Centre for Romanian Studies

Pietà

Poetry in Translation (CLXI): Lucian BLAGA (1895 – 1961), “Lettre” (Scrisoare)

LETTRE (Scrisoare)
Lucian BLAGA (1895 – 1961)

Même à présent je ne t’aurais écrit ces lignes,
mais les coqs ont chanté trios fois dans la nuit
et j’ai du m’écrier:
Dieu, Dieu, qui ai-je renié?

Je suis plus vieux que toi, ma mère,
mais toujours celui que tu connais:
les épaules un peu voutés
et penché sur les questions des hommes.
Je ne sais toujours pas pourquoi tu m’as fait voir le jour.
Est-ce seulement pour marcher à travers les choses
et leur faire justice en leur disant
laquelle est la plus raisonable et laquelle la plus belle?
La main s’arrète: c’est bien peu.
La voix se voile: c’est bien peu.
Pourquoi m’as-tu fait voir le jour, ma mère?
pourquoi me l’as-tu fait voir?

Mon corps tombe à tes genoux
lourd, comme un oiseau mort.

En Français par Constantin ROMAN
Bucarest 1967, Londres, 2013
© 2013, Copyright Constantin ROMAN

Short Biographical Note:
Blaga’s works remain highly mystical, close to the primeval myth and to his village roots and sadly very little translated in foreign languages.
Blaga was born the son of an Orthodox priest in a small village of Transylvania. By the time of his maturity his contribution was recognised by being elected a Fellow of the Romanian Academy, just before the Second World War. With the advent of Communism in Romania the last two decades of his life were spent in obscurity, interspersed with time in the Communist prisons, reduced to silence and physical incapacity.
Between 1943 and 1946 Blaga published some of his major philosophical works; the “Trilogy of Knowledge,” “The Trilogy of Culture” and the “Trilogy of Values”. Two further titles – the “Cosmogonic Trilogy” and the “Pragmatic Trilogy” respectively had their publication barred by the advent of the Marxist dictatorship. The philosopher is made to renounce, his ideas, under duress. He is dismissed from his Chair of Philosophy at the University of Cluj and compelled to take up a job as librarian. But soon he is forced to renounce even this modest position, for he spends more and more frequent spells in jail, as a political prisoner.
Lucian Blaga dies in 1961, only a few years after he is released from prison.