Hyperboréa by Mario Martín Gijón

A review of 'Hyperboréen' by Mario Martin Gijon was published in the Spanish-language newspaper 'El Periódico Extremadura'.  




Translation: 

'I've never been to Romania, nor do I know any Romanian in Spain, although there are more than half a million (there were almost a million, but many have returned as the economic situation has improved) but some of my favourite writers were born in that country, like Emil Cioran or Paul Celan. None of them wrote in Romanian, as natives of that Romance language with Slavic influence have shown a surprising dexterity in expressing themselves in other languages.


This linguistic polyglotism of Romanians endures to this day, and I've just finished reading Hyperborea, the first poetry book by Daniela Nicolaescu, a poet who writes, with complete naturalness, in three languages: Romanian, French and English.

Born in 1993 in Rădăuți, a small town a few kilometers from the border with Ukraine (and near Czernowitz where Celan was born), Nicolaescu is currently finishing her doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds on Romanian Jewish poets (Gherasim Luca, Isidore Isou and Tristan Tzara) who had the merit of being more innovative in French than the majority of native French writers. Nicolaescu is also in this poem that has taken almost a decade to write and which is articulated in four parts anchored by the four elements according to ancient physics: "Earth (2012-2015)", situated in Rădăuți, Bucharest and Bordeaux; "Water (2017)" in Italy; "Air (2018-2021)" in England and "Fire (2022-2023)" in Paris.


The land of the Hyperboreans was for the Greeks the northernmost known and, for Homer, coincided with present-day Romania. In this book it is part of a personal mythology linked to the snows of childhood, as anterior to that of the uprooting, marked by the temporary death of the father (expressed in "Search for the father") and the fundamental relationship with the mother, reflected in the memorable "M". There is an exquisite sensitivity and irony in these verses, as when she speaks of "my heart / an anti-stress ball / that trembles between your hands", and also the bitter cry of someone who, no matter how integrated into their new society, feels, as she says in "The distance to cross": "There is always a margin of error / an unpronounceable word / Something comes / Nobody has pronounced it completely / I live in innumerable waves, / or at the bottom of the ocean, / without fixed address"

 https://www.elperiodicoextremadura.com/opinion/2024/08/10/hiperborea-106823579.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1wst5vdQxCqqq7RhlelWVxp7iRQCYm4viXk4y9J1L2K2nMBUodEomXMrg_aem_3KoB97FWFOwaa52ya2z7bQ


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