Carmen-Francesca Banciu
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First Edition in German, PalmArtPress, March, 2015
© 2015 Carmen-Francesca Banciu, ISBN: 978-3-941524-60-6
ISBN: 978-3-941524-95-8 (Print)
ISBN: 978-3-96258-040-7 (E-Book)
1. Edition (English and Greek), All Rights Reserved, 2017
© Carmen-Francesca Banciu
© PalmArtPress, Pfalzburger Str. 69, 10719 Berlin, Germany
www.palmartpress.com
Publisher: Catharine J. Nicely
Cover Photo: Carmen-Francesca Banciu
Photos: Carmen-Francesca Banciu
Translation: Advanced Training in Greek Poetry Translation and Performance Workshop, directed by Vassiliki Rapti
Translation (English): Molly O'Laughlin
Chapters: 1-3, 9-11, 13-41, 43-60, 62-68, 70-73, 75
Editors: Catharine J. Nicely, Clara Luise Hildebrand
Translation (English): Pat Snidvongs
Chapters: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 42, 61, 69, 74
Editors: Peter Bottéas, Vladimir Bošković, Julia Dubnoff, Vassiliki Rapti
Translation (Greek): Vassiliki Rapti and Andreas Triantafyllou
Produced in Germany
Foreword
1. Karelia Gold
2. Karelia Joy
3. Eyes behind the Eyes of the Eyes
4. Homesick
5. Morning Moods
6. Thirst for the Sea
7. Mimis, The Philosopher
8. Cicada Music
9. Summer Home
10. Terrace Safari I
11. Orange Life, Orange Learning
12. Clytemnestra and Orestes
13. Brief Locust Lore
14. Summer Friends
15. Among People Again
16. Akrogiali, Here and Now
17. What Remained of the Day
18. Daniel, the Savior of Himself
19. May the Earth Rest Lightly upon Them
20. Today, about the Rain
21. The Scent of the World
22. Portrait in the Company of Insects I
23. Portrait in the Company of Insects II
24. The Intelligence of My Pets
25. My Toothbrush Belongs to Me
26. Cat Visit
27. Agave Kraken
28. Ode to the Agave Kraken
29. Sunset
30. Terrace Safari II
31. Every Sunset is Different
32. Heart Jump
33. Basic Hunger
34. Driftwood
35. Is that Betrayal?
36. It Doesn’t Take a Lot to Be Clever
37. Temporary Homecoming
38. I Eat Cherries and Look at the Sea
39. Risk of Confusion
40. Betrayal or Responsibility
41. Where is Orestes Hiding?
42. The End of Summer
43. The Power of Silence
44. Silence Is Balance, Talking Is Joy
45. Sappho from the Mainland
46. My Friend Palomena V.
47. Yearning for Crisis?
48. The Eternal Perikles
49. Do You Know Fukuoka?
50. Beloved Music I
51. Beloved Music II
52. Summer Friday in the Village
53. The Fool in Me, the Fool to Me
54. The Day of the Karamanis Clan
55. Cloudy Summer View
56. Cat Teachings
57. In Doubt of the Returnees
58. On the Terrace Battlefield, Banners Wave
59. And I, Why Do I Murder?
60. Saturday Again
61. Nocturnal Visit
62. The World’s Navel at the Sea
63. Life Is Everywhere
64. That, Too, Is Life
65. Time for the Bookworm
66. Small(est) Stories at the Sea
67. Vacation at Last
68. Tattoo-Tataaa!
69. Drunk on the Sun, and Wanderlust
70. Summer Dies a Little Every Day
71. Ilios Goes to Sleep
72. Farewell to the Beautiful Clytemnestra
73. I seek the Traces of Summer
74. A Last Cherry for Orestes
75. The Death of Summer
Translator’s Note
For Dieter Ohlhaver and Germa von Heydebreck-Ohlhaver
“Championing a cosmopolitan perspective, Banciu’s novels are distinctive in style and structure and present an interesting challenge for English language translation of her work. Richly metaphorical, rife with anaphora and characterized with a sentence structure that is skillfully elliptical and allusive, as well as deceptively simple and deliberately suggestive and ambivalent, Banciu’s prose is both playful and profound.”
Elena Mancini, Queens College, CUNY
“Thirteen ways of describing the rain”— and a thousand and one the sun, sinking or rising in the mirror of the sea.
Despite all the tragedies about those locusts, baptized “Orestes” or “Clytemnestra” by the author, in spite of all the insect satyr-plays about Arachne’s webs, Ariadne’s threads, about love-labyrinths and death-orgies in the terrace-arena of the miniature Minotaurs, in the cicadas’ polyphonic chirp of a Greek summer: with the author alone on the terrace, with her in the car among people, in the kafenion, in the sea, by reading—now, during the melting of the Berlin snow—the weight of the world grows lighter gram by gram, and step by step the eye grows brighter …
As modest as she is clever, Carmen-Francesca Banciu draws on the root of all poetry inspired by Greece: to be a hymn to light.
I can feel my heart contracting. / Flickering out like the Sun’s daily death. I know this. / There is no beginning. And no ending. / I know this. / Nothing is lost. / Nothing dies. / Things are only transformed. / I know this. / And forget it, again and again.
Werner Fritsch, January 2015
Hearing many words is not listening. It´s like a noise among the leaves. The quality of listening is attention. Sagt Yddu Krishnamurti.
Watching many things is not seeing. The quality of seeing is awareness. I add to it.
No, I’m not starting again.
I never stopped. Smoking.
By now, I only smoke a couple of times a year. Maybe ten times. But today I feel like it. A George Karelia. I tried them for the first time here in Greece. Back then, fifteen years ago. And they’re still around.
A lot has changed in these 15 years here. A lot has disappeared in these 15 years. The Karelias are still there. A blend of the finest. Un mélange … Still in their flat, yellow package. The package with the golden letters. That one opens like a box of chocolates. George Karelias and Sons. Smoother Taste. Virginia. Everything as it was years ago. Only nowadays, a white sticker with deep black script defaces the elegant box. It sticks threateningly to the front side. And repeats on the back. A premonition of the future obituary for the smoker.
The sweet-savory-soft smell leaves me waiting. Until I’ve opened the box wide.
But I take my time. And first patiently study the print on the inside of the lid. I can’t remember ever having read this Note from George A. Karelias. Did I not pay attention to his message back then?
Back then, anyhow, George A. Karelias never spoke to me. Or maybe it’s a new message.
For over a century successive generations of our family have worked to refine our products. From this rich tradition of heritage and quality we bring to you a distinctive cigarette of superior quality.
George signed it himself in gold. A regular, balanced, elegant hand. A man in equilibrium. No lover of wild excess.
Is that true?
When one opens the box, one gets a faint idea of what Mr. George means.
But first one must admire the elegant paper. Patterned with tiny Karelia logos. Countless gold emblems on white paper. When one opens the protective paper, the whole inside shines golden. In this shining bed lie the cigarettes, underneath each other in two rows. With long, orange, yellow-speckled filters. Each one wears the Karelia name in gold.
White leather gloves-milk-vanilla-honey aroma. And the aroma of tobacco. Out of the box it rises smoothly upward. Un mélange des meilleurs tabacs choisis pour qualité …
I breathe in the fine aroma. Light and rich. Its enticing sweetness relaxes me. The Greek summer afternoon is more perfect for it.
I’m away from Berlin. Fled. I’ve escaped my life for this summer. To slip into another. Into life on a terrace with a view of the sea.
I’m away from Berlin, leaving everything heavy, everything unresolved behind me. At least to interrupt the old life. Or even to change it. To free myself from the heaviness. To birth myself anew. Through another view. Through another attitude. Through mindfulness. Through awareness.
I have come in order to touch life itself. To give birth to myself anew. And to capture the birth in words.
I live in a lonely house. At the edge of a village in Mani.
It’s not my house. It’s the house of friends from Lübeck.
And I’m allowed to spend the summer here.
Having just arrived, I plunge into the velvety air.
Around me, the tepid summer evening.
The new moon. Dainty. An arabesque.
Karelia Gold.
The new moon hangs over the sea.
I am sitting on the terrace. A terrace on the hillside.
And the way I sit there, it looks like the terrace is a bridge. From the garden to the sea.
I choose a cigarette. The third in the row. As if it had a meaning. It has a meaning. It is the third cigarette in the top row.
And because it is the third, it tastes different from the second. Or the tenth. Or the seventeenth in the second row.
Because more humidity.
Because more air.
Because more light has reached it.
Because I’ve chosen it.
Because nothing is the same as itself. And everything is always new and unknown.
I can’t part with the aroma, and clamp the Karelia between my upper lip and nose. I look at the sea. And at the moon above. And at the swarm of bustling moths around the hanging lamp on the terrace.
The Karelia between upper lip and nose. I imagine how that looks. And have to laugh. And the cigarette falls to the floor. I pick it up. It’s the third cigarette from the top row. And yet, now it’s become something or someone else. From now on, it is the third cigarette from the top row, that has fallen on the floor.
The-third-cigarette-from-the-top-row-that-has-fallen-on-the-floor has a history now.
It already had one before. Only I didn’t know it. I didn’t even think about it. Now there was one, because I noticed it.
A locust sniffs at the box. It’s ocher-colored. With brownish patterns and green decorations. It, too, goes with the gold of the box.
I hold my cigarette under my nose and breathe in the aroma. The aroma makes me happy. Can smoking make me even happier?
A locust with only one feeler wants to get at the smell. Into the box. I close the box. Frighten the little locust Not on purpose. It stays on the table. Frozen. Then it thaws again. Feels with its feeler ever closer to the box.
It must be a smoker. An addicted smoker.
The aroma makes me happy. The aroma of twenty luxury cigarettes.
Twenty times I can take pleasure in it. When I breathe in the aroma of the tobacco, sitting on the terrace at night—surrounded by singing cicadas, by chirping crickets and grasshoppers, by curious locusts, by orange and pink moths, by small, lemon-yellow, tiny insects—with a deep drag.
Twenty times I can take pleasure in it.
And even more often. When I don’t light up.
At the foot of the mountain flicker the lights of the city. The lights of Stoupa. And behind the lights a sea of darkness spreads. Behind the lights darkly lies the sea.
I, high up on a Greek mountain, could smoke the finest cigarette now. More than a century people have striven for this. So that I can enjoy it, here and now.
For years I have bought no cigarettes for myself. Only sometimes bummed from other smokers. I don’t even have a lighter. In my bag full of surprises. Really a city backpack. I find a slim matchbox.
On the box it says Hotel Remarque. This box has traveled with me a lot. Through half the world. For no reason. Because it was just there. And there was no reason to take it out.
Hotel Remarque in Osnabrück. That’s a long time ago.