Linda Maria Baros - Official Site. Poems
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.
P O E
M S
Linda Maria Baros, born in Romania on the 6th of
August 1981, is a French-language author who lives in Paris.
PhD in
Comparative Literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and University of
Bucharest.
She has published five collections of poems, two plays, and
two literary studies. Her three most recent books of poetry were published in
France by Cheyne éditeur: Le Livre de signes et d'ombres
(The
Book of Signs and Shadows), winner of the Poetical Calling Prize 2004,
La Maison en lames de rasoir
(The House Made of Razor Blades), winner of the famous
Apollinaire Prize 2007, and L’Autoroute A4 et autres
poèmes
(The Highway A4 and other poems),
2009.
She
poetry has been published in over 25 contry.
Linda Maris Baros has also translated about
thirty
books.
In
2008, she created BNZ - La Bibliothèque numérique ZOOM
(Zoom Digital
Library), a virtual library that includes over 125 authors whom she
translated and published into French or Romanian.
In Romania, she is the
initiator and the organizer of the Spring of Poets Festival (which takes
place in 55 cities) and the director of the literary review
VERSUs/m.
In Paris, she is the general secretary of The
College of Comparative Literature, the assistant secretary of the
Romanian Translators’ Association and the general assistant secretary of
the La Now Pléiade Association.
Linda Maria Baros
Mine
Horses
The house that nursed you told you perhaps,
at night,
the story of mine horses:
Mine horses are born and live in the
depths;
between gallery walls one finds their house,
their
table.
There, they feed on enormous pieces of darkness,
of coal.
They
feed themselves gropingly, by lamplight.
And like gallery slaves, they
blindly pull coal-trucks.
They carry always and forever,
as long as a
horse’s life lasts.
They carry light to the surface.
But at the
surface, in light, they cannot live,
not even when they are retired, released
from the mine.
Because they come into the world blindfolded.
Darkness
glued to their foreheads.
And like this they live a little longer,
docile.
Breezes and fragrances make them shiver,
in the crumbling coal
shed, in the courtyard of the mine.
Blindfolded,
until they descend
once more into the depths.
Their house is eternal darkness.
In the Trap of the Nostrils
Dawn is a
woman
who breaks your windows with her breasts
-reddened are her
nipples
that the bums suck...
Ah, we hear the hour of the hunt
striking...
(Cursed are Vlachka and its Teleorman!)
Prepare the raid,
the surprise attack!
The trap for the guests!
Set the snares!
Splatter
your face with blood,
as if African masks of sleepless nights
ran from
your arteries!
Catch its red foxes in the trap of the nostrils!
And
first,
prepare the raid, the surprise attack.
Even if no one
comes.
Dawn-when solitude
appears to you as a curdled brain on the walls.
Q.H.S.
There are days when you would
like to make yourself a place
on the windowsill, strolling there
secretly,
eyes closed, as if on a hypnotic bridge,
as if on the edge of a
deep silence.
(From below, only emptiness looks up at you, its
height.)
As if you were someone else,
legs sunk to the knee
in a
deep silence,
someone who strolled there secretly.
For one moment
only, because the air
behind the bars of the window pushes you back,
as if
in a high-security wings.
And the room absorbs you into
itself.
Fata Morgana
The floor donkey carries
you on his back,
trotting exhausted between the walls,
their whitewashed
utopias
-also alive, their petrified troops,
their mobs, their
temptations!
He carries you, untiring, as if across a desert.
He
throws himself into the bend, aflame,
as if his path were ardently
traced
in paraffin.
“Merde!” shout those who come,
vertiginously,
the wrong way,
and their voices mingle with the muffled
sound
of weaving
that haunts desert, walls, highways...
“Merde
alors!” resounds the echo.
And from the window, light, sharpened
spear,
reflects upside-down on the floor,
as if in the back of an
eye.
It will pierce your rib later.
The donkey throws you in the
dunes. And weeps.
Across the Gardens Autumn Breaks
Across
the gardens autumn breaks.
(Lethargic
and creaking from old
arteries,
asphalt crackles underneath. It whistles.
Autumn has plunged
knives
into its lungs.)
Like aboulic travelers,
the sharp edges of
autumn
-you see them scraping, as they go,
the mane of the
forest,
slashing at your room, at the walls’ wrists,
where neuroses
knot,
collide, break and lisp.
With their sharpened nails,
they knock
for a long time at your window.
And fly away from the left
ventricle,
carrying the pentryl and the din and the faces
developed in the
darkroom of your heart,
among which you can no longer find your way
as in
the spark of delay,
of the axe.
You double-lock the door. You fall
silent.
Across the gardens autumn breaks. And crackles.
Unknown poets
will go past, for a long time, in the Seine.
And late in life we will fish
them out with steel hooks.
Translated by Youna
Kwak
La Maison en lames de rasoir, Cheyne éditeur, 2006,
2008
(The House Made of Razor Blades)
Linda Maria Baros - Poetry of the A4
Motorway
read Horizon
Review Great Britain