Coșul tău este gol acum!
Archetypes is a collection of poems intent on revealing the deeper patterns of meaning beneath the surface level of language – that infinitely generative folk resource of words and syntax which streams through every border and connects all antipodes. Code-switching from English to Romanian with a virtuosic contiguity, Cristescu’s evocations of an author divided between Ego, Soul and Self are enigmatic and precise – they seduce the monoglot reader into the unfamiliar territories of a foreign language, and draw the casual observer into a verdant philosophical landscape.
In Cristescu’s poems, familiarity and estrangement meet where word and object intersect, and the simplest images – a panama hat, a solander box – pierce the page and become rich metonymies, carried along by the rhythm of lines; they are thoughts brought in heavy buckets over field and stream. These charged signs and symbols pour as water through ‘branches and fingers, doors and circles’ until they become ‘lines on paper’ read by ‘humans learning letters’. Each poem speaks to the reader like water ‘talking to the new born house in the summertime’ – they build a house of words where all must learn to make their home.
An ingenious, and unfathomably deep work of poetic achievement, Archetypes is charged with a Bakhtinian sense of the carnivalesque – it is a bold divination into language’s bewildering complexity.
Dr. Luke Carman
Western Sydney University, Australia
Mihaela Cristescu –
Perspectiva autorului
Traducand limbajul cotidian al celor care au plecat sa locuiasca departe de locurile natale, ‘Archetypes in Code-Mixing Poetry’ este un volum dedicat profesorilor mei, personajelor pentru care literatura a fost perceputa drep unica modalitate de existenta, un vector fara de care nu putem privi timpul decat prin ritm si vers. Ego, Soul si Self, cele trei capitole ale cartii, se doresc a fi definite prin teoria lui C. G. Jung precum centru al identitatii constiintei, proces de cladire al identitatii autentice si dorinta de a fi conectat si de a contribui la creatia lumii.
Va invit sa lecturati cele 21 de compozitii in limbaj mixt, romano-englez, cu dorinta de a intelege perspectiva scriitorului contemporan in lupta sa permanenta cu expresia poetica.
Ilustratiile sunt realizate de Luminita Serbanescu, pictor si arhitect de origine romana, stabilita in Ottawa Canada si sunt inspirate din lucrarile fotografice ale romanului Ion Nelu Serban.
Aceasta carte a fost publicata in cadrul Proiectului eLiteratura, in format electronic si tiparit.