Linda Maria Baros - Official Site. Poems
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P    O    E    M    S


Linda Maria Baros, born in Romania on the 6th of August 1981, is a French-language author who lives in Paris.
PhD in Comparative Literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and University of Bucharest.

She has published five collections of poems, two plays, and two literary studies. Her three most recent books of poetry were published in
France by Cheyne éditeur: Le Livre de signes et d'ombres
(
The Book of Signs and Shadows), winner of the Poetical Calling Prize 2004, La Maison en lames de rasoir
(
The House Made of Razor Blades), winner of the famous
Apollinaire Prize 2007, and L’Autoroute A4 et autres poèmes
(
The Highway A4 and other poems), 2009.

She poetry has been published in over 25 contry.

Linda Maris Baros has also translated about thirty
books.
In 2008, she created BNZ - La Bibliothèque numérique ZOOM
(Zoom Digital Library)
, a virtual library that includes over 125 authors whom she translated and published into French or Romanian.

In Romania, she is the initiator and the organizer of the Spring of Poets Festival (which takes place in 55 cities) and the director of the literary review VERSUs/m.
In Paris, she is the general secretary of The College of Comparative Literature, the assistant secretary of the Romanian Translators’ Association and the general assistant secretary of the La Now Pléiade Association.
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Linda Maria Baros




Mine Horses


The house that nursed you told you perhaps,
at night, the story of mine horses:
Mine horses are born and live in the depths;
between gallery walls one finds their house,
their table.
There, they feed on enormous pieces of darkness,
of coal.
They feed themselves gropingly, by lamplight.
And like gallery slaves, they blindly pull coal-trucks.
They carry always and forever,
as long as a horse’s life lasts.
They carry light to the surface.

But at the surface, in light, they cannot live,
not even when they are retired, released from the mine.
Because they come into the world blindfolded.
Darkness glued to their foreheads.

And like this they live a little longer, docile.
Breezes and fragrances make them shiver,
in the crumbling coal shed, in the courtyard of the mine.

Blindfolded,
until they descend once more into the depths.

Their house is eternal darkness.



In the Trap of the Nostrils


Dawn is a woman
who breaks your windows with her breasts
-reddened are her nipples
that the bums suck...

Ah, we hear the hour of the hunt striking...
(Cursed are Vlachka and its Teleorman!)

Prepare the raid, the surprise attack!
The trap for the guests!
Set the snares!
Splatter your face with blood,
as if African masks of sleepless nights
ran from your arteries!
Catch its red foxes in the trap of the nostrils!

And first,
prepare the raid, the surprise attack.
Even if no one comes.
Dawn-when solitude
appears to you as a curdled brain on the walls.



Q.H.S.


There are days when you would like to make yourself a place
on the windowsill, strolling there secretly,
eyes closed, as if on a hypnotic bridge,
as if on the edge of a deep silence.
(From below, only emptiness looks up at you, its height.)

As if you were someone else,
legs sunk to the knee
in a deep silence,
someone who strolled there secretly.

For one moment only, because the air
behind the bars of the window pushes you back,
as if in a high-security wings.

And the room absorbs you into itself.




Fata Morgana


The floor donkey carries you on his back,
trotting exhausted between the walls,
their whitewashed utopias
-also alive, their petrified troops,
their mobs, their temptations!
He carries you, untiring, as if across a desert.

He throws himself into the bend, aflame,
as if his path were ardently traced
in paraffin.

“Merde!” shout those who come, vertiginously,
the wrong way,
and their voices mingle with the muffled sound
of weaving
that haunts desert, walls, highways...

“Merde alors!” resounds the echo.

And from the window, light, sharpened spear,
reflects upside-down on the floor,
as if in the back of an eye.

It will pierce your rib later.
The donkey throws you in the dunes. And weeps.

Across the Gardens Autumn Breaks


Across the gardens autumn breaks.
(Lethargic
and creaking from old arteries,
asphalt crackles underneath. It whistles.
Autumn has plunged knives
into its lungs.)

Like aboulic travelers,
the sharp edges of autumn
-you see them scraping, as they go,
the mane of the forest,
slashing at your room, at the walls’ wrists,
where neuroses knot,
collide, break and lisp.
With their sharpened nails,
they knock for a long time at your window.
And fly away from the left ventricle,
carrying the pentryl and the din and the faces
developed in the darkroom of your heart,
among which you can no longer find your way
as in the spark of delay,
of the axe.

You double-lock the door. You fall silent.
Across the gardens autumn breaks. And crackles.

Unknown poets will go past, for a long time, in the Seine.
And late in life we will fish them out with steel hooks.

                                                     Translated by Youna Kwak

La Maison en lames de rasoir, Cheyne éditeur, 2006, 2008
(The House Made of Razor Blades)


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Linda Maria Baros - Poetry of the A4 Motorway
                                        
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The House Made of Razor Blades
The Highway A4 and other poems
The Book of Signs and Shadows
144 Today Poets from all over the World
Anthology of Romanian Poetry
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... poems of Linda
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