Simonides translated by Anne Carson says everything that is me is with me. I’m in flight, midway over the Atlantic, I’m carrying my child and feel him move at times, my husband is with me. Borders are blurred here off ground. In math class I learned that lines you don’t border don’t have a beginning despite the start you create for them on the page and they don’t end on the page either. There’s also nothing in the pupil. It’s a hole through which light passes and is absorbed in the iris. And in that tiny space, reflections.

S's sister was a harpist while S was a chemist working in a furniture factory. Her work everyday was to decide the correct chemical composition of varnish the factory would use on the furniture they produce. Her husband was a doctor. Once a month they would take a train to the capital city for a weekend for S to get her hair done and a facial, they would get lunch afterwards then go to the opera and a late dinner at the Lido downtown Bucharest. English is just a language for this story, it wobbles in carrying the weight of the story, she wouldn’t use these words to tell her story. From the Romanian to English story edits occur, tones get altered, a mixture of pure colors to which only pure gray is added. Adding gray to a hue can make the intensity much duller. S is 95, her mind and language are intact and when she dies her world and language will be gone. I grew up on the edge of her world disappearing. In English I’m not myself in this story. Outside my window is a walnut tree, an ivy used to grow around it, it died a while ago but its structure is still holding itself up around the tree trunk. Ne-a condus pe toți toata viața. She ran us all our whole lives. And now it rains. A feeling of all those times losing us dissipating runs through me.




Translation: Ion kept asking the primary school teacher to direct him on how to take on himself the eight days of jailtime. He was at peace and didn’t care about the conviction. He even enjoyed feeling relieved to have one less thing to worry about, he could now focus on his trouble with Vasile Baciu. Because the hearing date had been set, Ion began having nightmares: either that he had a fight with his father-in-law and he was left under, or that Grofșoru left him and sided with Vasile, or that Ana asked him to break up and moved back at her father’s with the child, leaving him blindsided. The Ana nightmare especially was stuck in his mind like a screw.




I imagine eavesdropping is sitting by eaves to overhear what is said on the other side of the wall, on the inside of where the conversation is taking place. It’s about not being in the room but finding a way to be inside by hearing, being inside somewhere else listening in your silence to the sounds of your outside and others’ inside. The two men at a table across from us in a garden restaurant in Bucharest are talking about nationalist political parties in Romania. People are really tired of being told that Romania is awful and we all have to leave. I wonder if I can ever be gentle in Romanian. There’s an acacia close to our table completely taken over by ivy, a salcâm just serves as a structure for the ivy that has grown into a tall bush with salcâm branching out of it.

Ne dăm bătuți, we give ourselves up, beaten, we give us away as beaten up entities, we give up, within the idea of giving up is the idea that your body has been beaten to such an extent you give yourself over to whomever. The king of England bought ten properties in Romania throughout his years of being the Prince of Wales. What does this land give him? He speaks of being closer to nature here, it seems to give him a sense of holding purity and spirituality he cannot access otherwise. He quotes a canonical poem calling Romania my country of glory my country of longing. He visits his properties multiple times a year, his wife never comes with him, his princes never come with him, it is his place and then there’s everyone else living here. I, here, don’t understand why it is our country of glory but it is at times my country of longing. We long for it when we go abroad, we long for it when we live in it, we long for it when it changes daily. We’re tied to the land and find it in our longing while it finds us in its ownership.

Tie: I always struggle to find salt I like in the US, usually it’s not salty enough, it’s too fine, food doesn’t taste right. Tradition is to greet visitors with bread and salt, to dip the bread in salt and take a bite, then enter. Salt mines in salt mountains with salt caves. C takes her kid to a salt cave every few weeks so he can breathe in salty air in hope it will help him get over the flu he’s had for weeks. In there it smells fresh, humid, weighty. Gray rocky looking salt is what I keep trying to buy.

I carry my son with my longing, I hope he will find his own ties to the land but part of me would be content if he was free of them too. Dor is a longing with a lot of restlessness. My pregnancy with my son brought me a deep calm, when I fly out of Romania now my breathing is quiet, the feeling of a huge spider gripping my lungs is gone, my brain waves reconfigured to imagine a further future, past the separation anxiety of a plane taking off.

TV anchors are so enamored with the king of England’s feelings about Romania, they keep trying to interpret and figure them out. Does he allow us to see ourselves in translation? Perhaps we are just excited to be translated. We conflate the king with Charles, the original with the translation, a unit that stands for the West, the West that finally sees us enough to translate us to a form they like so maybe we can like it. My view is of a dystopic way to view ourselves. His 10 properties mean we are visible, someone sees 10 of our lands. I wonder if this view is an escape for a people who are uncomfortable in thier own original. Are our ties to the land made comfortable by the king from the West who chooses to tie himself to our land, in that story ignoring the history of his family violently tying themselves to land they did not belong to. Our ties to our lands that lead to our ties to our families tied to our lands that we long for when we have to leave. For the first years after the revolution as children we would be told we have to leave to be happy. We have to leave? Do we have to leave? Do we still have to leave?




Translation: I wrote Ion out of a scene I witnessed three decades ago. It was one of those days at the start of spring, the ground was soaked through, sticky. I’d gone out to hunt wild doves. As I rambled through the hills around the village, I saw a peasant, dressed in his Sunday best. He couldn’t see me... All of a sudden he kneeled down and kissed the ground. He kissed it as if it was a mistress.

The black sticky clay, grabbed at his feet, weighing them down, bringing him in like the arms of a passionate mistress. His eyes laughed and his whole face was drenched in a warm ardent sweat. A wild appetite grabbed hold of him to embrace the soil, to tear it up in kisses. He stretched out his arms towards the straight furrows, rough and humid. The sour smell, fresh and rich, lit up his blood. He bent down grabbed a handful and broke it up in his fingers with an aghast pleasure. His hands were smeared by the sticky clay like funerary gloves. He drank in the smell, rubbing his hands.

He slowly, piously, went down to his knees, lowered his forehead and stuck his lips voluptuously to the wet ground and in this quick kiss felt a cold chill that left him feeling lightheaded. [...] And the ground staggered, bending down to him.




The king of England says there is no other country in Europe with virgin forests, that we must protect them. Does he see himself as their protector or does he need them to stay in this word he used “virgin,” what about the rest of us? As I watch a Romanian interview with a popular singer I hear her keep using the word raw in English to describe the style of music she’s trying to emulate, it’s strange she can’t find a Romanian equivalent, like entering someone’s life with your shoes on. Brut, crud, neprelucrat, nefiert, jupuit, necopt, curat, deschis all approximations but nothing there.

As I’m having my morning coffee my dad is watching a show on Romanian grammar. Five minutes daily of an anchor explaining the correct way to speak, what words mean and how they should be used. He feels vindicated when a form of the verb is confirmed as what he had been saying it should be. He frequently talks to TV anchors through the TV correcting their Romanian. DEX online tells me jilav means land containing a barely felt amount of water or another liquid, soaked through by humidity. Regionally it can mean hard, unbreakable, nonelastic. It comes from Bulgarian.

Tie: I don’t know how to feel about being naturalized as an American. To experience a process described by a word signifying uprooting plants from one land and getting them used to another. To be unrooted from Romania and be adapted to the US, I’m not sure that’s how untying works. We took a family trip across India and we frequently would take off our shoes either to go to someone’s house or a temple. My brother-in-law would joke that the newest wellness fad in the US is walking barefoot to practice grounding, as if LA just discovered walking barefoot. My mom has very cold feet, she has always chased me around the house with a pair of slippers to try to stop me from walking barefoot, that’s how you grow cold. Between the body and the ground lies a passport.

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Anca Roncea is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa’s MFA in Literary Translation and is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature (International Writers’ Track) at Washington University in Saint Louis. Anca’s poetry has been published in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Beecher’s Magazine, Omniverse, the Bare Life Review, and Lana Turner. Her translation from Romanian of the poetry collection Tribar by Andra Rotaru was published in 2022 by Saturnalia. She is currently working on her first book of poetry, an experimental translation that aims to create a speculative archive of the work and presence of women artists of the Dada Movement.

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