Victor Pambuccian
Photo courtesy of Victor Pambuccian
Bio
A professor of mathematics at Arizona State University, Victor Pambuccian has published more than 100 papers in mathematical journals, mostly on the axiomatic foundation of geometry. He has translated poetry from Romanian, German, and French into English, the translations appearing in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, International Poetry Review, and Pleiades. He was the guest editor of a 2011 special issue of International Poetry Review dedicated to poetry from Romania, and is a recipient of a 2017 NEA Translation grant. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar (to Poland and Armenia) and once a Mercator Visiting Professor at the Dortmund University of Technology. He is the editor and translator of Something is still present and isn’t, of what’s gone. A bilingual anthology of avant-garde and avant-garde influenced Rumanian poetry, Aracne editrice, Rome, 2018.
The award was essential in motivating me to complete the project of translating Romanian avant-garde and avant-garde inspired poetry. These projects are usually on the back burner, as mathematics research and teaching is my main preoccupation. Receiving the award made me focus on this task, made me leave everything else aside to devote the required time to the completion of that task. The result of that year-long work has appeared as Something is still present and isn’t, of what’s gone. A bilingual anthology of avant-garde and avant-garde influenced Rumanian poetry, Aracne editrice, Rome, 2018, 300 pages.
From Hertza
[translated from the Romanian]
IV
The old folks from that old house came out to meet us
at the gate, with its rusted ivy grating,
in their eyes the quiet smile of a pond in the plain.
Do you still remember? Do you still remember?
The orchard threw stones at the mirabelle and apricot trees.
Quinces, behind windows, with sleek skin
were exchanging words echoing the mating of pianos.
The sofa like a pear became soft for you, tomcat,
and it was cozy in the old Moldavian armchair,
with wooden leaves wrested from the veneer, year in, year out.
Behind a brass lock, the photo albums hide you so well from us,
youth! The past is near the lamp
and the mirror’s filled with wrinkles.
Time has gotten so long since it’s no longer today
and barren and flabby like a convalescence.
You wait the whole evening for the same stagecoach
that lets off the same returning Jews.
In homes one knows of ships bound for New York
and banks where the ocean unloaded bones.
A lighthouse still gives off signs of fear through shutters
and that’s all. You go to the rusted ivy fence:
two youngsters knock at the old gate. You step out,
in your eyes a frozen quiet smile
of a pond in the plain, in autumn. Do you still remember?
1922
About B. Fundoianu
B. Fundoianu’s work, ranging from poetry in Romanian to literary theory in French and movie-making, is known in France mostly as that of the theorist Benjamin Fondane. His work in his native language is largely unknown. Hertza, is a mesmerizing expressionistic re-creation of a state of soul, evoking on the one hand the vanished world of the shtetl in the Greater Romania between the two world wars, and on the other the slow passing of time and memory, with its reflection in the observer. By its overwhelming nostalgia and use of hylozoistic images, a gem unlike anything written in any language.