Claudiu Komartin

trans. by Diana Manole

Getting REady for the Centennial
of the OCtober Revolution

Out of scissors and ladles people will be born again.
Getting ready. Seething like lard.
Hunks of fresh meat already hang in the attics, the sign
that someone in the orchestra played the wrong
note at the end of the solemn aria.
What more proof do you need?—there are bloody feathers, eyelids
drenched in polonium.
And at the fish market a scrawny fella who’s not yet guilty
of any wrongdoings
pretends he’s a sturgeon with the mouth sewn shut.
Under Putin’s boot he tried to hide his hands
and the minuscule needle on which it was written Правда.

Alone he did all this, alone he has to bear with it all until the end.

You can read more of Claudiu Komartin’s work in the print edition of The Arkansas International 8.

Claudiu Komartin is an award-winning Romanian poet, author of five collections and an anthology (Masters of a Dying Art, 2017), which earned the Matei Brâncoveanu Award in Literature. His books have been translated and published in German, Serbian, Turkish, and Bulgarian, while his readings span the world, from Europe and the UK to Israel, South Korea, and the US. Komartin is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Poesis International literary magazine.

Diana Manole is a Romanian-Canadian scholar, literary translator, and author of nine books of poetry and drama in her native Romania, several books of translations, and a co-edited collection of essays, Staging Postcommunism Alternative Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989 (Iowa, 2020). Her literary work has earned her fourteen creative writing prizes in Romania and second prize in the 2017/18 John Dryden Translation Competition in the UK.