Dor by Alina Ștefănescu Review by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Dor by Alina Ștefănescu

Review by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

Published September 2021 by Wandering Aengus Press 

(Eastsound, Washington USA)

90 pages

ISBN 978-0-578-91578-4

Alina Ștefănescu’s intense and enlightened engagement with language reaches new heights in her fourth collection of poetry, Dor. Deeply confessional, Ștefănescu’s poems simultaneously illuminate wider social and political themes—a difficult feat that Ștefănescu achieves with invention, wit, and compassion. Ștefănescu has emerged as one of our leading voices on the knotted, yet fluid, issues surrounding identity, loss, and mourning, her words creating the weirs necessary to capture darkly quicksilver fish.

“Dor” means “a state of unsated longing or yearning” and “a complex spiritual experience [. . .] acute awareness of the impossibility of fulfillment” in Ștefănescu’s native Romanian (derived from the Latin “dolus,” meaning “pain”). It is akin to the German Sehnsucht or the Portuguese saudade but with its own specific mysteries and identifiers. Ștefănescu notes in the preface that she is making “dor-words” in English because “dor” defies or eludes our available language. Here Ștefănescu reveals her exquisite eye and ear for translation, as she plumbs the meaning of individual words, the space around words, and how the meanings of that space and of the words themselves shift recursively as words are added or elided. Fittingly, the volume concludes with “a cenotaph-cradle [. . .] to carry ghost lines of poems removed from the manuscript.” Such brilliant work in different registers puts her in the company of other emigres writing in English who enrich the language and our understanding of it: Hamburger, Miłosz, Nabokov, Simic, Kaminsky.

Ștefănescu returns throughout Dor to her Romanian roots and her efforts to integrate her Romanian-self with her American-self in the “Romanian Republic of Alabama.” As she writes in one of the collection’s first poems, “The Communist at Catholic School: A ‘Multiple-Choice’ Test”:

……………………You can smell refugees from the way their stories pickle,

……………………from the sourness they leave on the tongue.

……………………[“Da, but it’s the sour that protects; vinegar preserves

……………………the vegetables. Aşa se face.”]

Ultimately, Ștefănescu triumphs, seizing the English language and remaking it in her own image, molding it to meet her needs, and thereby changing the language we share: “I want to argue that this word in my mouth belongs to me in a way that cannot belong to the americanest poet” (“I May or May Not Be Appropriate/It”). This declaration, which ironically demonstrates that Ștefănescu is an “americanest poet,” will resonate for all those claiming English for their own and reminds us forcefully of the preeminence of the polyglot, hybrid, and demotic in our language.

Ștefănescu’s variegated experiences of the world prevent her poems from falling into mere nostalgia, let alone the maudlin. Even as she celebrates her rightful place in the language, Ștefănescu recalls that “inside every word hides an argument: a jury of dim alleys” (“A Lustration”), that “the word plays dead / like an unstruck matchstick” (“Landmark Study”), that “verbs leave the mouth / wordless as hummed lullabies, melodies with lyrics / no one remembers” (“Poem for the Beautiful Skull”). Challenges of meaning—in whichever language, whichever register or mode—remain the spiky rocks upon which she and all poets risk foundering. Ștefănescu counter-attacks, with an immigrant’s fierce and angular dynamism, pinning meaning to her dissection-table precisely because she is ever-aware of how threatened our ability to find meaning is.

Ștefănescu’s awareness of language under threat is not theoretical but informed by her memories of life under dictatorship in Romania—with pointed references as well to authoritarian tendencies in the USA today. Oppressed artists and writers haunt the pages of Dor: Benjamin Fondane, Lena Constante, Varlam Shalamov, Anna Akhmatova, Alma Mahler, Paul Celan (whose Todesfuge is a tacitly acknowledged touchstone).

Ștefănescu explores the concept of the fugue. “Dor” incorporates the fugue in its senses of sudden flight, wandering at a loss, inability to recall or understand one’s surroundings, misplaced identity: “The alien sculpts new verbs in navigation, / she coins nouns to accommodate // dislocation” (“Ovid as a Bruise”). The contrapuntal and repetitive characteristic of the fugue (it comes as no surprise that she references Bach) feature prominently in Dor, as do the elegiac improvisations of the traditional Romanian peasant songs known as doina.  As Ștefănescu writes in “Proper Fugue,”: “The gentlest fugue begins in fear / of loss, and develops its argument.” She subtly threads menace and alienation throughout. One poem is entitled “Sul Ponticello,” the technique in playing the violin right at the bridge, creating a stressed tone often heard as “eerie” or “metallic.” Two other poems are entitled “Minor Ninth” and “Minor Major Seventh” respectively, both of which chords convey dissonance, a lack of resolution and a feeling of alarm (the former features in Schubert’s Erlkönig when the King of the Elves bears down to steal the child, the latter is known as the “Hitchcock Psycho chord”). 

Having established the stakes, Ștefănescu argues her way back to the sunlight, to a hope hard-won. This is Dor‘s greatest gift to the reader, its illustration that language wounded or deployed for harm can be healed, that language possesses the possibility to repair wordlessness and to rebuild meaning when grief, fear and anger seek to overwhelm us. Ștefănescu does this in many ways. She surprises us by injecting new life or different vision into seldom-used forms: the aubade (“Disquieted Aubade”), the cine-poem (“Cine-Poem Written On The Inner Arm”), the mono-stich (“Men Say The Strangest Things To Me”).  Elsewhere, she brings us up sharp with imagery that remains in the mind long after the reading of it.  Savor: “From here to eternity, we must create our own cosmologies as we lie in bed at night. I hope insomnia leaves the world richer, thicker, more bisqued.” (“Cosmology”). “Bisqued” is the unexpected treasure here. Ștefănescu grapples with religion throughout Dor; representative titles include “Apologia,” “Kerygma,” and “Christ Intercedes By Showing God His Wounds.” She invites us to a heartier meal than stale ritual provides, one specifically based on seafood. “Bisque” is also the unglazed porcelain used for votive figurines, etymologically linked to “twice-baked (bread)” via “biscuit.” Thus, the term has echoes of loaves and fishes, of communion wafers, but has been reinvigorated. Consider also: “Plums are finicky, / unreliable, quick to revolt or / pout” (“Pickled Plums”). Here Ștefănescu refers to her children, to her own childhood, to the plum tree she plants in her American yard, to the traditional Romanian plum spirit she drinks before dinner–several lifetimes embodied in one small fruit.

Above all, Ștefănescu is generous. Her work expressly converses with that of many other poets, musicians and artists, highlighting the play of the collective mind and shared ethics of the heart above the whims and vanities of individuals. She calls to mind Benjamin in her polymathic forays, grand vision connected to intimate daily details, the Germanic mitteleuropäische context and history. (Her website, www.alinaȘtefănescuwriter.com, reminds me of a spice cabinet exceedingly well stocked, with the doors open to all). With Dor, Ștefănescu will surely attract new readers into the conversation, readers who I am confident will look forward as eagerly as I do to her next collection.

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Daniel A. Rabuzzi has had two novels, eleven poems and five short stories published since 2006.  His 2008 story “Monologue with Birds and Burin” was included in The Best of Shimmer anthology edited by E. Catherine Tobler.  He earned his PhD in European history at Johns Hopkins, and lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France.  He lives in NYC with his artistic partner and spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills.

9 February 2022