Marius Dimcea
- Romania -
Marius Dimcea (b. 1993, Reșița, Romania) is a graduate of the Faculty of Letters and the MA in Translation Studies at the West University of Timișoara, Romania. He is a member of the “Pavel Dan” literary cenacle and the “HELION S.F. & F. Arts Club,” and has participated in numerous readings and literary events. His work has been published in anthologies including Carapacea de aur (Tracus Arte, 2023), Ce-ți spui noaptea înainte de culcare (2024), and O rană pe care nu o las să se vindece (2024, First Prize “Pavel Dan” contest). He appears in Vine miezul nopții, povestiri din Valea Șoaptelor (2025) with prose. He has published poetry, prose, and essays in HELION, Planeta Babel, Helis, ORIZONT, Critic Arad, Actualitatea Literară, „Pavel Dan” cenacle blog and others. Participant in the Junimea XXI Poetry Workshop (2024/2026) and the Young Writers’ Festival, Neptun (2024).
“The Disco Lights of Fairy Tales”
We don’t always have a choice, and sometimes—even the disco lights of fairy tales can bring more light than Queen Lux herself from Legends of Runeterra. Marius Dimcea, prose writer and poet, at least in the selection published in Helion Online, brings into the spotlight precisely this affinity of spells, curses, and pacts between today’s world and the one that came before, emerging from a rural subconscious.
It is no easy undertaking, and in its arduous intent it can often be taken lightly, even mocked in the spirit of the times, stripped of deeper meaning, the world is in perpetual change, and we no longer know where we are heading, yet, I am repeating myself, Marius D. remains faithful to this connection, this fairy tale–fantasy–retro strand, and he does not approach it in a manner that is easy to sustain, but in one stabilized along a shared trajectory, difficult as it is to amplify in our present day, he holds on to magic, though not necessarily in a metaphysical sense, but rather in its primordial one, of making things glow on the veranda of an ordinary man—and that is no simple task.
In Marius’s poetry there are spaces difficult to maintain without an almost unimaginable breathability, a concord between image and contemporary object, between inner universe and present moment, an evolution compelled to follow its avant-garde destiny without compromise, with a predilection between contrast and special effects., but what is the image that remains imprinted in the collective imagination? Perhaps precisely this dissolution between past and avant-garde present. This apparent separation between old and new, between curse and negative review, and so on.
Marius D. emphasizes this hard-to-master trajectory between what has been and what breathes through the pores of the new generation—difficult to imagine, yet so well sketched with the imaginative brush of a writer. At just over thirty, with a solid background and time on his side, Marius ventures into any thicket, however difficult to decipher even for those more mature and experienced, concerned with form and prestige. Like a contemporary Don Quixote, the young poet battles the windmills of the past, not without result: his poetry remains solitary and sufficiently calcified to withstand the test of time, “tattooed on the retina of the sky” like a primordial sign.
By Ionuţ Manea
published in the Helion Online Magazine
Translated by Marius Dimcea
Poetry
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Invisible potholes / Gropi invizibile
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In space there is a deceased friend / În spațiu este un prieten mort
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Insanity / Insanity
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Apocalyptic / Apocaliptic
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Secular / Secular
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To Dame Maggie Smith / Lui Damme Maggie Smith
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Dream of the Endless / Dream of the Endless
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Push the bellows little artist / Dă-i foale micule artist!
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Mellitus II / Mellitus II
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Film / Peliculă
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Signs / Semne
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Like a Demiurge / Ca un Demiurg
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Moths / Molii
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America Express / America Express
