Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident
before for the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest
candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu
regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well
as for her courageous defence of ethical values. She was co-founder and
President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political
organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change, and more
recently co-founded the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. Blandiana
redefines her poetics in every new book of poetry she publishes. In My
Native Land A4 she recreates a land of words, water, trees, cities with
abandoned churches, fallen angels that cannot find their way back to
heaven, and gods that learn to roller-skate to try to reach the young
who remain oblivious of their existence. She projects visionary spaces
within the confines of a page - the A4 sheet of her title - which emerge
out of her imagination as anguished territories in which the lyrical 'I'
is compelled to draw precise, clear boundaries out of a diffuse magma of
words. The poems articulate a quest for love, beauty and truth and
affirm an urgent need for existential authenticity as a requisite for
the redemption of the self, chronicling the struggle between a
constantly deteriorating body that is learning how to die and the spirit
that strives to overcome its physical constraints. My Native Land A4
contains meditations on fundamental themes such as the fragility and
vulnerability of being, the inexorable toll of time, the limitations of
the human condition and the correspondence between life and death within
the cosmic rhythms of the universe. The print edition of My Native Land
A4 only includes the English translations. The e-book with audio is a
bilingual Romanian-English edition with most of the poems read in
Romanian by Ana Blandiana.
