[Two Lines Press; 2024]
Like language and translation itself, Romania is a land of multitudes. It has seen the rise of both communism and fascism; its dialects developed from an intermingling bilingual population while the current government continues to face scrutiny for its treatment of immigrants and minority groups; it is a land caught between the alienation of modernity and the vibrant traditions that keep the past alive. While these specters of history certainly haunt the poems in Two Lines Press’ new anthology Cigarettes Until Tomorrow, the book is far from being bound by the past. Instead, the eight Romanian Poets featured in Cigarettes Until Tomorrow dare to look forward, dreaming with reckless abandon. What results is a sweeping tapestry capturing the everyday textures of life in contemporary Romania, intimately specific yet universal in its scope and themes—providing readers with a collective portrait of life in modern society: the mundane, the barbarous, the joyous.
Moni Stănilă acknowledges this duality when writing “Anything for quiet, for beauty, for / the supernovas of our front yard” before describing “fat old dogs / who know to bite / only when someone steps on their land.” These themes of sovereignty and how to defend it echo across all the poets’ work in this collection, highlighting both the historical context within which they write while also giving key insights into how these writers conceptualize their sense of self and place. Contradiction seems to be integral to this experience. These poets are writing from a land poignantly described in one poem by Constantin Acosmei as being full of “talent and pills,” a place full of self-destruction that is simultaneously bursting with great beauty. Despite this tension coming from a history that is specific to this place and people, it makes one consider all the places of which the same could be said, including the US, which continues to struggle with the opioid epidemic. Lines like Acosmei’s allow readers to grasp the interconnectivity of our globalized economy, inviting us to view the issues of today through a different perspective.
Many poems in the collection also speak to the need for human connection in a world that can have such a dearth of genuine interactions. Anastasia Gavrilovici situates this sense of dislocation within the digital space when lamenting how “only the illusion of communication lurches over the virtual steppe between us.” Amidst so much widespread estrangement, it can be easy to echo Gavrilovici’s cry that there is “nothing erotic nothing heroic.” Never in human history have individuals had so much access to knowledge and information, yet this doesn’t seem to have improved our quality of life. Quite the opposite; people are now cocooned within cybernetic algorithms that leave us callous, disinterested. This poet captures the tragedy of contemporaneity when writing, “I stretch across the table reaching for your hands / you withdraw them,” but the poem is far from cynical. Instead, we’re left with a reminder that the real tragedy, the true horror, is that “the days / pass and one can live this way too.” It is normal to mourn a dying planet, it is common to feel isolated and embittered in this new era, but the true loss would be to accept such disaffection, to not fight for a better tomorrow.
Interestingly, the anthology centers language and its limits as being central to our modern condition. Elena Vlădăreanu demonstrates the inability of words to articulate our lived experiences: “I can say what snow means / but I don’t know what it’s like to run your fingers through the fluffy snow / on the hoods of cars.” In her poems, re-connecting with nature is a recurring means through which humanity may surpass the limitations of the written word: “I can describe the stem and leaves and flower and tubers of a sunchoke for you / but I don’t understand the notion of smooth spikes that pierce your skin.” This poet reminds us that the only way to know “the pleasure of a root gently sliding out” is to get our hands dirty, to imbibe in all that life has to offer. This mirrors the concerns of Adela Greceanu’s poems, which demonstrate how modernity can numb our appreciation of life with lines like “when they say ‘tree,’ / they assume it always means / the same thing. / And, at the speed of everyday life, it really does.” Throughout her poems in this collection, Greceanu’s work walks the line between recognizing the absurdity of mundanity and earnestly appreciating the beauty the world has to offer. It reflects a kind of utopianism at the heart of her poems, one that doesn’t flinch from humanity’s darkness but recognizes how “People want to be friendly. / They care about why / you haven’t come by for days . . .” It’s with poets like Greceanu that the collection reads as a kind of call for all of us to be just a bit more present in our everyday lives. If not, one runs the risk of never truly escaping the digital claustrophobia brought by the Information Revolution.
We might, in the words of Emil-Iulian Sude, never “find out what I was suffering / from. from one hospital to another,” forever doomed to surface-level small talk and niceties dictated by social formalities. “of course they asked me how / i was doing. the eternal goodwill. could happen to anyone. people said”—lines like these illuminate Sude’s ability to cut through the coldness of decorum, revealing the heartless, shallow nature beneath such structures. With this same efficient diction, Sude is able to express the unfulfilling nature of modernity: “we inhale deeply but never fill up.” Sude is one of the first award-winning Romani-Romanian poets, and I find his ability to tackle the subtle hollowness of everyday life particularly affecting. Rather than addressing large systems of violence like the police or the military, Sude explores the spiritually numbing effects of gestures as seemingly harmless as small talk, creating a lasting impact by making readers consider the unknowing ways that they contribute to cycles of isolation.
All these complex, socially-engaged ideas come to the fore not through heavy-handed emotional plays, but from the poets grounding us in the minutiae of their daily lived experiences. Ioan Flora is especially effective in this respect. Reading Flora’s poems, one doesn’t get the sense that the author is trying to preach a hyper-specific message through the work. Instead, it’s as if he is using strong diction and imagery to create an atmosphere, leaving readers to navigate their own emotional responses. Establishing a narrative cadence with lines like “I put Dad’s shirts out to dry, early in the morning” he then immediately disrupts this sense of story with lines that displace the reading experience: the “hinges of the world had broken there / far away / in the metal, cement, glass atmosphere.” By avoiding the trappings of plot and storyline, Flora is able to utilize poetry’s unique strengths, weaving imagery and language to create a tableaux that jolts us from the tranquility of the idyllic scenes he typically begins with. It mirrors the way one views the world after reading a collection of poetry this impactful, now able to see the beauty alongside the bloodshed.
It’s through this acknowledgement of life’s wonderfully horrid contradictions that the collection achieves a kind of universality, one that’s driven home by Nora Iuga’s work. “how smoothly the hand slips out of a foreign glove,” Iuga writes, and “this way you can finally look at a territory.” By unsheathing Romania’s complex history, as well as its equally intricate present, the specificity with which these authors write becomes a way through which readers are able to see how, despite our differences, every society has “to take that golden sunset on our shoulders.” It’s this sense of interconnectivity that adds so much vibrancy to each page of this anthology.
Each poem has a distinct translator, and when translating, it’s natural for some of the original music to be lost. A lot of the mechanisms through which rhythm finds its way into a particular language don’t translate perfectly, so translators are left with the task of strategizing how to reinsert music into the language. Iris Nuțu does this by translating the word “turnip” as the much more evocative “sunchoke,” for instance. While the two vegetables may share certain characteristics, this translator choosing to forego accuracy for the reader’s emotional experience is commendable, particularly because the word occurs so often in Elena Vlădăreanu’s work. It’s choices like these that make translation such a powerful art form, and because Two Lines Press was able to include the original texts alongside the translations (something that should be the standard, in my opinion), readers are able to dig in and discover all these linguistic curiosities for themselves. It’s in these interstitial spaces that the collection proves itself to be a most evocative snapshot into the psychological and emotional landscapes of a group of poets who deserve far more recognition than they’ve historically received. Tender, brutal, and full of life, Cigarettes Until Tomorrow is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary poetry.
Michael Zendejas is the Senior Hybrid Acquisitions Editor for Abode Press. He received a Fiction MFA at UMass Amherst and runs the film blog, The Chicano Film Shelf. An inaugural recipient of the Rose Fellowship, a Juniper Fellow, a 2022 winner of the James W. Foley Memorial Prize and a member of the inaugural cohort of the Emerging Writers Fellowship, he consults and teaches classes on Fiction, Poetry, and Screenwriting via GrubStreet. His work is featured or forthcoming in: Stanchion, North American Review, Unstamatic, and elsewhere. Follow him @Mikeafff
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