Between 1994 and 2002, under the name CÎNDE, C Fodoreanu wrote three books of Romanian poetry — one work, Zîcere, in three volumes. They were made by the same hand, and in the same years, as the glass icons written at Nicula. They are the verbal half of that practice.
Zîcere — the act of saying — is written in a dialect of the poet’s own assembly. Its words come from several real sources: gathered village speech, collected from villages and swap meets where the poet heard them still spoken; anonymous folk verse with no individual author; surviving oral material from songs and sayings; and standard Romanian words actively modified — chopped, enlarged, diminished, tossed — to fit each poem’s sonic mold. A Romanian speaker may recognize a word by its sound and still have to reconstruct it. The grammar and the punctuation are the poet’s own; the standard language would not produce these poems in this form.
The three volumes move through three registers. întru (1994) is the doctrinal book — întru acela ce mi-e totunu, “in the one for whom it is all the same.” măiu (1995) is the village book, populated with neighbors, hunter-shepherds, weddings, the dead. ceiu’ (2002), handmade and placed online, is the cosmic book — storms, the sky, a gaze returned. The trajectory runs from the language of saints, through the language of neighbors, to the language of weather; and it closes in the plainest register of all, the voice of a grandmother saying it is only good, look.
The poems were first handwritten on plain paper, in landscape, and pinned to the walls of family homes without order or design. What follows is the typewritten form they later took — one verse to a page, scanned from the 2002 archive at cinde.ro. Each can be read, and increasingly heard, in the poet’s own voice.
