“Sailing Blossoms, Silver Fishes” draws on the power of water to spark the imagination of poets and artists. Inspired by a line from the poem “Looking-Glass River” by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, this project invites poets to reflect on the role of streams, rivers, waterfalls, lakes, deltas etc. in people’s lives and on what humans can do to protect them as well as the fauna and the flora associated with them.
For example, the Danube River is an essential element in defining and shaping the geographical, environmental, historical and political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe. Crossing ten countries and four capital cities, it represents a relevant multiethnic site of cultural memory. Following in the footsteps of Friedrich Hölderlin, the author of the hymn “The Ister”, we may ask ourselves what the river means to us today.
From another angle, a big river is never possible without the existence of smaller rivers. Moreover, the natural water cycle is an ongoing process without which life on the planet would not be as rich as it is. Writers and artists are often some of the most important agents that can communicate in style about the relationship between people and various types of water, highlighting its emotional and necessary, beautiful, but sometimes entangled aspects.
The workshop “Sailing Blossoms, Silver Fishes” is conceived as a collaborative project, meant to increase our awareness of the strong links of individuals and communities with different forms of water. This project is a way to revive it through the power of poetic language. The same as water connects different parts of nature, poetry can remind us of the principle of in varietate concordia or “unity in diversity”, present in many cultures.
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The project is part of the subthemes Climate Crisis and Poetry and Literature as a tool for social equality.
Author
Monica Manolachi
Monica Manolachi is a lecturer of English and Spanish at the University of Bucharest, Romania. As a poet, she has published three collections: Joining the Dots (2016), Fragaria’s Stories to Magus Viridis (2012) and Roses (2007). She co-authored two bilingual poetry collections with Scottish poet Neil Leadbeater: Journeys in Europe (2022) and Brasília (2018). Her poems came out in various national and international magazines. Three recent anthologies in which her work is included are: Immigrant Voices in the Pandemic (2023), Poetry is Tightrope Walking on the Lines in God’s Palm (2023) and Poetry and Settled Status for All (2022). The study Performative Identities in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry (2017) is part of her work as a researcher and literary critic. She has published numerous academic articles including “Literary Translation as a Form of Social and Pedagogical Activism” (2022), “Multiethnic Resonances in Derek Walcott’s Poetry” (2019) and “‘Our Chef is Delicious’: Contemporary American Persona Poetry” (2018). She translated the anthology Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge (2015) and won local translation prizes for rendering Caribbean poetry and Eavan Boland’s poetry into Romanian.
