Poetic File: Talking to Romanian Poet Vasile Grigore Latiş

Talking to poet Vasile Grigore Latiş, in Baia Mare, Romania, in March 2000
by Eva Acqui

E.A.- I have seen the papers relating your writing to that of the German Romantic poets, Holderlin, Trackl....you have always talked warmly about South-Americans, Indians, so why the German poets?

V.G.L. - I feel spiritually related to the German culture, though it has intermittently reached us: the stranger it is, the more important for us. The German spirit is more profound than the Latin spirit: mine is related to the German and Hellenic spirit. There I find force, I find myself.

E.A. - What about the influence of Romanian folk poetry on your verse?

V.G.L. - My verse is a sum of epochs historically lived through by the people: there is such a sum living in me. That is where you find the influence of folk poetry.

E.A. - What do you call original poetry?

V.G.L. - Original poetry meets two requirements at the same time: thought and emotion. Man is presented in totality: however, the poet is unhappy, never satisfied.

E.A. - Do you have a special place where you write?

V.G.L. - There is a place (topos) hard to think about, immense, fortunately (not totally) dislocating the immediate, translating the inborn spaces of the creator. I create such a space and there I write.

E.A. - You have written over the years.....

V.G.L. - Yes, I have. Nothing is sufficient to itself: one thing is the sign for another: all things account for this injustice done....

E.A. - What is the main feeling triggering your writing?

V.G.L. - I feel terror, fear, self-destroying emotion: I am all ashes. What makes me different from others is my force of becoming. At the same time, I am a burning spirit.

E.A. - I have just seen a text written by you, entitled My Brother. Who is "the brother"?

V.G.L. - There are two people in one, in me: "You brother of mine": however, my greatest suffering is an immense loneliness. The other one, "the brother" , is my transcendence.
E.A. - Whose is the voice then? Who writes, you or "the brother"?

V.G.L. - I do. The brother is happy, he transcends this world: but I, "I loved, oh God, fiercely and much/ I cried and lonely, second time born, from other parents...." (Songs without Words, the volume to be published soon). This is the real danger: the re-birth. And I walk, keep on walking and writing. And I voice things, things that are in waiting to be created already named.

E.A. - You are considered a great artist.....

V.G.L. - No, I am not an artist: artists have a playful soul, they love themselves: I am a tragic soul. I am a creator. I love non-artistic people.

E.A. - If so, how do you value other people who create?

V.G.L. - One afternoon, I went to a painting exhibition. The artist was there, explaining someone his ideas about his work. It seemed pathetic to me. I ran out of the hall and walked for about an hour, to clear my thoughts. For me to relate to him, to his work, he should have given me a more terrible truth than mine, so terrible as to enable me to say that such a truth shouldn't even exist. Creation, the real one, is not adaptation. As Hegel said "We do not mind, but he should prove it". Then, let a creator prove that he has created. My problem is that "the sea waits for me at its source". I can even take things in their absence at times. But all that is hard. The easy is hard. This is my part of curse. I do want to confess, but, God, can I? I'll endure, I'll try.

E.A. - I've found a definition of yours for poetry in your book entitled Socrates Cries for Diotima. Could you explain some of the symbols? May I take it verse by verse? "Poetry, friend, is what breaks away from itself...."

V.G.L. - Yes, I've already told you, one thing triggers another. One verse breaks itself away to become another....

E.A. - "A blue being. A saint in his fearful dances. A place fitting itself and forgetting you. A warrior's voice. A child. A deed perhaps untold. A girl as you were before. Silence forever interrupted."

V.G.L. - Poetry is of the blues, of the high, if you wish. It is like the prayer of the saints, almost exorcism. When it comes to its place, it translates the inner space of the creator, forgetting about him. The warrior as symbol stands for the role of poetry to place things where they should be. A child, yes, the child is the primary entity, the child tells the truth, so does poetry. He is innocence and experience, all in one. It can also tell deeds otherwise untold. It can be a "maiden", dreamy and candid. The silence of the beginnings meant life. Poetry translates this silence, interrupting it by materializing thought, in verse.

E.A. - One of the main roots of your poetry is love. In the 101 Poems of Socrates Cries for Diotima you actually express 101 conclusions on love....

V.G.L. - Oh, yes, I love, but beware of a self-killing love like mine. Eros has to die: everything is to be loss to stay. I keep love by deserting it, and desert keeping it. The woman is sublime and ideal. She is a saint. I don't mind if there is love, but it should be authentic and identical. Love is pain to me, the pain of a "mild storm". It does not stand lies. Lies make me desperate that I may fall out of the last reality I have. But I am ready to forgive it. It will be a pleasure for the woman to lie to me, to create herself from lies. But when there's nothing left, I act like the child told "it is not allowed". I am not ardent in love, I am passionate.

E.A. - I find your definitions of love resembling beginnings, contradictory and very large.

V.G.L. - Yes, let me quote: "Love-no words. This is the hardship"; "There is a wide sea in the waves...."; "You build your light into me exceeding limits"; " You are but Image and Law on earth"; "If you want to be what you are - turn to me"; "Tell love? Do not speak it. It's God in dreams. Prayer."; "Forever terrible for the good one. But without you, God doesn't read the world"; "You'll love me one day, love hard and proud, as I love, but I wouldn't like to know it"; "Teach me the silence of the beginning"; "I imagine you, I'm someone else, righteous and good...."; "What soul are you that I am not destined to see you?"; "Oh, song so mild, hardly whispered....a pale of wind and swaying of woods....How to keep myself from you and from the power of those sounds?"; "Love our knowledge should be, but it isn't....all its wonder is impression."

E.A. - All your poems are written to Diotima. Who is she? I read: "I'll leave you alone now. In turn, I'll try, as well as I can. To present you what I once heard from a woman in Mantineea, Diotima, who knew not only about Eros, but about so many other things." (from Plato, The Banquet, a quotation on the inner cover of Socrates Cries for Diotima). After reading your book, I feel that Diotima is also a sum of whatever femininity stands for, of everything that triggers creation, of love, of sound and image mingled together in your own way. As the title says, Socrates cries for Diotima.

V.G.L. - Yes, he looks for her: in his childhood, in meditation, in prayer: in songs; in the temple; in the most hidden place of his heart. And there she lies, because without her, God simply doesn't read the world.

E.A. - We've talked about the child: about childhood.....

V.G.L. - My childhood does not belong to me: I belong to it, to that strange land: to the shepherd's hut; to the "Live fire and burnt fireplace"; to the "black winters when our parents sent us out"; to the "coolness in the room of our elders" where I would watch the night star rising on the threshold. I used to hear "a silence totally in its place, white, mild anxiety"; in "the country turned upside down in the water". There is " a child by the waters, near birds and waters." There "children run wind and spaces", where "children are the deed"; "there is a lake with old blue water, in the mountains, and the moon comes down each night to scold it". I belong to the place where " we see rocks fallen to the ground/ a green meadow and evening/ black houses leaning over dark waters and again the whirl of the abyss angrily foaming at the mill:/ or mild waves under your eyes, flowing, descending/ or, if old birds breathe forgotten legends,/ the head of the child bows/ listens to the beech trees and utters/ an endless, feared waiting". Loneliness is the word that describes childhood. What came out of that?" But the storm would come.? It came - tempestuous wave and the forest white, turned upside down, by the wind/ and old thunders at the gorge, descending/ And darkness, waves it sends forward into the fields/ it moves, hits and rises the shore/ look , it leaves behind - an unborn storm". But, the strangest thing, "the childhood living today still searches for its parents".

E.A. - I see that there's a certain tune of the verses where you evoke moments of childhood: there is a blend of image and sound, an alternation of silence and storm one may find hard to follow when reading your poems.

V.G.L. - I do not sort memories by images, they have all passed into hearing. I have heard the woods, the waters, the birds, the murmur of summer evenings.

E.A. - I've read the three books and noticed a gradual increase in anger. From the meditation of the first book, I reached to the flames of the second one. But the third book is scorching anger. Deny that if you wish, but I, the reader, fully support this statement. You are not longing for anything, you define things categorically. It is not warmth I sense; you are placing your previous findings into specific forms, and you are angry with them. It is almost hatred that you treat them with....

V.G.L. - Let's see. We should take a look at these verses: "There is not spirit to reach your roughness....From good, evil was born....". Or, "But show me another destiny....and show me the love that stays alive". I would like you not to know me....I want to hide." Or, "Don't listen to me. May man and beast perish, may waters run into the sea....Close my eyes. For the second time let me see. Move winter's wailing into me, into pure hearing!", or "Teach me to be a stranger to myself, as God in word and being, don't ever know me". May you never know my fury! As it for "Justice comes into being and alone is where you, mortals, blink your weary eyelids". Do not call the impression hatred. It is only an immense solitude, vacuum. Everything dies looking for a re-birth. The condition to be is to undo and re-do. Do not call it hatred.

E.A. - Are you translating this verse :" There are years in between...I do not know them. Alone, God, I am alone again...." ?

V.G.L. - Not exactly. Let me read further: "Don't put an end to it.... There was an end sometime, in the beginning."

E.A. - But, "in the beginning there was the Word...."

V.G.L. - If you read through, you'll find the truth. Just read the poem.

E.A. - Are you planning to continue writing? Is there any other book in the making?

V.G.L.- I have an extremely painful feeling that the Great Poetry is just about to come. Can you understand what it takes? I am not able to offer any other explanations. Just that the Great Poetry is about to come.

Vasile Grigore Latiş and Eva Acqui
March 22, 2000, Baia Mare, Romania