By MARIN SORESCU

Translated by DANIEL CARDEN NEMO

Translator’s note

Marin Sorescu, despite being one of the most translated Romanian writers, is one of the literary world’s best kept secrets. The reason for it, to my mind, lies squarely in the quality of existing English translations, as many of them have failed to capture his poetic essence. Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he never received the award based on his translated work.

Like many of his poems, “Map” reveals Sorescu’s depth of thought and highly associative mind, and above all his ability to convey the most complex emotions and contemplations into a multi-layered poetry that remains accessible to all. The challenge in the translation here comes from the ability to convey an intimate, almost didactic exploration of the body, revealing the speaker’s vulnerability as he opens himself up for in(tro)spection. The body becomes a cartographic landscape, with known and uncharted areas, while the self is a terrain molded by time, animated by the soul, and inevitably oriented toward death. The poem blends stark physicality with cosmic metaphysics, suggesting that human identity, just like the Earth’s geography, contains vastness, complexity, and the unknowable. It is consciousness which imbues the world with dynamism. Without internal life, and perhaps without poetry, existence becomes static, ornamental.