and affection, I would not have been able to complete this endeavor. To all of you, and to all my friends in Moldova, I present a simple toast: Noroc, cu drag, pentru voi.John Flynn