Excerpt from DESCÂNTEC FOR MY SPLIT TONGUE by Adriana Onițǎ

HĂRNICIE

My mother tries to translate it on the phone:

Harnică means you’re vrednică.
You’re pricepută, îndemânatică, dibace.
You work with spor.
Muncești cu râvnă.
Lucrezi cu zel. 

Mom, I need to explain it to someone
who doesn’t understand Romanian.

It’s like rigour, but less brute,
diligence without strife,
ponos, but less toil.

More awe than vigour,
more precise than play—
the muscle of craft.

Hărnicie is unobserved.

Imagine pivniţa, a full cellar in winter.
Making things with your hands all day.
Imagine not having to prove or perform.

When light arrives
you have already been working for hours.
You become your work.

Hărnicia întrece arta—
it surpasses even art.

—Excerpt from DESCÂNTEC FOR MY SPLIT TONGUE by Adriana Onițǎ. Published by Palimpsest Press, 2026. Shared here with permission. Copyright: Adriana Onițǎ.

Descântec For My Split Tongue, Adriana Oniță’s first book of poetry, gathers English-Romanian poems that travel across generations, homelands, and dreamscapes to ask: what do we lose when we lose a language? Drawn from Oniță’s childhood and her immigration from Jilava to Edmonton, the poems explore dor—a Romanian word for deep longing—for her mother tongue. Along the way, Oniță unpacks “untranslatable” Romanian words and proverbs, each a compressed zip file of culture, humour, grief, and courage. The book itself becomes a descântec—part incantation, part prayer, part spell—summoning both the failures and the triumphs of translation into a ritual of healing.

Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her multilingual poems appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com