Summer weeks spent teaching English to Romanian students have helped me to learn of several of the country's fine poets and to get involved in a bit of translating. Romanian mathematics professor, Gabriel Prajitura (now at SUNY Brockport) -- whom I first met at Pennsylvania's Bucknell University when I was teaching nearby at Bloomsburg University -- worked with me to translate several mathy poems by Nichita Stanescu (1933-1983). The Summer/Autumn 2004 issue of Circumference: Poetry in Translation included "A lecture on the cube" and "A lecture on the circle." My blog posting on April 18, 2014 -- available at this link -- shares "A lecture on the circle" -- and I offer the other below:
A lecture on the cube by Nichita Stanescu
You take a piece of stone,
chisel it with blood,
grind it with Homer’s eye,
burnish it with beams
until the cube comes out perfect.