When Justice Fails: On Ana Blandiana

In October 1964, around the 16th or 17th day of the month, a Friday or a Saturday respectively, while staying in the city of Oradea, Romanian poet Ana Blandiana finishes her poem Carantină. She is twenty-two years old.

Durerea nu e contagioasă, durerea

Singularizează mai atroce decât zidurile,

Nici o carantină nu izolează atât de perfect,

E banal ce spun - acesta e argumentul.

Pain is not contagious, she writes, pain insulates, isolates, separates one individual from another. This is the second verse of the poem. No matter how hard I try, I can never experience another person’s pain. It belongs to them alone.

In English, the poem’s name is Quarantine.

Pain is not contagious, pain

Singularises more atrociously than the walls,

No quarantine isolates so perfectly,

it’s banal to say it - and that’s the argument.

Nothing isolates the self more than suffering, nothing so difficult to fully express, so impossible to grasp by anyone other than the self. And so if pain contains the notion of quarantine, what is the nature of this virus? At the time Blandiana wrote the poem, her native Romania was under the thrall of a Communist regime, on the edge of assuming the oppressive leadership of Nicolae Ceaușescu, who gained power the following year, in 1965.

But in 2020, the year of the novel coronavirus, certain other meanings, certain contemporary relevances in the poem, are self-evident. The world has absorbed itself in its own pain.

The symbol itself in Blandiana’s writing has a precarious hold, always displaying its opacity. She implies that the symbol obscures more than it reveals, that it hides more than it shows. In her essay, Poetry Between Silence and Sin, she argues:

Poetry is not a series of events, but a sequence of visions. It’s not a matter of banal abbreviation or simple concentration; but of essence and symbol. And when I say ‘symbol’, I do not mean the word or trope, or the movement called ‘Symbolism’; I am thinking of a mathematical symbol. In an infinitely longer time, poetry - like mathematics - has moved from things to the symbol, from the numbering of objects to the naked cypher itself.

Blandiana borrows her surname from her mother’s home-region. And her writing itself cultivates a certain namelessness, a universality that is expressed as equal or approximate to the inexpressible. A new village is constructed. She shares this poetic township with the other great Romanian poet of silences, of the failures of language in articulating essence where matter is needed, and matter where there exists abstract essence: Paul Celan.

In her poem Rugă, best translated as Pray, something of the limit of the word is shown in the form of the orison, of the prayer form. Repetition takes on the transcendent quality. Blandiana suggests that the act of writing is a gesture of the desperate, a desire for the unattainable.

Ajută-mă să blestem şi să plâng

Lumea supusă ochiului meu stâng,

Ajută-mă să plâng şi să accept

Lumea ascunsă ochiului meu drept;

Ajută-mă să plâng şi să suport

Catapeteasma ochiului tău mort

Şi nemaidesluşitul paradis

Strivit în ochiul tău închis.

These are the two final verses of the poem, part of her collection Soarele de Apoi, published natively in 2000, and not translated into English until 2017, as The Sun of Hereafter. They are difficult to render into English.

Help me for to curse and for to cry

For the world contained within my left eye,

Help me for to cry and for to accept

The world of which my right eye is bereft;

Help me for to cry and for to abide

The iconostasis of your dead eye

And the interscrutable paradise

Crushed in your closed eye’s sight.

Celan’s poetic citizenship was filtered through the German language of his destroyers. Blandiana’s is not. Both poets interpret that language is the material on which meaning is made, never the reverse. For Celan, the German language facilitated the traumatic break with meaning itself. For Blandiana, the Romanian language signifies an isolation within this trauma, this abundance of meaning. What is seen and what cannot be related. Crushed in the closed eye. Celan’s mysticism works through his Judaism. Blandiana’s through the esoterica of Orthodox, with its iconostases, her late father an orthodox priest. In the language-town, both are neighbours.

In the same essay, she writes:

Where nothing is said, all can be suggested. Mallarmé was the first to prefer silence to poetry. This may seem like madness, but it’s logical, since silence contains poetry in the same way that the colour white contains all the other colours.

And what can separate one colour from another after mixing? This is not a question of purity or impurity. If poetry, as Blandiana suggests, is the absolute reduction of vision, crushed in the closed eye, then poetic truth is lost forever. I cannot wholly understand the perception of another person any more than I can understand their pain. It belongs only to them and their memory. This is an injustice. And as Blandiana famously states: ‘When justice fails to be a form of memory, memory alone can be a form of justice’. Poetry is lost between what can and cannot be made of silence. But even so, she continues, knowing that: ‘The implacable nature of poetry is its only, painful reason to be.’ And in this dubious territory, she writes, it is only pain of which we can be certain.