Actors

How naturally spontaneous -the actors!
With sleeves rolled up,
How much better they know how to live our lives for us!

Never have I seen a more perfect kiss
Than the actors' in the third act,
When the passions start
To make themselves clear.

Stained with oil,
In authentic caps,
True-to-life in their perfectly plausible jobs,
They enter and exit with speeches
That unfurl like carpets under their feet.

Their death on stage is so genuine
That, next to its perfection,
Those in the graveyards,
The truly dead,
Made up for tragedy, once and for all time,
Seem stagy and unstill!

Whereas we, so stiff within our single span,
We don't so much as know how to come alive!
We speak our lines at the wrong time or keep silent for years on end,
Histrionic and unaesthetic,
And we haven't a clue where the hell to keep our hands.

Marin Sorescu, a prominent poet and playwright, was Romania's Nobel Prize nominee in 1996, the year of his untimely death at the age of 60. Sorescu's works, serious and wide-ranging in idea, are frequently comic, deceptively light, witty and sometimes absurd, often deadpan in their delivery--a combination not surprising from a writer from the nation which gave birth to Dadaist Tristan Tzara and absurdist Eugene Ionesco.

Lidia Vianu, is a poet, novelist, and translator who is on the English faculty of the University of Bucharest.

Adam Sorkin's collaborative translations of Romanian writing have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry, Sulfur, and Partisan Review. BOA Editions is publishing his volume of Daniela Crasnaru's poems, Sea-Level Zero, in the fall of 1999.