“Milk for my mother” by Irina Nechit, trans. from the Romanian by Mihaela Moscaliuc

Poetry, Translations by Irina Nechit, trans. Mihaela Moscaliuc | From Issue 30, Spring 2026

Milk for my mother

Soldiers had occupied the rooms and the porch,
killed the last chickens,
eaten the pigeons and sparrows,
emptied the dugouts of provisions,
the corn meal was out,
and so were the potato peelings,
the four young children did not leave 
the top of the wood stoves all winter 
until the morning they heard screams in the yard
and sprinted outside barefoot.
You won’t take her! Shoot me but you won’t take her!
their mother was yowling 
her unyielding body fronting the cow,
uncombed hair roughed by the wind,  
shawl fallen off shoulders, 
the four children’s eyes pinned to the snowflakes
embroidering her worn dress
the cow mooed at her back 
one soldier prodded her with the gun barrel 
another lifted his, ready to fire 
when from the barn out came
the military priest
who lived apart from the soldiers
he bolted out yelling something in German 
his bald head was piling with snow 
the cassock fluttered upward
on his chest 
I remember how on his chest
a cross was hanging on a chain
and the silver chain swayed in the wind,
recounts one of the four children,
my mother—
They let us keep the cow, we had milk, 
we survived. 


Lapte pentru mama

Soldații ocupaseră odăile și tinda,
tăiaseră ultimele găini,
mâncară porumbeii și vrăbiile,
goliseră gropile cu alimente ascunse,
mălaiul se terminase,
nici coji de cartofi nu mai erau
patru copii mici
nu coborau de pe cuptor toată iarna,
dar într-o dimineață au zbughit-o afară desculți
auzind răcnete în ogradă
Nu v-o dau! Împușcați-mă dar nu v-o dau!
striga mama lor
stând neclintită în fața vacii
vântul îi împrăștia părul zburlit, 
șalinca îi căzuse de pe umeri,
cei patru copii se uitau cum de rochia ei ponosită
se agățau horboțele de ninsoare,
vaca mugea în spatele ei
un soldat a împuns-o în piept cu țeava puștii,
altul își ridică arma,
era gata să apese pe trăgaci
când apăru din sarai
preotul militar,
el trăia aparte de soldați, 
ieși glonț din sarai strigând ceva în nemțește,
peste capul lui gol se lăsa zăpada,
poala sutanei îi flutura
iar la piept,
îmi aduc aminte cum la piept
îi atârna crucea de un lanț
și lanțul argintiu se clătina în bătaia vântului,
povestește unul din cei patru copii
mama mea
Ne-au lăsat vaca, am avut lapte, 
am scăpat.

Irina Nechit

Irina Nechit (b. 1962) is a poet, journalist, critic, translator, and well-known playwright from the Republic of Moldova. She has published several poetry collections, the most recent being Copilul din mașina galbenă/The Child from the Yellow Car (Ed. Cartier, Chișinău, 2010) and Masa de sărbătoare/Holiday Feast (Editura Cartea Românească, 2020). Her play „Eu am vorbit cu Putin”/”I spoke with Putin” (2023) was selected as winner and stage read at the National Theater Vasile Alecsandri” (Iași, România), in October 2023.

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of four poetry collections, including Heartmoor (Alice James Books, 2026), translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (2015) and Clay and Star (2019), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (2016), and co-editor of Fruits of the Earth (Knopf, 2025) and Border Lines (Knopf, 2020).

Translator’s Note:

Translator’s Note: I came across the work of Irina Nechit while reading a two-volume anthology titled Un Secol de Poezie Româna Scrisă de Femei /A Century of Romanian Poetry Written by Women. Her voice resonated with me instantly. I could hear the poems in English while reading them in Romanian, which I took as an early sign that I might need to bring her work into my adoptive language (English), both for the benefit of U.S. audiences and my own. Self-exiled from my mother tongue, I often find comfort in the intimacies afforded by the translation process, and the longer I spent with Nechit’s poems, the more I felt at home in the lyrical spaces they opened and the tensions that often layer or subvert them. I came to deeply admire her work for how memorably and unassumingly—with sharp craft but no flashy pyrotechnics–it manages to address the human condition in all its discordant aspects, how it makes use of memory, history, and personal anecdote to remind us of what matters, what it takes to survive physically and spiritually in a world gone insane, how vulnerable we all are to corruption and self-betrayal. In translating her poems, my main goal is to recreate the timbre of her voice, its casual yet intentional cadences, and the fine line it often threads between social realism and surrealism (twins in her work, I’d say).