Oberlin College Press

Marin Sorescu

HANDS BEHIND MY BACK (translated by Gabriela Dragnea, Adriana Varga, & Stuart Friebert)

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 0-932440-57-6) Cloth $22.95 (ISBN 0-932440-58-4)

"If anybody, except a poet, were saying the things Sorescu says in his poems, he or she would be found insane. But this is what poetry should be doing, putting this kind of material into rational form."
--Russell Edson

"This selection, which includes poems from all stages of his career and translates them into a suitably American grain, opens the border wider: American readers now have direct entry into one of the most cheering and distinctive regions of the contemporary poetic imagination."
--Seamus Heaney

"Sorescu has the ability to say, once or twice in a poem--though God knows even once is enough--something that causes a transfiguration of the whole piece. That one moment, which changes everything, if it were to be severed or disentangled from the rest, might actually seem somewhat slight--but in context, surrounded by that strange, oddly prosaic or matter-of-fact voice, it causes something miraculous to take place."
--Franz Wright

GETTING USED TO YOUR NAME

After you've learned to walk,
Tell one thing from another,
Your first care as a child
Is to get used to your name.
What is it?
They keep asking you.
You hesitate, stammer,
And when you start to give a fluent answer
Your name's no longer a problem.

When you start to forget your name,
It's very serious.
But don't despair,
An interval will set in.

And soon after your death,
When the mist rises from your eyes,
And you begin to find your way
In the everlasting darkness,
Your first care (long forgotten,
Long since buried with you)
Is to get used to your name.
You're called--just as arbitrarily--
Dandelion, cowslip, cornel,
Blackbird, chaffinch, turtle dove,
Costmary, zephyr--or all these together.
And when you nod, to show you've got it,
Everything's all right:
The earth, almost round, may spin
Like a top among stars.

--Marin Sorescu
translated by Gabriela Dragnea, Stuart Friebert, & Adriana Varga

Copyright c 1991 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.