Publisher's Synopsis
This anthology of contemporary poets of Cluj-Napoca represents a strong, varied tradition, as varied as the changeable weather in the Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca. Recent Romanian poetry has been shaped by many factors in the 20th century. These include not only the four-decade-long Babylonian captivity of communism, which ended with the revolution of December 1989, but also the influence of powerful creative sensibilities through the voices of important literary personages. In part, communism impeded poetic achievement, not only by its restructions in style and theme (especially during the decade and a half, from the late-1940s until the mid-1960s), but also by its interruption of contact with European modernism, in which the writers of this geographically marginal culture had been a central, avant-garde presence. But in part, communist control also unintentionally served as a bracing tonic, a goad to poetic inventiveness and the natural ingenuity, indirectness and metaphorical and ironical obliqueness of the art, forcing poets -- who after the relatively relaxed period of the late-1960s faced a tightened, changing, but never totally restrictive censorship -- to find ways around the regime's prohibitions and follies. If nothing else, the totalitarian experience raised poetry to a central importance as witness to the spiritual terrors and material deprivations of the police state and as an essential participant in the resistance of the human psyche to denial of its integrity and its freedom. Adam J Sorkin is co-author of 'The Sky Behind the Forest', which was the Poetry Book Society Recommended selection in the translation category.
