With a green scarf

With a green scarf

by Marin Sorescu

translated from Romanian by Michael Hamburger

With a green scarf I blindfolded

the eyes of the trees

and asked them to catch me.

At once the trees caught me,

their leaves shaking with laughter.

I blindfolded the birds

with a scarf of clouds

and asked them to catch me.

The birds caught me

with a song.

Then with a smile I blindfolded

my sorrow

and the day after it caught me

with a love.

I blindfolded the sun

with my nights

and asked the sun to catch me.

I know where you are, the sun said

just behind that time.

Don’t bother to hide any longer.

Don’t bother to hide any longer,

said all of them,

as well as all the feelings

I tried to blindfold.

Marin Sorescu (1936-96) was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most orginal voices in Romanian literature. His mischievous poetry and satirical plays earned him great popularity during the Communist era of the regime, Romanians used to a culture of double speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. On his poetry, Sorescu said, with characteristic irony: "Just as I can't give up smoking because I don't smoke, I can't give up writing because I have no talent." But later- like hapless character from one of his absurdist dramas- the peasant-born people's poet was made Mister of culture. "If anybody except a poet were saying the things Sorescu says in his poems, he or she would be found insane. But this is what poetry should be doing, putting this kind of material into rational form”,  says Russell Edson in an introduction about his poetry.

The above poem addresses the impossibility and inanity of hiding oneself from the world and from oneself. There is an ineluctable clarity in those relations, a profound honesty that we cannot obviate, although we persistently seek to do so, whether it concerns the natural world (‘I blindfolded the eyes of the trees’, etc.) or our own emotions (‘Then with a smile I blindfolded my sorrow’).

Blindfolding does not help, however: ‘At once the trees caught me, their leaves shaking with laughter’, ‘The birds caught me with a song’, etc.

Eventually, everything he blindfolds in an attempt to hide from it, retrieves him and rubs his nose into the fact that concealing is a vain endeavor. Nature seems to ridicule him (‘leaves shaking with laughter’). Of course, nature cannot really mock anything. But its stiff resistance to our hiding efforts suffices to render it a laughing human face.

Where does the tendency to defy our unavoidable clarity in the eyes of the world and ourselves come from (a tendency apropos that originates in our most personal perspective; the I, as can be seen in sentences like ‘I blindfolded the eyes of the trees’. ‘I blindfolded the birds’, etc.)?

The poem does not directly move into an explanation of that question, but an arguable answer might go along the following lines. We habitually hide part of our thoughts, emotions, and even actions, from other people, often deliberately so when it suits us. That often seems to work. Hence it sounds natural to assay to do the same in relation to ourselves - when it suits us. The disbelief in our ability to hide ourselves from nature arises from the ease by which we mislead other people. This disbelief explains our ceaseless defiance (‘and asked them to catch me’).

Finally, there is something game like, hide-and-seek like in our attempts to hide ourselves, as if, deep down, we realize that hiding is a kind of escapism. Unsurprisingly, we always lose the game:

Don’t bother to hide any longer,

said all of them,

as well as all the feelings

I tried to blindfold.