Blue Window of Lippovan House, Danube Delta
Ready yourself, soul,
it’s late, oh, it’s late!
The rainbow of bells,
the rainbow of bells
drinks our blood’s last pulse,
all our peace from the River.
A rainbow of bells: the evening
presses white soles to the window,
the water flows clouded,
the water flows clouded,
from I am to I shall have been.
from Realm, by Nichita Danilov,
tr. Adam J. Sorkin and Cristina Cîrstea
about Danilov:
The poet "belongs to the Lippovan Slavic minority, a group which settled in Moldavia and the Danube delta in the eighteenth century, having fled Russian persecution after the Orthodox Church schism. Although Danilov was raised speaking both Russian and Romanian, he writes solely in the latter language.
The Lippovan identity as religious dissenters has been instrumental in constructing Danilov’s own identity. His mystical vision of religious experience seems to inform all his poems, even those that do not contain explicitly religious imagery. The imagery itself can be located in the Romanian engagement with Surrealism, which has provided Danilov a mode for describing an ineffable God. In his poetry and theoretical writings, he argues that the divine is manifest in this world through surrealistic moments, that is, through jarring juxtapositions."
by Sean Cotter, who translated a volume of Danilov's poetry into english.
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i added the lines and the explanation about the poet because he is Lippovan, and growing up with windows as such in the photo - and because i imagine no one knows about Lippovans and their spiritual traditions, even here we don't know much about them... (and because he is a great mystical poet :-)
ReplyDeleteMarvelous!
ReplyDeletewhat beautiful colours!! and the reflections seem to question the possibility of ever seeing into the world of the other ...
ReplyDeletei love the second stanza of the poem .. a great mystical poet, indeed!!
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