1. Bebop Baby
(’Cause Tonight You’ll Be Mine)
2. Little
Elegy
3. Self-Portrait
in the Flame of a Lighter
4. History of
an Ocean
Bebop Baby
(’Cause Tonight You’ll Be Mine)
you
were so highly evolved, such a flirt, a charmer
and a skirt
that
even the adam’s apple at your neck had descended
from
the apes eons and eons before I found myself here
your
little tit had emancipated itself to hyperboloid
and sphere
ending
in a sweetness and a toxin
of
jailbate ingenuous and wanton.
gliding
over vacant lots, you were a compound
of
barbiturates, armpits, prisms and cellophane
levitating
like a leviathan through the forests of mondrian,
under the trees
beneath
which the atoms got scattered like china cups in
smithereens
you’re
just like an armored mini-tank in the camouflage
of syrup
and
your figure reminds me so little of aesop
that
I wrote you a bebop
and
I’ll sing you my bebop
hey,
bebop baby, ’cause tonight you’ll be mine
bebop
baby, the stars, they’re gonna reflect, refract
and shine
not
upon your sheets, not down your neck so fine, nor
your pillows over
but
on the dew dimpling your crumpled slip lying in
the clover
yeah,
bebop, oh baby,
dance, dance,
bebop!
you’ve
revealed the universe to me:
a handful of mint drops and spinning tops
a
humdrum bit of dust, plants and gnawing animals,
some thrumming whirligigs
with
your little muzzle you’ve bitten my cerebellum
in a kiss
and
now I’m no longer able to breathe, to cough, to
sneeze
to
caress your conch shell, your hair bun
under
your nails to dig toothpicks, nat king cole,
mahavishnu, voronca
and
felix aderca.
you
said to me, oh, how you said it I’ll never
forget:
“let’s
sit a while on the bench and watch the sunset you
know, the doppler effect
has
rather bizarre consequences
just imagine, my love, that
beyond a limit of twelve billion light years we
can never hope to know anything more of this
universe and that’s because swarms of galaxies
beyond that limit recede from us at a speed equal
to or greater than the speed of light, and
consequently the light signals, the photons, no
longer can catch up with us.
not only the light but also everything else
that consists of electromagnetic radiation.”
we sat with our faces toward the
arena of the state circus whose big plate-glass
windows reflected at various angles the multicolor
breezes of spring getting tangled in the swollen
buds on the spreading magnolias, moving the clouds
here and there on the vast vault of the sky,
fondling the pine needles tenderly and the
delicate new green leaves of a kind of vine
cork-screwing up the stalks of the neon tubes not
yet aglow
“surely, then, we won’t know
anything beyond that finite limit,” I answered,
looking at her beautiful head, her hair like an
entanglement of burnished-bronze equations, her
fine skin, protected by a thin layer of makeup
base, her eyes big, yellow and glittering.
I couldn’t concentrate,
because, looking at her lips, I could
automatically bring to mind their tasteless taste
and almost savor their vague aroma, was it ether
or maybe perfume from her lipstick?
I would have liked to tell her that we did
not know and could never hope to know more than
the body of the woman we loved and her teeth
touching our skin somewhere just below the
clavicle.
I
no longer was listening.
but meanwhile evening had fallen and the
pines had lost themselves in the isolation of a
deep blue fog.
the green needles had turned coffee-brown,
everything was about to climax in a parade of
stars. oh,
and how you made your entrance at the tinkling of
the wineglasses and demitasses
how
you buzzed like a drosophila in a bucharest of
syrup
crooning
you a doo-wop, from its every sidewalk a bebop
scatting
with all its tapping footsteps this happy-go-lucky
bebop
hey, bop,
bebop
bebop
baby, ’cause tonight you’ll be mine
and
your upturned face, it’s gonna blaze and glow
like wine
not
with apathy, not with lackadaisical spoiled
manners, nor misery
but
big splashes of an oarsman in a galley
yeah, bebop,
oh baby,
dance, dance,
bebop!
you
were so rapacious, so voracious and ferocious
that
even your sapphire earring had learned enough to
be tenacious
and
to smother, to snuff out, to suffocate
your
adolescence sprinkled with chloroform and
transubstantiated into a gag
chafes
the cavity of my mouth
and
the skin on my palms, together with my nails, fits
tight like a glove
oh kill me,
kill me
kill me
kill me
kill me
kill me
fill
my flesh with amphetamine, turquoise, beryllium,
faïence
turn
me into tableware, make me into tweezers, a
curler, a lamp, a vase
take
my heart and dance!
hey,
bop, bebop
bebop
baby, sure, tonight you’ll be mine
yeah,
dance, dance,
bebop!
(translated
by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim)
Little Elegy
love
me, ’cause I love you too,
care
for me, ’cause I care for you,
the
sun’s yellow, the sky blue, the clouds pale
turquoise,
so,
dear, let’s enjoy this life
“…till
the silver cord be loosed,
or
the golden bowl be broken…”
the
fields are green, the roads are deep in dust
the
hills are golden, the brick viaducts breathe,
you’re
a sweet girl at a vacation’s end
your
mother, she’s an honest woman.
try
to treat me gently, don’t torture me,
don’t
give free rein to the aggressiveness in you;
keep
thoughts of marriage on a tight leash, just let
things flow,
and
when you make love, don’t believe you’re
making love.
I’m
fed up with love affairs fraught with tantrums—
you
must have had experiences like this too:
biting the pillow, hour after hour of
tennis
only
to make yourself forget
phone
calls when you’re trembling as if plugged
in—the hell with
those
days, the hell with “my soul-mate,” “my
doll-baby”…
love
me, ’cause I love you too,
care
for me, ’cause I care for you,
so
what if now we’re short of money, let’s enjoy
the pleasure
of
love, let’s hurry up and live
“…till
the silver cord be loosed,
or
the golden bowl be broken…”
(translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Mirela
Surdulescu)
Self-Portrait in the Flame of a
Lighter
I’m a set of
pulverized dentures, a mouth charred by a
night’s boozing
I’m a toxic
pregnancy, a bifurcated torrent
of cyanide
spurting blue from the spider’s mouth,
stronger than a
sperm whale, more fragile than a test tube:
I’m an
incurable dreamer.
I’m a
silhouette of braided firearms, harquebuses,
flintlocks and mortars
I’m the
apocalypse suddenly heralded
by all the
sounding trumpets of the sewer pipes, the gas
mains
when every flower
becomes a pearl harbor of worms
and the worm
poking its head from the grape
cries out, oh,
god, your hawk would I be,
oh, god, cries
the worm, were all the atoms of my flesh
metamorphosed into light
I’d strobe the
universe and your living creatures might at last
gaze upon your countenance
and your hands
with their infinite fingers, your breast with
millions of nipples
the flame pouring
down you like sweat.
I struggle in the
gelatin of the ocean, in the dust of the earth’s
branches
in the mud of the
sunset, in the lard of the dwelling places
I light up the
lakes of an entire hemisphere
contracting a
sunrise of golden ball-point pens out of my heart.
I’m the man
spun of veins and bowels and electrical wire
I’m a glass of
bloody vodka
I’m an
armor-clad bulwark of hotels burned to the ground.
I’ve rubbed my
throat with algae, I’ve washed myself with a
shoal of sevruga
I’ve had my
teeth shattered in the sun, I’ve dwelled in
women
I’ve dried my
hair, after a bath of brambles,
with grünewald’s
resurrection, with caspar david friedrich’s
sunrise
I’ve sucked a
molotov cocktail from a sponge.
crush me if you
can, for I’m the one who
drinks your name
and skeleton,
bone by bone,
from the flask of flesh.
I devour your
spider-webbed eardrum, as you loll on your hip
basking in
bombardment, tanning from hell and catastrophe
I spin the
cardinal points, I’m the puppeteer of your
glands.
I’m the
ulceration of a spring morning, and the tram stop
spooled round by fog and blizzard
and the
dinotherium skeleton which walks out of the antipa
natural history
museum every
night
lumbering about
victoria square, clattering beneath the faintest
stars
then along
stephen-the-great avenue, flipping cars wheel-up
to cassiopeia and the moon
and scratching
itself against the newly constructed apartment
houses.
I’m all that
ingests you and all that chews you to a cud and
all that shreds you
an affectionate
octopus, attached to your bulb and your brain.
…overwhelmed by
loneliness, I was looking at the spectacle of the
world
as if from a
glass bowl.
amid flames,
gasoline and tubes I meditated upon peace and
purity
wallowing in a
dough of alarm clocks.
shy, tinfoil,
photophobic, I felt so good there in the cave
in the cave lined
with blood.
then I saw the
graves being dug up, halves of men and women
kicking to get
out of the snowy earth
I saw blackened
tank cars, lined with glass wool, drawn down a
dead-end spur
under the most wonderful sunset of coiled angels
and a wild light
howling to get out of the bark of trees
and gushing from
under sparrows’ wings.
god, what
couplings then in campsites and artesian wells
what crowding in
one-bedroom flats, and still such melancholy
on the faces of
those walking hand in hand to the movie at the
scala.
I saw hell and
heaven swirling skirts of crude oil above the
cities
above the
villages and the beehives,
rabidly fighting
over a brick.
I was looking at
all this with blue eyes, then I was forced to shut
them
because, hair
streaming, I passed through a defile of flesh.
I’m a cat
thinking, with a thrill, of this universe
I’m a dreaming
object, daffy with shop windows and traffic
I’m the
mechanism in the tower, ready any time to set the
blue and cherry-colored Marys
revolving, above
some girl or barrette
or above a city
with bridges of hydrogen.
next to you I’m
nobody, you, phantom charged with energy,
you, illusion
more real than stone,
you, who hold the
world in your palms sheltering it from the wind
like the flame of
a lighter, the golden world
which will last
only as long as you’re lighting your cigarette,
the round, rotating world,
full of plum
trees in blossom, of circus tents,
of fertilizer
factories and hairdressers and stockings
the world we love
so much…
I’m a screw of
dripping tears, a bouquet of vices and pulsations
a field across
which my heart limps ahead on crutches.
(translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Surdulescu)
History of an Ocean
upon
the plate-glass windows of the unirea department
store, the evening
deposited
thin sheets of lapis lazuli
the
parked cars appeared folded from tinfoil and
smelled of patchouli
violet,
depressive and empty, the north-south avenue
pointed to the clouds
as
after emotional disillusionment
when,
suddenly, nothing happened to transpire
suddenly,
everything was much like just before
child
differed terribly from child, clothes from
clothes, cigarettes from cigarettes,
teeth
from teeth tire from tire.
because
everything was in tears, in the evening everything
shed
somersaulting
blue teardrops over six inches wide.
and
the teardrops kept asking each other:
“do
you love me?”
and
“well,
do you love me?”
“how
much longer will we stretch illusion on our skin,
curved and bare?
and
you, windshield, yes, you, shoe, who are you?
who are you, cißmigiu gardens,
smoking like a blue snare,
what
color is your life, intercontinental hotel of
velvet?”
“little
fly, what in the world is the use of your caviar?
cicada,
spider, golden rhinoceros beetle, scorpion,
why
are you alive, window, architect, waterfalls,
spigot, peon?”
the
drops were hiccuping, panting, sighing
the
houses became pink pig-snouts, elephant trunks,
mandibles pinching
the
evening that was convoluted and profound
the
drops were breaking free, flowing into the
pedestrian passageway underground
blue
wave after yellow wave after withered wave
and
though everything was hallucinatorily the same as
before”
the
little muscle in the corner of your eyes also shed
drops of greenish, hot tears
they
flickered on the latticework of the gutters, they
asked in very loud voices:
“what
are we? hurry
up there, your IDs, bushes of opal!
hurry
up, star cluster, strip off your clothes for your
mandatory physical!”
and
also asked in very loud voices:
“are
we hormones, cuffs, biorhythms, blunders, engines,
sluices?”
and
then your tear fused into the unanimous tear
which
flooded the whole of life, the whole of the
evening
with
a vast, flattened teardrop, scintillating with
iridescence,
gliding
toward the passageway in innocence.
behind
it remained no trace of scenery
behind
it remained junked auto bodies twinkling ardently
towards the celestial
and
a kind of rabble with flesh winking like asphodels
with
the eye socket a little splintered
with
stiff gizzard.
they
were a bit taller and more filoform than us
and
asked themselves:
“will
it fly, this airplane of pus?
will
anybody touch our lips?
will
we be as delicate as a button seen in the dressing
table mirror
by
the girl’s lashes like blue and mauve arches?
will we ever
come
to nibble on
an atom?
will we hide
there under the atomic rind,
deep
deeper
even deeper?”
“do
you love us?
do we love us?
do you love me?
do
we love?”
and
they were staring at the teardrop, shrunken and
glossy,
flowing
down all the escalators at once into the
passageway.
god,
how your skirt hung stiff and shredded into scraps
while you were standing
in
front of the unirea department store
and
your skin was crumbling into pieces like old paper
your
flesh was falling into crusty flakes like plaster
your
skeleton was disintegrating:
the maxillae, phalanges, tarsi, vertebrae
were
dissolving into dust as after a fever
and
of the store there remained a few steel uprights,
a
handful of aluminum hangers, some haberdashery…
I’ll
go down into the passageway, among holothurians,
gudgeons and coelenterates,
I’ll
knock with my fins on the plate-glass
I’ll
touch the shoals of parrot fish with my widened
lips
here’s
the balloon fish, the lobster lurking where the
pharmacy once was
the
cuttlefish levitating above the counter for café-frappé
everything
enveloped in such tranquility, such tranquility!
here’s
the hermit crab, the little crayfish with sea
anemones on its back
a
classic example of symbiosis.
(translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Surdulescu)
Poems from the book "Bebop Baby" by Mircea Cărtărescu.
Translated
by Adam J. Sorkin
and Radu Surdulescu, Mirela Surdulescu,
Ioana Ieronim, Ileana
Ciocârlie. Poetry
New York Poetry Pamphlet Series No. 19.
New
York: MEB / PNY,
1999.
