AUTUMN HAS COME
by Aura Christi
(translated from the Romanian
by Adam J. Sorkin and Petru Iamandi)

A night fallen on its muzzle, like a cringing animal.
Autumn has come.  I suddenly shrink inside myself
and wait.  I no longer know when I lived
and if ever I’ll live again, God,
what dream, what life, what story I’ll awaken in,  
if the same room, on the same day,

among books, prayers and simple pencils,
muttering all sorts of things,
among letters, groans, icons, planets, flowers
and barely grasped words.  All things become almost simple
as I wait on their edge for something to happen.

When I understood that death didn’t exist
it was late in the eternal lateness,
and my brother—my nearest kin—never appeared again.
Meanwhile autumn had come to the sky too.
Yes, it’s autumn, everywhere; and I haven’t died.

It’s important to keep waiting.  Someone, some time, will show up
to take me away from here.  As if from another world,
what a terrible autumn God has made for us.
The heart knows everything, yes, everything, and tells
what’s proper to know only to those who in former days were
birds carved in bronze, air, memories, a rainbow.








_____________________________________________________


Aura Christi has published fifteen volumes of poetry and six
novels.  “Autumn Has Come” was first published in Romanian
in her 2016 collection,
The God’s Orbit.  Christi’s individual
poems have appeared in
Singular Destinies, an anthology of
poems by poets from Moldova (the former Soviet Bessarabia);
in
Poem, a literary journal based in the United Kingdom; and
elsewhere.  She was born in Chișinău, Republic of Moldova, and
now lives in Romania.

Petru Iamandi teaches at the Dunărea de Jos (“Lower Danube”)
University in Galați, Romania.  He has translated more than one
hundred books between Romanian and English.  These include a
translation, with Adam J. Sorkin and the author, of contemporary
Romanian poet Mihail Gălățanu’s
The Starry Womb, published
by Lavender Ink/Diálogos.

Adam J. Sorkin’s most recent publication is his sixtieth book
of translation, Mircea Dinescu’s
The Barbarians’ Return, a
collection of poetry translated with Lidia Vianu and published by
Bloodaxe Books in 2018.  Sorkin’s translations of work by Ioan
Flora and Svetlana Cârstean have appeared in previous issues of
the
Apple Valley Review.     


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Apple Valley Review:
A Journal of Contemporary
Literature
 

ISSN 1931-3888

Volume 13, Number 2
(Fall 2018)

Copyright © 2018
by Leah Browning, Editor.  

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Valley Review
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