Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism. Over the years, her poetry became symbolic of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian governments. This new translation combines five of her collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry. The poems of Predator Star (1985) and The Architecture of Waves (1990) chronicle a convulsed history and pose the question of how to resist the terror of history. Clock without Hours (2014) marks a return to rhyme, as Blandiana attempts a courageous renovation of traditional verse forms. Her fiercely militant voice – that helped inaugurate the postmodern idiom in Romanian poetry in 1984 – has modulated over time into a new tone of forgiveness and renunciation, expressed in meditations on the fragility and vulnerability of being. She has also written two collections of love poems which rank among the most beautiful in contemporary Romanian poetry – October, November, December (1972) and Variations on a Given Theme (2018) – the second of these composed after the death of her husband, Romulus Rusan, in 2016. A prolific and expansive poet, Ana Blandiana constantly re-invents herself. Her work ultimately reflects on universal issues, on human existence itself in our 21st-century consumer society.
About the author
Viorica Patea is Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca, where she teaches American and English literature. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca 1989); a study of Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999); T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (Cátedra: 2005); and a collection of essays, Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Rodopi 2012). With Fernando Sánchez Miret she translated from Romanian into Spanish the annotated edition of El diario de la felicidad by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las Cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Periférica 2008, 2011); and with Paul Scott Derrick, translations into English of Blandiana’s poetry published by Bloodaxe.
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