Phosphorescent Romanticism: On Magda Isanos’ “Homecoming”

Magda Isanos, transl. Christina Tudor-Sideri | Homecoming | Sublunary Editions | July 2021 | 120 Pages

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This earth—‘our’ earth—is an infinitely dissuasive sphere both radiant and quiet, oftentimes unthinkable in its persistence of sclerotic atrocity, yet resoundingly contrived at each intervening breath. It is also a tomb—a burial site demanding full complicity across stratification of nature’s yield. No other inertly exhausted star could cultivate such a lethargic tragedy that could collapse in on itself, without remains. Against this escape velocity, a poem often stands resolute as testament, reprieve or Worldsong to the ongoing and protracted terrestrial melodrama.

Magda Isanos’ (1916–1944) newly translated collection of Romanian poetry titled Homecoming neglects the return voyage that would implicate a homeland, and is instead replete with strange scenes of the putrescent side of nature and its inhabitants in delirium. Her poems are threadbare, torn copies of nature’s eternal consumption of disoriented narrators and the unresolved and wounded status of human life among its oftentimes agnostic surroundings. Previously titled “When Angels Sing,” this new translation by Christina Tudor-Sideri accompanies a self-described impulse to read as “an initiation and a foretelling of the thaumaturgical space of grief.” Compounded by Tudor-Sideri’s own surveys of dark forests in Under the Sign of the Labyrinth (2020) and Disembodied (2022), similar cavernous depths of the human, however disfigured and abandoned, are explored. 

In Isanos’ poetry, we are guided by no human conduit—neither Mephisto nor Virgil—but by pseudonymous terrestrial lifeforms, “fawning with their bristling spines” that speak “greet me: mistress, where do you come from that you smell of graveyard dirt?” In each Isanos poem there is a lacerated whisper attending to a provisional subject yet to arrive, each poem an indeterminate survey of fumigated land. Like a smothering deformative blight, these poems arrive in remission, the moment before full collapse, a slipstream incongruity between locations, futurities, and the clouded cataracts of speculation.

In “The Poem of a Woman who Loved Spring,” we encounter a narrator who dwells imminent to a dark sabbath, anticipating the bloom of spring. She laments: 

the shadow, she too like water, 
slithers someway, escaping us 
to fill itself with evening stars. Night came.

As the poem continues, darkness enshrouds the page as no one is there: 

Silence. 
In paradise there are no ephemeral plants.
Nor rivers that freeze. 
Let us go, but with the sun in front of us… 
you abandon me, life…

The narrator that “loved the earth” in the past tense is left in resignation at the reigning melancholy of tomorrow. Spring fails to arrive as autumn governs perpetually in the tone of “...uncertain, distant season / Clouds and sun and abysmal clouds again.” We are caught between a narrator who says ‘yes’ to the earth in all its harvest and decay, but no to the world of its callous emblems. Neither primeval nor contemporary, Isanos’ poems capture wayward moments—each minute, quotidian and banal. The moment itself speaks, confesses and speculates about the confines of the page: 

Moment, spread your plush wings;
the seas are swaying in the distance,
somewhere the course of a river goes astray,
people are born, people are roofed in by death…

An elongated funeral procession, but for whom? Isanos expands bliss to encompass an engulfing precipice that finds in dust the origins of life. Here, there is often no resonance to accompany the word, just silence compounded with confusion:

Perhaps they will come down
With a garland of glistening rays
A garland?
For whose head?

Dislocated, abandoned, and deserted limbs tethered together like entangled roots, both acephalic and ignorant. Threading throughout the collection is a sense of persecution, as if Isanos herself has fallen short of settling Providence, wherever and whenever it may be. In this absence, Isanos’ poems invoke a call from nowhere with undead volition—faint echoes of the lyrical misanthropy of a late baroque style sequestered between a byzantine decadence and corpuscular naturalism.

“Homecoming” is neither horizon nor meridian, but an echoing tremor sourced across nature from glimmering streams to metallic fumes. Isanos’ poetry is a shard somewhere nested in the past-progressive, initiating a receding borderline, on a foreign desertshore. The only vertical logic is everlasting time itself, that we arrive on a planet and attend to its own volition. These poems phase a homecoming aetherial, elemental, and an unbound ecology beyond city limits. In “Flowers and every Luminous Meaning of the World,” she writes of her contempt for writing from the position of life: 

I long to write bright in the morning, 
the blank page terrifies me; 
I long to carve in hearts like wood 
a name we must all carry: life. 

Life for Isanos is less a vessel but a burden, a preordained fallout at the incursion of the species. Isanos’ romanticism sediments a dwindling of the human side of any encounter by foregrounding the negative manifestation of something subliminal, abyssal, and subterranean in its wake. Not unlike phosphorus—or the cousin of sulfur who is all too at home in hell—an overexposed and exhausted essence streams through these pages, mapping a warped lithospheric geology. Phosphorescent romanticism is a fleeting and ambient style, a maligned neologism to retrogressively define an antiquated literary tone. While Roland Barthes indicates “Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die” (A Barthes Reader) nearly a century prior, Charles Baudelaire would often detect a “phosphorescence of decay” (Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists) emanating from the page, the residue of a degenerate style, prophetic of a coming storm. 

Isanos conjures these landscapes with taxonomic precision, increasingly so that the threshold of the fantastic and the real swerve. Downward composition of form outgrows classifications and bleeds into other terrains. Breeding pools leak to bleaching pools and a lyrical verse crawls forth. Like the petrichor scent summoned by the onset of rain, the taste of deeply sieved soil that no one mistakes, Isanos plows the earth through the form of the poem. In a poem called “Do You Remember the First Rain?” we are anchored to a confusion coterminous with creation:

Do you remember how the first rain fell,
in curtains of long stars and lightning strikes?
The trees stood tall, chanting
The hymn of life…

…you could hear the heavens opening and closing, 
We too stood tall like trees,
‘Nothing dies,’ you whispered to me, ‘nothing dies…’ 
The plants grew, and gesturing to us
like hands, like earthbound shadows

Here, Isanos locates the demarcation of a wound so deep it merely glosses the human. Its circumference is immeasurable as we idle observers misremember the genesis story and its deluge. But the recomposition runs errant, one must be reminded and warned of the geologic. But with Isanos, the lapse of recognition unifies the page, rather than fracturing it further. Ancestrality breeds its own techniques:

They said, ‘The poet is mad, 
she speaks with the trees and the stones…’
and then, I slowly moved away,
Forgetting their language and their homes 

Mystical experience dissolves one’s proclivity towards near future agency, abolishing reverence. “Instead of living, I sang the melancholy yesterday” Isanos writes. One succumbs to the world inverted, fermented by groundswells immersing all matter, whirlpools vibrating inert, fault lines demarcating split ground. We stand as estranged conduits. We somehow exist, in delirium, in its wake. Full unbound complicity with adversarial elements, lamentations emerge:

Memories cling to me like algae and mud,
and here I am, immovable – despondent boat,
without the mast of will and the rudder of thought.
Who shall return me to the shores

Yet this encounter is subjectless, relegated to amorphous natural anatomies; a body is not requisite for planetary melancholy, only poetic documentation of its after-effects. Isanos’ ungrounded univocality bridges to others of her period that ventured the trenches on the margins, corresponding to various inter-war poets between the continents and the blood altars of wartime powers. Georg Trakl similarly de-characterizes this encounter throughout his poetry. For him, “Silence encounters the forest’s outer edge.” He writes:

... A black silence lurks in fear
purest sky amid the branches
only the stream runs silent and still 

(Trakl. Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition) 

Trakl died close to the time Isanos was born but lived a similarly short life defined by a Europe in war-torn ruins. Trakl prefaces Isanos’ own subjectless phraseology by serially returning to a void point. Yet there is solace to these expiring cosmological scenes of letting the last of the species comment. The terminarch, or endling, compulsively confesses trauma both cosmological and terrestrial. Isanos vividly captures the precise moment before, “Life is long gone, life is gone…” but we are ‘here,’ as offshore debris nevertheless. The posterior speculation is opaque and blank, but irrevocably returnal to a planet prior.

At Homecoming’s close, although the angel’s song fades away, its remnants linger for a moment. A moment long enough to sift through soil, etched into stone.