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| Simona Grazia Dima |
SimonaGrazia Dima
is Secretary of Romanian PEN, a poet, essayist, literary critic and
translator. In her introduction to her latest volume of poetry she
presents the background to her writing – the political and cultural
milieu, her ideas, ideals and in particular the extraordinary
experience which led her to become the writer that she is today.
I
found it all inspiring – the relevance to our materially-obsessed
times, the candour, perception and sensitivity. (Editor)
You
can read poems by Simona in English here,
Simona-Grazia
Dima
Foreword
to The Army of Small Beings (Extracts)
The
irrepressible need to talk about the hard nucleus of my poetry has
been in my heart for a long time.
As
I come from a family made up, in my maternal line, of a long chain of
priests and hermits, whose roots can be traced back two hundred
years, poverty and deprivations were not the hardest burdens on my
soul during the dictatorship, although they were not easier for me to
endure than it was for others; on the contrary, my health has
suffered and is still suffering as a consequence of those conditions.
I was born with a very sharp sensitivity and, in high-school and then
at university, I was painfully affected by the impact of the social
world on values, morality and culture. I saw wasted energies, and
what was not being done for the isolated Romanian culture, not only
abroad but also, primarily, inside the country – the lack of
interest in a person’s true personality, the pastiche and
simulacrum we were replaced with (and we still are! − when have we
NOT been replaced!?), for the sake of (exclusively social) dogmas and
the promotion of some writers who ‘had to be published’.
It
was not until the post-revolutionary era that I fully understood how,
beyond the particulars of political systems, much of what happened
was also because of people; analysing things coolly, we must admit
that nobody ever deterred us (neither the dictatorship, nor the
system) from being good, just or generous, if we wanted to be,
changing the given circumstances with our humanity; therefore, no big
words, just a response appropriate for a particular situation. That
is why viewing people exclusively as social entities seemed to me
rather unproductive. The essence of the political world and that of
social thinking revealed themselves to me as not necessarily harmful
but merely reductionist and limited, drawing the individual according
to the notions of success or failure, as an element on a scale which
defined him from the outside. Excessive trust in these notions
suggest we should accept as a life slogan the fact that man is only a
dog raised with Pavlov’s reflex, a dog quickly coming for his meal,
without knowing other legitimate coordinates. Should we blame only
the lack of education, the atheism instilled with perseverance?
However, man cannot be fully trained. Parents and tradition have also
preserved many values. Human development does not take place
according to some official coordinates but follows an inner course
which is hard to describe or anticipate – a very personal course.
So I have not stopped searching for other saving dimensions inside
me.
*
However,
as I did not have a clear training in the spiritual domain, I would
suffer; I took to heart everything I thought was evil and ugly around
me. I noticed that loud-mouthed, impertinent, persistent and
insincere people were promoted, those that did not seek harmony and
were ready to do anything for social advantage. And I was not wrong,
(but this is going on now, at higher rates, with increased virulence,
for the stake is greater and life’s rhythm is faster today). As I
said, I felt that life had other implications than the social
dimension, and I have always told myself that this intuition is true.
Poetry was an example of a different intuitive success, a perception
of some essential truths by means of gentleness, without traumas or
outside pressures; by an innate knowledge, similar to Platonic
knowledge.
*
I
used to read biographies of artists (and I prefer this kind of
reading even today). They paid for their independence or creative
boldness with exile, marginalization or even death. In other cases,
when they were not understood by their contemporaries, they paid with
a momentary eclipse. Culture for me was never an insipid or futile
activity or entity, consisting in sophisticated chatter, or in the
cosiness of a salon or of a comfortable situation. Instead, it was
the quintessence of life, a priceless human testament to be left to
the descendants. It was an example to be at least contemplated, if
not followed.
For
me, reality (I mean true reality) was not to be found in the
level of the concrete but in the world of principles, which was at
the core of poetry, unlike prose - hence, perhaps, the impression of
intellectualism or abstraction. I do not believe that the supreme
indication of reality can be found in the torrent of daily events but
rather in the force of consciousness, and the impact with what is
imperishable. In this respect, poetry can be an urge and a living
justification of a spiritual existence (even an actualization, just
as, by sound, a song becomes immemorial), establishing, by its holy
sovereignty, another beatific dimension, in which there is nothing to
ignore, nothing to cast away, and nothing to blame. In poetry even
the critique and the acid verb has something luminous, a bright halo,
due to closeness to a generous Source. The hieratic quality of the
icon does not mean dryness.
This
introduction is only meant to sketch the atmosphere in which I began
to write poems. ….
On
the occasion of a national student event in Suceava, I was walking in
the deserted former Throne Citadel, very upset about the helpless
situation I felt my country was in (and I did not see the part I
could play in the future either). The festival, or colloquium, seemed
highly politicized, predictable and manipulated. And so it was. We,
Romanians, made a mistake by not being, except to a small degree,
open to the miraculous, expecting only the predictable and being
satisfied with it. Actually, that was what made me despair the most.
Against
this background, the perception of poetry – as I was saying, all
areas seemed interwoven, trouble in one area immediately causing
another trouble somewhere else, in a symmetrical plan – appeared to
be glowing, living, comforting, and almost maternal. My eyes fixed on
one of the abysses of the citadel (archaeology has always been a
passion), I got caught in a vertigo and whirled about in an
incredibly intense suffering, as if death was in front of my eyes and
as if I was facing an absolute dead end. Then, all of a sudden, I
felt a full resurrection, followed by an intimate, mental vision,
perfectly clear, of a river of light – quiet, beatific, friendly
and eternal. The entire world, wisdom, senses of the Universe and all
my poetry were concentrated in that silvery bright river of thick
honey. At that moment I had the certainty that under the layer of
overwhelming reality there has always been a layer of eternal peace,
of relaxation and friendship, and of perfectly natural humour and
merriness, close to each other and merciful. There were only love,
compassion and understanding of everything.
Since
that moment I have found my full poetic inspiration and I have
created the mythology of small beings – the ones I feel the urge to
define further, in order to protect them from the vulgarization they
may fall victims to (and sometimes have fallen victim to). The small
beings are not some minor lives to be mistaken for things like
flowers or small animals etc. (although I have often used such topics
in my poetry), but they exist in the eternal creative layer, in the
foundation inherent in the manifestation and in generic existence,
and at this point they meet with Christ’s message or with the
message of the Upanishads. As can be seen, I instantaneously reached
the conclusion that there is a convergence of religions at a
metaphysical level they have, which can allow – and cause, as a
special feast – unity in diversity. If these beings are small it is
because they are modest, and because they represent the lives hidden
at the core of manifestation, determining the other level of the
visible existence. They may be similar on the external, manifest
level, to those humble people praised by Jesus in the Sermon on the
Mount, but they are also to be feared, for they create the world;
and, after it wears out, they destroy it. However, they only destroy
its form, while the inward core of existence remains, however,
eternal – resuscitated as a celebration of tireless existence. They
seem to be various but they are like a monolithic existence, an
ontological block which cannot be conceived separately − even
though they can be separated into different existences. A sign of
oxymoron, of paradox, that might be a possible description for them,
accomplishable only through poetry – which is what I have been
trying to do. So poetry played not only an aesthetic role for me but
also an ontological role, enabling me to understand and live life by
its highest coordinates, the spiritual coordinates. In an ideal
mystique of the desert, I equated the desert with the desert of the
era we live in and the analogy worked wonderfully. It is still
working and will continue to work.
The
poems literally flooded in cascades after that moment and they were
included in a volume which was very difficult to have published. It
was a consequence of that ideological era. The small creatures were
rightly and wrongly considered subversive: rightly because they
seemed to undermine the state order, like a sort of menacing Martians
– which they were, actually – dissolving the barren
conceptualization we have already talked about; wrongly because they
are eternal, can be read at any time and in any place and, since they
are invulnerable, cannot be attacked (and they are not maleficent
either, because they are beatific). It was therefore sheer
ingenuousness to reject them. But the censors did not know that. The
system functioned with all its absurd machinery. Therefore, I
published the volume after being excluded five times from the
editorial plan (editorial production was planned in those years), but
it was incomplete. It would have been too large and, besides, not all
the poems were ‘suitable’.
*
I
have emphasized the moment of epiphany in Suceava because I have
previously only talked about it episodically and fragmentarily, and
yet it is worth talking about, as my whole poetry has sprung from it.
That moment unified the present and the past of my art as an
essential core or a condensation of time, just as a seed encloses a
tree in itself.
*
My
concerns do not seem at all unusual to me in the context of
contemporary Romanian poetry, and I wish them to be known more
widely, as a dissemination of a rich experience which can bring joy
to others. Of course, they refer to an alternative way of writing
poetry now, at this moment, when perception is mainly focused on a
‘positivist’ view of life, in the sense of a gaze from/towards
the outside. The obstinate search for interiority which characterises
my poetry is not a minor or pointless thing to me, as it expresses a
sincere aspiration to which I am devoted. I also believe that, in a
normal society, it should not be necessary to continuously justify
what we do. ….[And] poetry is never a dogma but a spark from the
beauty which accompanies us, intact, forever.
Translated
from the Romanian of Simona-Grazia Dima by Adriana-Ioana
Nacu-Minculescu
Simona-Grazia
Dima
was
born in Timisoara, in a family of writers. When 8 years old she won a
prize for a theatrical sketch, Lica's Mask, which was staged by the
Puppet Theatre in Timisoara, as well on tours throughout Romania and
abroad. She graduated as a national valedictorian from the University
of Timisoara, the Faculty of Philology. As a student, she was the
president of the literary circle of the Students' University Centre
in Timisoara. Simona-Grazia Dima is mainly a poet, but also an
essayist, a literary critic and a translator.
She
is an active contributor to the leading Romanian literary magazines
and the author of ten books of poetry :Ecuaţie
liniştită (Serene Equation),1985,
Dimineţile gândului (Mornings of
Thought), 1989, Scara lui Iacob
(Jacob's Ladder),
l995, Noaptea romană (Roman Night),
1997, Focul matematic (The Mathematical
Fire), 1997, Confesor de tigri (A
Tiger's Confessor), 1998, Ultimul
etrusc (The Last Etruscan),
2002, Călătorii apocrife (Apocryphal
Journeys), 2002, Dreptul rănii de a
rămâne deschisă (The Right of the
Wound to Be Left Gaping), 2003, La ora
fulgerului (When Lightnings Start
Flaring) She has published two books of
essays and literary criticism and has translated from English Arthur
Osborne's Ramana Maharshi and the Path
of Self-Knowledge (2003, title of the
Romanian version: Sri Ramana Maharshi
sau calea Cunoaşterii Supreme).
Currently
Simona-Grazia Dima manages an international literary project which is
a part of the International PEN Organization’s activity (The
Linguistic and Translation Rights Committee), by preparing an
anthology of contemporary Romanian literature in both electronic and
written form in English and Macedonian languages. She is a principal
editor in the Romanian Academy and lives in Bucharest, the capital of
Romania.
