Poetry. Southeastern European Studies. Selected and translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin with Radu Andriescu, Mircea Ivanescu, and Bogdan Stefanescu. Some of the most groundbreaking works of European literature, such as Rimbaud's Illuminations and Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, have been prose poetry. The present volume--a substantial selection from three contemporary Romanian prose poets--draws on this tradition. Cristian Popescu experimented with personal myth by parodying his family and himself. The Bucharest found here is often sinister, cold, and dark. Displaying a mordant sensibility that could be called "urban pastoral" rather than political, he conducts his convivial disputations with God in the vernacular of the street. Iustin Panta, from Sibiu in Transylvania, is more lyrical and intimate in exploring his personal autobiography. An amalgam of form, his prose poem takes on an aura of suspended meaning, a constellation of objects, gestures, conversations, and private associations that eschews the grotesquerie and solecism found in Popescu's work. Radu Andriescu is from the artistic hotbed of Iasi, straddling the Moldavian border. His work is exuberant, direct, often manic (see his Club 8 Manifesto), and he is completely comfortable appropriating the forms of today's digital and media culture. A complex topography of language, his work ranges from the quotidian to inner meditations to fantasy, creating a texture that is thick with images and phrases often bordering on the absurd.
Author City: ROM
Reviews and Other Links
http://look.naut.cz/twisted/club8.pdf
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2007
http://blog.salonicaworldlit.com/2009/07/13/get-your-glyph-on-romanian-style-.aspx
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2009summer/romanianpoets.shtml
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/memory-glyphs/
about the translator
Adam J. Sorkin has published more than thirty-five books of translation and has placed the work of Romanian writers in over 350 periodicals and reviews. His recent translations include CHAOSMOS by Magda Cârneci (White Pine Press, 2006),
Crusader-Woman by Ruxandra Cesereanu (Black Widow, 2008), and Mariana Marin's PAPER CHILDREN (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006). His work has won a number of awards, including the Prize for Excellence from the Iasi Writers' Association, the Kenneth Rexroth Memorial Translation Prize, and in 2005 a Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of English at Penn State Brandywine.
"Calling himself 'Cristi' and grouping his texts under the title The Popescu Art, the author evokes his own family (or perhaps a fictional extrapolation of it) and lets members speak about him through dramatic prose monologues. The genuine theme is his own self, its paradoxes and prevarications, but also its ingenuous aspirations.... A fragmentary history of family interaction and especially a 'portrait of the artist as a young man' thus take shape as one piece leads to the next, while the main character remains so unabashedly self-centered (Popescu was actually schizophrenic) and gleefully boastful that he continues to be interesting despite, or, in a sense, beyond the limits usually restraining our full appreciation of cynosure narrators. Against all literary odds, the narrator becomes a kind of Romanian Everyman-individualist, even if he borders on solipsism. The poetic prose texts also suggest how and why they were themselves engendered."
—John Taylor, The Antioch Review
"In his brief but illuminating translator's preface to the work of three Romanian poets born in the 1960s, Adam J. Sorkin describes prose poems as 'a formless form, oxymoronic, with both lightness and heft, a chiseled, lapidary, elliptical poetry' that, according to Radu Andriescu, is 'an abnormal mode of writing, marginal, irrelevant, and bookish.' But anyone interested in the form or simply in challenging and sometimes brilliant writing will see through this false modesty."
—Robert Murray Davis, World Literature Today