Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident
before 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. Over the years, her works have
become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be
silenced by a totalitarian government. This new translation by Viorica
Patea and Paul Scott Derrick combines her two collections, The Sun of
Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the
fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly
involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance
(1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania's
integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning
point in Blandiana's poetic evolution: they lead towards a new
conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My
Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in
English by Bloodaxe in 2014). After 1989, the motifs of her poetry
remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For
Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she
inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one's time
and insists that it is 'not a series of events, but a sequence of
visions'. Blandiana's poetry oscillates between the sensual perception
of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions
alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic
gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions
reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the
degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the
individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of
primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self
must confront.
