{"id":5317,"date":"2010-09-18T08:41:23","date_gmt":"2010-09-18T06:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=5317"},"modified":"2010-09-18T09:01:50","modified_gmt":"2010-09-18T07:01:50","slug":"poems-by-sorin-mihai-grad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=5317","title":{"rendered":"Poems by Sorin-Mihai Grad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Surrogate of a story<\/strong><\/p>\n

translated by Stella Davis & M\u0103d\u0103lina Mo\u0163 [MTTLC student]<\/p>\n

we are useless and we think about death
\nthis is everything we know and we don\u2019t say it one another
\nyour story is more insipid than you
\ntake me out of it
\nevery word which I would tell you would beg me to
\nthen an observation about time periods and weather
\nor time and ages
\neven cycles and times
\nthe reversal of the apocalypse is only an illusion
\nnot mine
\na transparent slice of nothing
\na head leaning on a table
\nand?
\nshe\u2019s gorgeous<\/em>*, but we are digressing from the subject again
\nwe don\u2019t see each other, we don\u2019t talk to one another, it is raining, yes, it\u2019s raining
\nit could be a natural conclusion
\nonly fatigue is punished on Sundays<\/p>\n

—
\n* = the text appears in English also in the Romanian original version<\/p>\n

Surrogate of cohabitation<\/strong><\/p>\n

translated by Stella Davis & M\u0103d\u0103lina Mo\u0163 [MTTLC student]<\/p>\n

they were living at the third floor, last one on the right
\na room for four, filled up with five
\nadding up another two or three
\nwho were different every now and again
\nplus those who ended up in their beds, as they were students, weren\u2019t they?
\ndinamo, u, rapid, cfr, steaua
\nthis is what they were interested in besides what I have already told you
\nand also to have a boxful of liquid bread under the bed
\nthey went at the faculty once in a while
\nbut not more often than on the football field
\nfrom behind it
\nthe first time I came to be at their place
\nthey told me not to open the fridge
\nbefore opening the window
\nand to be careful not to touch their wire
\nwhich replaced the aerial and was better than any brad pitt
\nor pamela anderson?
\nwe shall think about it, the boobed-angel is watching over our youth
\nlook how she smiles at us happy that we let her stay on our wall
\nproperly dressed, of course
\nbeside metallica, britney, bayern, pistol stark naked
\nsenna, miss august ans shaq
\none can barely notice that this place hasn\u2019t been whitewashed ever since my father
\nhas had a hair cut at the dean\u2019s office
\nit hasn\u2019t even been swept since one of their mothers
\npassed by to be horripilated
\nby the place where the pride of the family
\nis sleeping.<\/p>\n

Cemetery Surrogate<\/strong><\/p>\n

translated by Nigel Walker & Alexandra S\u00e2rbu [MTTLC student]<\/p>\n

abandoned words flow on the dead sheet
\nin an illiterate direction
\ntheir syllables disappear among the ruins of the sentences
\nwhich aborted them
\nthe letters can no longer be recognized
\nthey randomly take each other by their hands
\nin an unpronounceable way
\nor run from each other
\nand disappear <\/p>\n

a few words left on the sheet
\nand some which became others
\ntry
\nto gather themselves in a sentence
\nso as to save themselves from falling
\nand oblivion
\nleaning upon the melted relics
\nof others
\nhoping
\nthere will be someone
\nto decipher their agony
\nand understand their story<\/p>\n

Sleep surrogate<\/strong><\/p>\n

translated by Nigel Walker & Alexandra S\u00e2rbu [MTTLC student]<\/p>\n

until now I have escaped life sleeping
\nI hid behind sleep
\nI haven\u2019t allowed myself to dream either
\nso I won\u2019t disturb myself
\nwith any battle temptation, pleasure nor word
\nof what I was to myself <\/p>\n

wars will have passed by my bed
\nstorms, galleries, loudspeakers, whispers, orgasms, tractors
\nthey didn\u2019t make me smarter not awaker
\nwe ignored each other no matter what
\neach remaining what they were
\nhad anyone cared for me all this time
\nI wouldn\u2019t know either <\/p>\n

one stripped day I woke up by chance
\nin seven colours, maybe nine, I didn\u2019t try
\nto count, it looked like something seen on a rim of the sky
\nsometime I wonder what they are called
\nmaybe I will remember but I\u2019m a bit tired
\nand I fall asleep head on the sill<\/p>\n

#
\nthe original versions of these poems, in Romanian, can be read in the author’s recent book SUROGAT<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surrogate of a story translated by Stella Davis & M\u0103d\u0103lina Mo\u0163 [MTTLC student] we are useless and we think about death this is everything we know and we don\u2019t say it one another your story is more insipid than you take me out of it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[615,77],"tags":[629,1150,1123,628,403,580,116,627,312],"class_list":["post-5317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-28","category-english","tag-alexandra-sarbu","tag-egophobia-28","tag-english","tag-madalina-mot","tag-mttlc","tag-nigel-walker","tag-sorin-mihai-grad","tag-stella-davis","tag-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-1nL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5317"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5321,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5317\/revisions\/5321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}