Night Fishing

EUROPEAN QUARTERLY KUKAI #12 - Winter 2015 Edition (topic: day/night)

FIRST PLACE:

night fishing -

life hangs by

a single thread

Radu Tudosan, Bucharest, Romania

Many fishermen (who usually do not catch anything) praise their hobby for the circumstances in which it is happening. For outings away from the urban bustle, for the tranquility of the lake, and for the charm of the mirror with ripples shining in the sun. Because you can think of something else than everyday concerns, or you cannot think about anything. For the life throbbing without harshness in the grass and water and offering you daydreams full of innocence.

I have only been fishing as a kid with a thread and a bent pin as a hook. But I can feel moved by this promising role in this haiku. I can see myself in the role of the one creating a thin edge located on the experience of unreality. Feeling the vibration of a special moment, coloured by the halo of concerns, but tempted by a thought which arose there through unexpected circumstances.

It is nighttime and, removing the fish out of water, in the rod we can see a struggling life hanging life hanging by a thread. Alone. It is thin, but behold, it is resistant. One moment, you can feel your own life depending suddenly on a thin thread. Which can keep you for too long out of the environment in which you feel like a fish in water. And, this time, you do not feel that the danger is devoted to the expression used by the author, as that thread might break, but you feel instead that it is too strong and it you can hold on to it forever.

If, however, using a slight metaphor, we accept that fishing at night is the allegorical feat of insomnia and we follow the meaning of to save, to retrieve hardly something sunk in the depths, then the thought that life is so endangered and fragile will actually be the great fish that we catch when we are awake.

(Corneliu Traian Atanasiu)