PLURAL MAGAZINE

Zoe Trahanache

from The Lost Letter ACT II SCENE V ZOE(alone; nervous, she takes out the newspaper and reads)In tomorrow's issue of our gazette we shall reproduce an interesting sentimental letter from a notable of our town to a lady of great influence. Beginning tomorrow, the original

Poem

Hear the waves rise and fall – memento twilight – the cradle is rocking lonelinesses cricket-heart forgotten in the grasssmall fear – barely startling– the blood falls in the arteries The shells of snails inhabited by the windfootsteps on inner stairs – we resume

Battlesheep

 Mioriţa, the most popular Romanian ballad, has its name coming from a rather ambiguous female character, the meek ewe that discloses the plot to her fair master, whose two fellow shepherds plan to kill by the time of sunset, looting his larger and worthy flock. Mioriţa

Vitoria Lipan

from The Hatchet I It is the mountain peasant's lot to earn his daily bread either with the axe or with the sheep hook. Those of them that work with the axe fell firs from the forest and take them to the Bistriţa; there they bind them together into rafts and float

Poem

Someone had to lovethe world's harmony, the hidden law of rhythms;someone had to be aloneand listen incessantly.   by Magda Isanos (1916-1944)

Tonia

from Don Juan CHAPTER VI Sometimes he would run into Tonia by chance. This is one way of putting it, because he often walked the streets close to her house, he went to a beer joint two corners away, sometimes he was in the park nearby speaking kindly, helping small groups

Poem

A man is sleeping on a bench in front of the sanatoriumhe's been waiting for his folks like manna from heavenwhite and coiled upfrom the valley he seems to mea lamb biting into the green woodI could go near him, call himjolt him, hug himbut he took everyone out of spaceand

Quote

In this world, there is no path more filled with emotion, unpredictability, amazing things and erratic zigzags than the soul of a woman. by Camil Petrescu (1894-1957)

Mrs. T

From The Procrustean Bed Add to these criteria of a physical nature the old preconceived idea of talent. As is known, talent is discovered thus: a boy or a girl, choking with stage fright, before a long table at which a commission are sitting, start declaiming Gens Latina

Poem

…And I walk in my memories as in a deep wood…there I find people like leafy treesand so many things unhappened to othersand walls built on mysteriesand old parks asleepand statues of silenceand masks molded in wax:a world of mine, a world I grew up in,and learned what

Poem

I dreamt we werearound a stone tablewith men long-forgotten –I was there yet absentnonexistent yet alivedrinking with them yet dying with thirst.  Something white fellon the stone tableilluminating our facessomething always putting to shamethe inability to grow.  We

Hariclea Darcle (1860-1939)

There are masterpieces of musical drama the destiny of which became final in the history of opera owing to singers with a flash of genius. Seemingly, this is how Puccini's Tosca was born, whose protagonist, a superb Romanian soprano from Brăila, lend brilliancy to