Centre for Romanian Studies

Poetry in Translation (CCCLXXII), ROMANIA/GERMANY, Alexandru LUNGU (1924 Cetatea Alba, Bessarabia, Romania – 2008, Bonn, Germany): “Margini”, “Limit”

Margini
Alexandru LUNGU
(1924 Cetatea Alba, Bessarabia, Romania – 2008, Bonn Germany)

Lasă-mi această margine
de lume
graniţă ultimă spaţiu incert
atât cât să nu lunece
talpa mea de călător însingurat
atât cât să nu-mi cadă
capul din nori
Nu-mi fura amarnicul
fir de nisip
care-mi sprijină
sufletul
sfâşiat ca într-un masacru ceresc
de necunoscute furtuni
Toate marginile
se întorc cândva împăcate
în miezul rotund de sâmbure dulce
al unei zile târzii
în care lumea devine nemărginită.

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A. Lungu: volume poetry

Limit
Alexandru LUNGU
(1924 Cetatea Alba, Bessarabia, Romania – 2008, Bonn, Germany)

Leave me this limit
of the world
ultimate frontier uncertain space
sufficient to stop sliding
this lonely traveler’s foot
sufficient to stop my head
falling off the clouds.
Do not steal from me this pitiful
grain of sand
propping up
my soul
torn by the heavenly slaughter
of an unseemly gale.
All these extremes
returning at some point reconciled
to the round heart of a sweet kernel
of latter days
as the world is without borders.

Rendered in English by Constantin ROMAN, London,
© 2016 Copyright Constantin ROMAN

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SHORT BIO: Alexandru LUNGU was born on 13 aprilie 1924, at Cetatea Albă, Bessarabia, then in Romania, now in Ukraine. A refugee from a land occupied by the Soviet Union, Lungu lived his childhood and early adolescence, with his family drifting from town to town: Buzău, Sibiu, Braşov, Cluj, Năsăud, before finally settling in Bucharest.
His first poem is published in the school’s magzine of the Lycee „Gheorghe Lazăr”, Sibiu (1935).
Prior to WWII, he publishes in several magazines, such as: „Prepoem”, „Curentul literar”, „Viaţa Basarabiei”. He further launches, together with Ion Caraion – the first four and only editions of the „Zarathustra” magazine, in Buzău. He frequents several literary circles such as that of Vladimir Streinu.
Between 1943 and 1949 he enrols as a student of the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest. During this period, in 1945, he receives the prestigious “Ion Minulescu” Literary Prize for his volume entitled “The 25th Hour” “Ora 25”. However, soon after the war in 1948- 49, this volume is withdrawn from bookshops by the newly installed communist censorship. From 1949 to1973 LUNGU works at the Institute of Endocrinology of the Romanian Academy, in Bucharest, and during the next two decades he refrains from publishing any of his poems, because of the prevailing Communist censorship. Finally in 1973 Dr. LUNGU and his family emigrate to Germany, where they practice their Medical profession.
Together with his spouse Dr. Michaela Lungu, also a medical doctor, they produce the „Caietul solstiţial de poezie şi desen ARGO”
and concurrently he further publishes poems in several periodicals of the Romanian Diaspora.
After the fall of Ceausescu, in December 1989, Dr. LUNGU publishes in many literary magazines in Romania.
HE dies in Bonn, aged 84, on 24 June 2008.