When you're among stangers it's not being alone that hurts the most, but missing your loved ones. But you know how much it hurts when you're lonely even when among your people, right, Marinică? The old man drank the last sip of brandy from the dirty glass and took a puff from the cigarette butt burning in-between his gnarled fingers. You see these hands, he said, as he splayed his large, cracked palms on the wooden counter, these hands helped me move mountains for my loved ones, and yet now, when I'm no longer capable of that, they threw me out like garbage. Bring me another one, Marin. Drinking my days away is all I got left.
Florentina Ghițescu
I come across a book written by an African author about some events taking place in Africa. Stories. I think to myself: I have nothing to do with these snakes I've never heard of and these trees I'll never see. It's another world. But the pain of the mother who loses her child to the bite of this strange snake or the joy of the child climbing this tree with a strange name - these are not foreign to me. We are all rooted in the same humanity and nowhere are we among strangers.
Răzvan Drăgoi
I am darkness. But light was my sentence. They gave me a heart. All feelings and regrets were thoroughly washed out of it.Still, some residue lingered. Like what comes out when last using an otherwise empty spray can. Too much light is just as blinding as too much darkness. Light always barks at darkness when it senses its blood; it wants to tear it apart. All darkness can do is run away. I hid in the veins of a soul. Might be my own, though I don't think it is. Everything is strange and alien to me. That's when I became the final howl of silence.
(Translated by Lucia-Alexandra Brînaru-Mitrofan / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by prof. dr. Nadina Vișan, Edited by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.