THE SEAGULLS FROM TRANSYLVANIA
This thorough country called nature
Lost breath of the heaven’s dragons
And from the wide waters of the sea deep from the very beginnings,
Even before the old Pannonian Sea
Added its extensions here,
Yes, this tenacious natural amphitheatre,
Full of thick forests,
Still silencing the Romans’ language,
This Transylvania is
Both the mountain shuddering with memory
And the fairy tale of the eyes suggesting the morning,
And especially the mild anxiety of some seagulls,
By their generations’ adage,
Becoming smaller and more grey
than their ancestors,
Living signs of the millennia,
Of the seas fatally squeezed into rivers,
In whose name there is a constant whisper:
The Someş, the Mureş, the Criş, the Criş, the Criş5 …
How could I not have recognized,
Even if I had not known what they were,
The thin quest of these Transylvanian seagulls
Gravely questioning the waves of my Criş River
And floating almost weightlessly,
As the poplar’s seeds fall;
Who can know if the absolute
Is not the forgotten song
Of the Transylvanian seagull?
5 Rivers from Transylvania
Manolis Aligizakis 