The Strange Sincerity of Desolation: A Review of Ion Cristofor’s Somewhere a Blind Child (2021, Naked Eye Publishing)

the morning bells dig mole tunnels in the clouds
your soul is clean like the lamb in its pen
like the sprig of basil in the old peasant woman’s hand
taken full of dew to morning mass

The work of Ion Cristofor, a distinguished Romanian poet, critic, editor, and translator, has been translated into Italian, German, French, and Catalan, but his English-language debut has been a long time coming. Somewhere a Blind Child, a new volume of his selected poems, is now available to anglophone readers thanks to Naked Eye Publishing, a small nonprofit press committed to elevating both overlooked authors and emerging literary translators. As a product of the contemporary American poetry scene, I have a certain tendency to fetishize self-contained collections and greet volumes of selected poems with skepticism, but this book instantly proved that my predispositions were misguided; it is truly a coherent whole, propelled and constructed by a singular momentum and held together by what I am more inclined to call “preoccupations” than “themes.”

The poet belongs to Romania’s ‘80s generation” who experienced the darkest days of the Ceaușescu regime, when the people faced political repression and economic privations that were extreme even by the standards of the communist world. Perhaps it is the brutal realities of this context that lend this book what I found myself calling its “desolate sincerity” when describing it to friends. In our age of irony poisoning, when “artificial” has become a curse when applied to literary artifacts, there is something truly refreshing about encountering a poet who can entitle a poem “Communism,” in which the speaker comes home fired with Marxist-Leninist enthusiasm and explains his newfound atheist views to his religious grandfather, who:

continued to pray unperturbed
asking me when he finished
with a benign smile
whether eggs in the store exist,
whether meat at the butcher’s exists,
or butter...

The unfeigned and sophisticated religious content of this collection is truly affecting, powered as it is by the poet’s virtuosity in the domain of associative imagery. The simplest magic trick of poetry, the humble line break, makes the speaker marveling at flawlessly realized images of natural beauty as examples of God’s creation almost a vicarious religious experience in its own right simply by isolating that most difficult of words from the rest of a commonplace expression: “God/how perfect it all is.” This imagery is so evocative that it is able to enter the poems without knocking, to the point that an abstraction like “desolation” can enter a person’s internal reality “like an unseen Macedonian phalanx.” I invite you to pause on that image and experience just what vast swaths of consciousness “like” is shifting. This effect is particularly strong when the book explores landscapes; physical images can be discovered like revelations to which, indeed, the overworked word “spiritual” applies. Some inflated cognitive currency was redeemed for me by the experience of reading this book.

Paradoxically, this collection’s sincerity makes its ventures into irony all the more powerful and worthwhile, especially in the domain of religious matters. A reference to God screwing the moon in like a lightbulb might have, in another context, sounded utterly insufferable, but in the arc of this book it is a powerful image. Unfortunately, it is in this domain of irony that the book does, alas, fail, and fail consequentially. One of the “preoccupations” mentioned above is women’s breasts, and the rendering of this preoccupation is objectifying. A lynchpin poem contains overperformed misogyny that is clearly intended to couch this objectifying language as ironic, which is a credible reading of certain instances, such as:

The wind will stop blowing
tomorrow, the smiling broadcaster assures us.
Her breasts seem to confirm the news.

It is not, however, a credible reading of the earnestly eroticized “the buds of her breasts that caught fire/in my palms.” This problem cannot help but inflect otherwise worthwhile feminine imagery.

The unassuming slashes I have used to illustrate line breaks often serve to demonstrate why this review cannot conclude fairly without praising the translator of Somewhere a Blind Child, Andreea Iulia Scridon, whose translations of Ion D. Sîrbu and Traian T. Coșovei (with Adam J. Sorkin) are available from Broken Sleep Books. Given how effective these translations are as English-language poetry, I will take her name on the cover of future books as a credible endorsement. The associative quality of Cristofor’s imagery, the way he, as Niculina Opera put it, “discovers the world as he discovers the poem” would be severely undermined by a clumsy translation that made logical connections inefficiently, an inherent risk of translating poetry. The translator is also to be commended for allowing the development of the poet’s use of punctuation to remain visible in English rather than “smoothing” it excessively, and for her successful handling of colloquialisms, which recalls Emily Wilson’s rejection of the idea that “a translation is good insofar as it disguises its own existence as a translation” in the introduction to her Odyssey; the translator’s choices in these situations indicate the colloquiality of the original without attempting to create the illusion of ventriloquizing it. To the credit of the translator, the publisher, and the poet, this book is a welcome addition to the body of poetry available in English.

Reviewed by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler