TRANSLATED BY Carla Baricz, SOURCED FROM "Romanian Writers on Writing", FROM The Syllable Hatter, WRITTEN BY Ion Caraion.

   Poets are individuals who live all of their lives building with discretion, in anonymity, the lives of others. The others- sometimes- know it; sometimes they do not.
   Every time a poet has angered a society without horizons or with a historial reservation, he has strengthed both society and history in futuristic projection.
   The dialectic illustrates it.
   There are many difficult things in the world.
   I have seen arms digging, carving, breaking stone. And I have dug, carved, and broken stone with them.
   I have seen men making houses, paving roads, draining swamps, raising the terraces of railroads or of dams. And I have numbered myself among the shadows of each of the masses of the aforesaid occupations.
   I have seen wagons pushed through the undersides of mountains, galleries strengthened with healthy logs, perforators biting the mined hollows, vaults collapsing, naked bodies from which the acidic water mingling with sweat ran in an intermittent salting of boils and eczema.
   It was not difficult; it was exceedingly difficult. Most of the time it was indescribable.
   But to make humanity dream without asking it for anything in return (for this is the position of the authentic poet in the universe!) is much more difficult than any of the other difficulties. For all the other difficulties it would be impossible without dreams.
   A blind, animalistic work, an ellipse of windows, and the memory of solar aims would turn men into termites and robots.
   And human intelligence was not born for the harpoons of this shipwreck.
   For the poet belongs to all of humanity, even without its approval, and to all times, even without time's approval.
   A cosmic escalator with lights and umbrellas, with the questions and silences of this world, moves through his brain and his heart distributing ozone, fantasy, the solutions of each molecule of the energy of waiting another minute; another halting, another sign: the revelatory one.
   Poetry is like a bizarre cipher.
   To await the sign that can reconnect every meaning, every hope, every aspiration to the colossal turbine of dreams where the waters boil bewitchingly and imbibe the human planet with the superb illusion that life has a meaning, that the discourse of existence is- besides that of a tragic toy and besides only blackmail, exploitation, anarchy- also beauty, and morality, and equilibrium, and music, and the prodigious blooming of all principles and privileges of thought and liberty.
   The work of the poet- so often defamed, ordered to the corner, to the stump, or to the electric chair; so fragile that only rarely it tempts any lily liver to deride it and beckon it to the circus, between buffoons, where cheap fun is prepared and sunflower seeds are eaten; the work of the poet, his song, the urge through which he (clumsy!) introduces into the world trust, dream, mystery, illusion; through which he makes possible for the impossibility- also of bearing life; the world of the poet is the dosage- simultaneously- of the fascinating inexpressible, of impalpability, of the essential without which life would be more impotent than if it were lacking in air. For we cannot name life that which has not yet arisen from the biologic.