Translator’s Note

Avoiding both self-victimization and explicit sociopolitical activism, Emil-Iulian Sude’s poetry is defined by an organic mixture of irony and self-irony with existential reflection, the search for identity, human rights concerns, and the challenging of ethnic discrimination. Both he, as the writer, and the first-person speaker in his poems, belong to the Roma ethnic minority. Enslaved in Eastern Europe, and specifically until 1856 in Romania, Roma have been discriminated against, feared or derisively stereotyped, mistreated or ignored ever since. As a security guard at a public school in Bucharest, Sude also reflects on the experience of classist stereotyping. Surrealist images are often built with everyday details, suggesting a literary style I previously identified as magic naturalism in the note I wrote to accompany the first ever translations and publication of his poetry in English (for the Winter 2022 issue of Asymptote).

Metaphorically, the school’s security guards are neither dead nor alive; relegated to the ground level, they are unseen as individuals, and often cannot even see the faces of those they protect: “missus English teacher changes her dresses every day … we never see her face / we only know her legs grow in one year like others’ / in ten.” Like it is customary in French with titles like « Mme professeur d'anglais », “doamna profesoară de engleză” has been abbreviated in spoken Romanian to “doamna de engleză” [word by word, the miss/lady of English] since at least the 1970s, when I was grade-five student in communist Romania. To subvert the required “comrade [teacher],” my peers and I called all our female teachers “doamna” [miss, lady], respectfully though informally, much like Sude’s speaker does in “Şi cum apare doamna de engleză” [And the moment missus English teacher shows up]. As “English teacher” is rather neutral, after much consideration I’ve decided to use “missus” in the hope that it would further emphasize the subconscious acceptance of the lower social status, which Sude challenges in his work.

The differences between Romanian and English, especially the lack of declension of nouns and adjectives in English, make translating poetry quite difficult in general. In Romanian, for instance, the plural of nouns and adjectives is marked by gender-specific desinences (grammatical suffixes): “i” for masculine, “e” or “i” for feminine, and “e” for neutral. This makes it much easier for Romanians to rhyme—intentionally or unintentionally. Sude often uses very simple perfect rhymes, recreating the light-hearted vibe of Romanian folk and children’s songs, which cynically contrasts to his poetry’s dark themes and imagery. “Lucim de sănătoşi şi e-uri. niște licurici” / “We shine with good health and E numbers. some fireflies,” included in this selection, is a multilayered poem, like most ones in Paznic de noapte (Casa Cărţilor, 2023 [The Night Security Guard]). It worries about toxic E additives that could transform us into shiny radioactive fireflies even after death, and which are more likely present in the cheaper processed food affordable to Sude’s impoverished characters and speaker. The poem also deplores the fate of people who don’t leave any kind of legacy behind, not even “a trail on the water” or “at least in kindergarten children’s colouring books.” Even though I had to give up on rhyming in some of my translations, I’ve felt that the end of this poem needed it. Sude uses a simple perfect rhyme, “să ne arate la părinți / că suntem cuminți,” “to show us to their parents / because we are well-behaved,” in a literal translation. The plural masculine noun, “părinți” [parents], has in Romanian the same desinence as the plural masculine adjective, “cuminți” [well-behaved, obedient, especially about young children], suggesting the speaker’s naïve but desperate plea, as he wishes they could become post-mortem something that children would excitedly share with their parents. To suggest at least some of the meaning and the feeling of the final two lines, I’ve chosen to slightly alter the content, portraying the parents as the actants, “for moms and dads watching / to see us behaving,” as if expanding their watchful parenting to the dead security guards. This has allowed me to use the simple “-ing” rhyme in the hope that it’d have a similar childish tinge like in Romanian. Finding the best solutions can be a fascinating task, while it also serves as a way to introduce English readers to Roma literature from Romania in general, and Sude’s poetry in particular.

Diana Manole