Two Poems from Descântec For My Split Tongue
by Adriana Oniță
HĂRNICIE
My mother tries to translate it on the phone:
Harnică means you’re vrednică.
You’re pricepută, îndemânatică, dibace.
You work with spor.
Muncești cu râvnă.
Lucrezi cu zel.
Mom, I need to explain it to someone
who doesn’t understand Romanian.
It’s like rigour, but less brute,
diligence without strife,
ponos, but less toil.
More awe than vigour,
more precise than play—
the muscle of craft.
Hărnicie is unobserved.
Imagine pivniţa, a full cellar in winter.
Making things with your hands all day.
Imagine not having to prove or perform.
When light arrives
you have already been working for hours.
You become your work.
Hărnicia întrece arta—
it surpasses even art.
LIMBA MATERNĂ
I should have begun by saying
that I lost my mother tongue.
I know what you are thinking.
How can you lose something
that lives inside of you, unless
you chose to live languageless?
Forgive me, loss never occurs
on purpose. Think of the way
you lose a loved one, or faith.
I did not deem Romanian
inconvenient, crumple it up
by a trash bin, hoping someone
would stumble by, find it useful.
Nor did I sweat it away
in the labour of learning
another language—
S-a ascuns. It disappeared
inside corpul meu,
and I know it’s still there.
Memoria mea, burnt sienna,
a clot of regret, limba maternă.
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Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her multilingual poems appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com
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