Ioana Trică, Romania

Ioana Trică, Romania

Ioana Trică was born in Grindu village, Ialomita county, Romania. She graduated the University of Bucharest, Romanian-French Major. Poet and translator, she has been publishing since 1999 in magazines and in volumes, translations from French and Romansh (Rhaeto-Roman), a romanic idiom spoken in Switzerland, rare language today, with only a few tens of thousands of speakers. She makes the Romansh literature and culture, whose language is protected by UNESCO, known.

Her debut in poetry is in the Romanian Life magazine in 2004. She is present in journals and anthologies in the country and in France, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Spain.

She has published several books of poetry and translations: Altcineva/ Someone else, 2005; Continente suspendate/ Suspended continents 2008; El Tiempo con rostro extraňo /Weather with strange face, Obsidiana Press Publishing House 2008, USA. The Spanish version François Szabo; Cruciadele somnului/ The sleep crusades, 2011; Noaptea șarpelui- Nata y gjarperit/ Night of the snake, bilingual Albanese-Romanian edition 2013.Translation in Albanese by Baki Ymeri; O insulă în nord/ An island in the north, 2015; Trafic de memorie/ Memory Traffic, 2020 etc.

Poet, she performs poem recitals in her country and abroad. Her poems are translated in Spanish, French, Albanian, English, Catalan.

Naji Naaman Award in 2009 for the manuscript Lonely men / Des Hommes seuls; The Grand prize of the ”Armonii de primavara” Literature Festival in 2016, for the volume O insulă în Nord.

Member of  P.E.N. International – French Centre, and of World Poetry Movement.

Her writings, considered “weird and deeply moving”, bring clarity, harmony, but also mystery, as the secret vision of someone who feels its fragrance.

THE FIRST SUNRISE OF CREATION

A frozen afternoon

Hallways of loneliness
were opening new dimensions

Within the season’s crater
luminous burning circles were swirling around

Remnants of the first sunrise of creation

No one knew the place
but you could find it in everybody’s dreams

And in the deep waters of the red moon

Today
in Christmas night
you can still see the lights
blazing slowly
on the roofs of the houses.

LIVID NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE EVENING

A man was passing through the livid
neighborhood of the evening
He carried a lonely sky on his back

An obscure metallic form of love
was shaking near a lamppost
begging for
a sign a glance a silver coin

Smelly rotten thoughts
were singing from the sewerage
they stopped under the nose of the fruit seller
smelling
of rotten mornings.

WOMAN OF THE SEA

Alone
through the night of shells
the woman of the sea
gathers in her foamy arms
the shore and beach

At day she rises
from the middle of the sea
and breathes the sun
and the leafless wind.

Then immerses in the abyss
and seeds the sea
with fish
and lost
ships.

SOMEONE ELSE

Someone else makes invocations
on my time
Someone else smells my looks

I’m slipping through the hottest evenings
until oblivion
until I forget I exist

I’m watching through the windows of time
Someone else’s watching through myself

My head comes under the night’s gutter
looking for my star

It’s a white star
in a foreign nebula

From another sky
from another Universe

Someone else’s writing poems
someone else’s erasing my memories
the ones I had to have

In another sky
in another Universe.

THE WHITE OF THE BLANK PAGE

And then everything becomes anything:

a book is now a foreign night
thoughts are sonorous birds
and the birds are springs in time

And then we are
the remembrance of someone
A silent rain
washes us of the time when
we was nothing more than
the white of the blank page.

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