Translating Alienation – Between Escapism And Adventure by Cristina Savin (Coolabah, Nr 30, 2021)
The text and the translated poems can be find in the
magazine Coolabah HERE
The poems translated have been selected from Vasile Baghiu’s
debut poetry collection The taste of alienation. Published in 1994, the
collection represents the genesis of Baghiu’s story of poetic chimerism that
spans three decades and eight volumes of poems. But the first chimeric ideas materialised,
quietly, six years before The taste of alienation saw the light of day,
at the height of the totalitarian regime in his native Romania. At the time,
the poet was working as a nurse in a tuberculosis sanatorium, consumed by a
sense of isolation in the depths of which he had a life-altering, liberating epiphany
that shaped his identity and his understanding of the world. He
realised that he
could be someone
else, that he
could escape the
personal, geographical and intellectual constraints imposed by the
regime, and could virtually live a parallel life. And so poetic chimerism was
born, as a means of evading ‘les maux de la société’, as a
form of personal
freedom made possible
through imagination and
the re-creation, in writing, of imaginary travels through
space and time.
When asked about the concept that he coined, poetic
chimerism, Baghiu portrays it not as a literary style, but as a way of life
that he devised with the help of poetry. (1) This way of life infuses
his entire oeuvre –poetry and prose –because many aspects of his existence,
including his irrepressible desire to travel and understand the world, are
intimately connected with poetic chimerism. Based on Jules de Gaultier’s philosophical
system, the concept is a cross between bovarysme and literature that brings
together four defining elements, all born out of a sense of despair: imaginary
journey, transfiguration, disease and science. (2)
Imaginary journey denotes a way of escaping the socio-political constraints and the cultural provincialism of the time, and led to the creation of Himerus Alter, an alter-ego, a universal, stateless citizen, who, unlike the poet, was able to travel without restraint through space and time. The presence of the second element, disease, is made possible by the poet’s work as a nurse and represents a reality devoid ofthe superficiality that marked the intellectual and literary landscape of the time. Baghiu’s poems are imbued with an obsession for illness, in the same way the lungs of thepatientshe cared for, while he worked at the sanatorium, were infused with bacilli. (3) As the poems translated attest, patients emerge as a true measure of lyricism. (4) The third element of transfiguration is the symbolic space where new experiences are created, where the poet becomes someone else and poetry metamorphoses into an expression of estrangement. Science, the fourth and final element, turns into poetic adventure and infuses the poetic space with quarks, DNA, chemical elements, theorems and magnetic fields. (5)
