The Siege

When they went out of the city walls to surrender,
the enemy was nowhere to be seen. – POLYBIOS

The walled town on a lance-tip. Unseen army.
The wells clogged up and low clung the smoke.
The eagle of the standard, live, shot from the sky
has been our food for a while. We haven’t choked.
Then, a wave of diseases. Bygone apparitions
more faithful to the hearth than we, still shot
arrows far from the battlements over the plains.
Nothing. Only a star – the body-wound of some god.
And late, the hour of treason struck. Our drawbridge
was lowered by pulleys. Cowards, their foreheads in the dust,
begging for pardon. No one; only the moon, like the ridge
of a ship, going by the moat on a wind’s crest.
Then no one again … We’ll be shedding tears of blood
until our seventh death; we’ll be possessed
with a sickness of open doors and smashed
windows. No one’s ever about. But we, we have surrendered.

Translated by Peter Jay and Virgil Nemoianu

Ştefan Aug. Doinaş, born in 1922, is recognized as one of the outstanding figures to have emerged in Romania’s poetic renaissance since the war. This selection of his poetry, the first to be published in English translation, was to mark the occasion of his appearance at London’s Poetry International Festival in June 1975: the Romanian authorities did not allow him to travel. The versions are by Peter Jay (who has also translated from the Romanian Nichita Stanescu’s selected poems The Still Unborn About the Dead) and Virgil Nemoianu, a leading literary critic who taught English language and literature at Bucharest University and is now at the Catholic University in Washington, DC.