Astrid López Méndez | NonfictionTranslations
translated from the Romanian by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea
The First Manipulation
The first time in my life I was manipulated, I didn’t know what the concept of manipulation[i] meant. I was five or six years old; it was in 1948 or 1949, more likely 1948, because I was not yet at school. And the event I am going to describe is also my first political memory. It’s about my father’s first arrest. It was just the two of us at home; my mother was out for a walk with my sister in her pram. My father and I sat together and read, he his thick books and I some pre-war children’s magazines, which I had learned to read because they didn’t print children’s books yet. I don’t think I ever felt more important in my life than when Father invited me “to read together.”
Thus, I was with Father, and we were both reading when we were interrupted by an unusually strong knock at the front gate, which, by the way, was not locked. There were three unknown men, one of whom, in a very loud voice—so that the frightened and curious neighbors who then appeared at their gates could hear—said that they had come to carry out a search. I don’t think I knew what “search” meant, but from the ominous tone of the announcement it could only have been something bad; and I still remember feeling proud that Father asked to be shown the search warrant and calmly waited for them to go through their pockets (it was obvious they didn’t expect to be asked) and to be handed the paper, which he slowly unfolded and silently read. Only then did he open the gate widely, allowing them to enter. They rushed in, almost pushing us aside, and arrived at the house before we did, where—when we entered a few minutes later—they had already begun to search everything, going through all the rooms.
“We must call a witness,” said the one who had shown us the paper, and then one left the house in a hurry to look for someone, but returned almost immediately to call Father to open the gate for him.
“But the gate is open,” said Father perplexed. “It doesn’t even have a lock.”
“Maybe it’s stuck. Anyway, I can’t open it myself,” the man replied angrily and Father, puzzled, went out to speak with him, while I—who since the arrival of the three hadn’t let go of Father’s hand—followed along (though Father had gestured me to stay), for fear I might be left alone in the house with the other two strangers.
The gate was, of course, open, and the man, in a tone at once humble and ironic, apologized softly for disturbing us. Then he left, but shortly returned with Silaghi Baci, an old man with a wooden leg who didn’t know a word of Romanian but was so quiet that he didn’t speak any language anyway. He came into the courtyard, embarrassed, following the man who had recruited him, shook hands with Father and patted me on the head, as if to apologize.
Then the search began again, this time in earnest. Silaghi Baci sat on a kitchen chair as if unable to believe his eyes. The three men opened cupboards, scattering their contents in the middle of the house, overturning drawers, tearing up bed sheets, while Father sat at his own desk as if in a waiting room, watching them with expressionless eyes, with a faint trace of curiosity. I snuggled as close to Father as I could, sitting on the arm of his chair, while watching as the countless objects that came out of crates, cupboards, chests, and boxes flew through the air and piled up in a sort of hill in the middle of each room. In time—because the whole thing took several hours—I became accustomed to the situation: the three strangers, who were hard at work searching every object, started to become familiar to me, less frightening, and I had the courage to break away from Father so I could follow them, full of curiosity. They went down into the cellar, while I stayed at the edge of its small entrance, which gave onto a shaft down which firewood was lowered, wood that had been chopped with the sharp, ominous, whirring sound of a mechanical saw that fascinated me. I could no longer see the men in the dark and almost felt sorry for them having to walk around where my mother had told me never to descend because there were mice and to wash my hands after playing with the cat because it roamed the basement. Then they climbed up to the garret and I followed them, without actually climbing, rather standing at the bottom of the stairs and reaching only my upper body into the smell of old book dust that I always found mysterious and alluring. I remembered how, a year ago or more, when I was younger, I had helped my father take down books that had been exiled up in the attic and then he had carried them up again, thinner, with many pages torn out. These were the very books that the three of them were now poring over in disgust, throwing them scornfully one by one onto the dusty floorboards that kicked up a little cloud of dust with each fall.
When I returned downstairs, Father and Silaghi Baci were sitting as still and mute as when I had left them. They didn’t even look at each other. I ran, wordlessly, to Father, clinging to his arm, as if to see if he were still alive. And indeed, he seemed to return from another plane, another world, and, rising from his desk, he walked towards the three men who were entering the room with the air of having finished the job.
“Is there anything else to investigate?” Father asked more amiably than wryly, and I remember one of them turning his head towards him, looking at him suddenly with intense attention.
“I think not,” the one who seemed superior to the others in rank replied with a drawl. Then he sat down at the table in the middle of the room and pulled some papers from his briefcase. “We must draw up the report,” he added, addressing Father.
“But boss,” intervened the youngest of them, a thin, dark young man, servile and impudent in equal measure, “I didn’t check the dresser drawers.”
The dresser had a tall oval mirror, set in yellowish wood with carved motifs, underneath which were two large drawers. Their top resembled a kind of small table on which a piece of lace had been spread beside a bird-shaped bottle that had a pump attached with which to spray a perfume that had long since run out. In one of the two drawers were my mother’s toiletries (lipsticks, powders, hairbrushes), and in the other, my toys (rag dolls, with hair made from a patch of black lambskin and a white cloth face on which the eyes, the nose, and the mouth were drawn with my mother’s makeup; a teddy bear with a tie that I used to fall asleep with in my arms at night when I was a little girl; some colored glass balls that I got from the “American aid” at kindergarten; a cardboard silhouette cut out by my mother, which I dressed by making her paper dresses and doll furniture made of empty matchboxes glued together).
“Would you allow us to check the two drawers?” the boss asked reverently, and Father looked at him in amazement, not knowing whether he was mocking him or if there was something more serious going on.
“But it’s absurd to ask . . . Of course, you can search them. You’ve been in the garret and the cellar . . .”
The boss smiled as if at a good joke, and the dark young man bent down and pulled out my toy drawer. On top was a revolver.
It was an unfamiliar object (I was too young to have seen any movies), and I didn’t know why it was there in my drawer. I looked up at Father, ready to ask, but Father no longer resembled himself. Silaghi Baci suddenly stood up, turned and almost stumbled over his wooden leg, and the three men waited with an air of having done their duty.
After signing the report, also signed by Silaghi Baci, which described where the revolver was found, Father was arrested for illegally owning a firearm. After the men departed, I was left alone, staring frozen at the heaps of disheveled things, unable to cry, while in my ears sounded the thump of the neighbor’s wooden leg as he walked away.
It wasn’t until Mother came back from town and made me tell her what had happened—asking me detailed questions and forcing me to go back and retell what she found unclear—that I understood that the revolver had been put in my drawer when Father had been taken out of the house to open the little gate that was already open. And then I remembered that Father had gestured for me to stay in the house, but I hadn’t listened to him, because I was afraid of being alone with the newcomers. If I hadn’t been afraid, if I had stayed in the house while Father was away, they wouldn’t have been able to put the revolver in the drawer . . . And it was only when I understood, or thought I understood, the mechanism of the catastrophe built on my guilt, that I burst into endless crying, so violent that it seemed I would break into pieces thrown among the remains of the house that had also fallen apart. The event lingers in my memory along with the image of Mother sobbing too, while, with my little sister screaming in her arms, she tried to give me a glass of sugared water. But that wasn’t the end of it. For months after that, and even after Father’s return, I kept waking up at night, screaming and crying my eyes out, because I was again dreaming the same scene in which I knew I had to stay in the house with the secret police, but I didn’t have the courage and again became guilty of what was about to happen, again and again.
A Story that Began Well
I believe the idea of the Civic Alliance was born in 1990 a month after the repression in University Square, during the “March in White.” When we announced in the journal România liberă a rally in solidarity with the students who had been arrested by the miners, we had no hopes. In the month that had passed since the June miners’ strike[ii], 600,000 Romanian citizens (the newspapers wrote), mostly young and mostly intellectuals, had applied to leave the country for good. There was a general depression bordering on nervous breakdown. Our gesture of suggesting a rally had been more theoretical than concrete: we simply felt the need to do something, but we never imagined that more than a few dozen masochists would respond to our call. We asked everyone to come dressed in white and carry flowers, not only to emphasize the nonviolent nature of the demonstration (unlike that of the miners) and to reduce the possibility of repression, which was not excluded, but also to draw the attention of passers-by and journalists to the group’s protest, no matter how sparcely attended. The fact that thousands of people (more than 10,000, according to the newspapers), dressed in white and carrying flowers, gathered at the announced time in front of the Opera House—filling the square and forcing traffic to stop—was a real emotional shock, not only to us but to every participant. No one had expected this, and everyone was glad that they had been wrong. We set off, flanked by gendarmes, and along the march’s kilometer-long route, onlookers—fearful after the crackdown in June—greeted us from balconies along the route waving or throwing flowers to us. A kind of pride, born out of the discovery that they had been able to overcome their fear and depression—hallowed the crowd, as if countless individual lights had merged into one exultant beam. I remember the hundreds of flowers I received at the end, as if in an ad hoc ceremony in which each one gave me a flower as though it were a weapon they had placed in my care. When I finally left, with my arms full of the flowers I could barely manage to carry, I had the feeling that their weight was like a responsibility that I couldn’t refuse, and which had been confided to me.
The next day without having scheduled it, Petre Mihai Băcanu[iii], Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu, Gabriel Andreescu, Gabriel Mărculescu, Horia Bernea, Romulus Rusan[iv], and I met at România liberă. We were all excited and anxious. The surprising conclusion of the previous day was that hope still existed. And if it existed, someone had to organize it. And if not us, then who? And if not now, then when? The mere formulation of the question placed a frightening responsibility on our shoulders. I remember the room in which we stood around a desk where no one sat. We were extremely different, we had different biographies, ages, and professions, but the fact that we all felt responsible for what had to be done bound us together. In fact, we hardly knew each other; it is only now, when I look back, that I discover that two of us were former political prisoners and three, sons of former political prisoners. We did not think of this at that time. Only one thing was clear: something had to be done, and we were the ones who understood that we had to do it. I remember very little of that discussion. I remember only that we talked about what name to give to the organization we were inventing, that the name we decided on would remain the same, but that we found it comical that we were thinking about a name before anything else existed.
I remember even less about the following months. Like us, others shared the same sense of urgency. There were other similar meetings, with other participants, in Bucharest, Timișoara, and elsewhere. But I don’t remember how the connections came about. All I know is that we were all living in a trance that united us, that there were no hierarchies, no definite plans; everyone had ideas; the division of labor was self-generated; some wrote statutes, others telephoned institutions, others made banners, and others made phone calls to friends who in turn made phone calls. At România liberă or at the “Social Dialogue Group,” where small groups of people from Timișoara, Cluj, Brașov, and Iași were looking for us, everything we did was provisional. Horia Bernea found us a venue: the large hallway of an old and shabby aristocratic mansion near the Icoanei Garden, where Remus Mistreanu, a cousin of the painter, and his mother occupied two rooms. Mistreanu’s gesture at that time, putting his house at the disposal of an idea—which had not even been outlined yet and the outcome of which was unknown—remained for me a symbol of unconditional devotion. He jokingly said that all he wanted in return was a plaque on the house saying that the Civic Alliance was born there. This didn’t happen. There, at the Mistreanu family home, first in the hallway—then, after we could no longer fit, in one of their two rooms that they freed up for us—we gathered to decide on the plan for the launch of the Alliance. There, the declaration of principles was written, to which at the last minute we added the sentence that would strongly affirm the ideal of solidarity and become our motto: “We cannot succeed unless we are together.” We talked for hours standing up, because there were only two chairs, so no one sat down. We decided that the launch of Civic Alliance would take place on November 15, the third anniversary of the workers’ movement in Brasov, and that, after announcing its founding in România liberă a few days before, it would be marked by rallies in the main cities.
Now, when I try to remember the details of that state of mind and the way things were unfolding, everything, but especially our almost irresponsibly optimistic way of thinking, it seems unbelievable. We were a handful of people, we had no money, no possibility of appearing on television and our only weapon was the newspaper România liberă, directed by Petre Mihai Băcanu.
I think our average age was around forty, but due to the enthusiasm, the excitement, and the eagerness, the novelty of the situation we all found ourselves in for the first time turned us into teenagers. However, we were not the only adolescents: the mood of a part of the population was also youthful. True, it was a minority, but a thinking one. After the repression in University Square, understood that the new freedom that had given us all such an unprecedented giddiness could be lost at any time, and this danger, this race against the clock made us unexpectedly alive.
On November 8, the front page of România liberă was entirely covered by the announcement “The Civic Alliance has come into being,” followed by a short founding text, including the ABCs of a Western-style democracy and 216 names of top intellectuals from all spheres. The next day, România liberă started to publish registration forms that could be cut out, filled in with a person’s name and details and sent to 10 Eremia Grigorescu Street, where, a few days later, bags of forms and hundreds of people began to arrive, queuing up and waiting in person in order to register. The first to sign up formed the secretariat. They brought their chairs from home and placed them around the Mistreanu family’s dining room table. Work went on from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. There were many journalists photographing the queues and asking questions of those waiting, but except for România liberă nothing appeared in the newspapers. Then one evening, as we were finally leaving for home, we were photographed with infrared rays, which obviously had nothing to do with media coverage. Instead, I remember a sort of press conference at our strange headquarters, where everyone was standing and it was so crowded it was impossible to distinguish the journalists from the organizers. And as we had no microphone, the only obvious thing communicated was a general enthusiasm and fraternity.
As the November 15 rally approached, the activity became frantic and our emotions were overwhelming, as if before a decisive exam. But I don’t think it occurred to us that we might not succeed, or that the plan to take to the streets in all big cities on a given day and at a given time in the name of ideas that were entirely theoretical and demands that represented not interests, but convictions, was utopian or out of all proportion. On the eve of the rally, when the tension had reached its peak and information or rumors emerged every minute about possible provocations or repressions, we received a late evening phone call from the city of Iași saying that the situation there was getting really dangerous and that the only solution, if the whole thing was not to end in disaster, was for someone from Bucharest to go there. It would have to be someone who was known and loved in the city, whose presence would increase the number of participants at the rally so as to make repression impossible. I comprehended the hint before the man on the phone said my name: it was about me. In ’87 I had been invited to Iași for the “Junimea lectures” and there had been so many people that there was a question of repeating the talk the next day at the university. But the rector’s office objected, the students protested, and I retained the memory of those events as a porte-bonheur during the ban that began shortly afterwards.
I remember that it was evening; I looked out the window and saw that it was dark, while the people from Iași told us on the phone that there was a train leaving Bucharest at 1:00 a.m. It didn’t pass through Iași, but they would wait for us with a car in Pașcani. It was after 11:00 when we went home to change clothes, eat (only now we realized we hadn’t eaten anything since morning), and get ready to leave. I was very tired. I was sorry that we wouldn’t be at the rally in Bucharest the next day and I think I was a bit scared too. In fact, it was not exactly fear but a certain feeling of frustration and persecution dominated me, as if I felt the need to complain that everything was always happening to me. We managed to sleep for a quarter of an hour, which was worse than if we hadn’t slept at all. We got on the train and as we passed the empty compartments we were thinking that we would sleep all the way to Iași and back. Then we heard somebody calling us. We had passed by a compartment where Nicky Manolescu and Zigu Ornea were. We sat next to them. They were going to a literary meeting in Bacau. They asked us where we were going and we told them, with the feeling that we were heading toward different planets. They tried to persuade us to go down to Bacău too, and I looked at them with wonder, not only because they didn’t understand what we were feeling, but also due to my own estrangement from the notion of a “literary meeting,” as if I couldn’t believe that such a thing still existed, as if I had never attended such meetings. We all fell silent in embarrassment at the obvious gap that separated us. Then Nicky began to mock our enthusiasm and spirit of sacrifice and even to criticize us in a scholarly way: “Now is not the time. It’s too soon. You should have waited; it’ll be a fiasco.”
I didn’t know if he was right or wrong, and above of all I didn’t know that within half a year he would become the president of a party stemming from the organization we were creating “too soon.” I looked at Romi and we both fell silent, all the more so because Zigu was watching us intently, curious to know what we would say in response.
I don’t remember who was waiting for us in Pașcani, but I do remember that he was anxious and scared, that all during the trip he told us about the preparations made by the authorities to prevent the rally from taking place and the way that those at the Alliance (this formula only a few days after the announcement of its foundation moved us deeply) planned to hold the demonstration, having rented the room at the “Traian” Hotel[v] with the balcony from which Cuza had once spoken, and from where the speech would be given today:
“We thought there shouldn’t be many speakers. Besides you there will be Mihai Ursachi, Emil Brumaru[vi] and a young worker from Brașov, Macovei. I think he is not more than twenty years old; he was eighteen when they took to the streets in ’87.”
After arriving in Iași, we went straight to the “Traian” Hotel, where the room with the balcony was crowded with acquaintances, mostly writers, all very excited. The atmosphere was like that in the balcony room during the demonstrations in University Square in Bucharest. Information was exchanged, ideas, even jokes were made, but all with a kind of carelessness. Everyone was only paying attention to the passing of time, to the hour approaching, to the gathering of people in the square. Every other minute someone looked out through the curtain to see what was happening downstairs, where on one whole side, parallel to the tram line, several police cars were parked. The rest of the square was deserted and I thought, with a kind of absurd relief, that perhaps no one would come. Then, when I looked again, the square was full. It seemed to me that only a moment had passed, which was not possible, or perhaps fatigue and excitement had made me glide through these minutes without registering them. Someone said, “You need to go out,” and the door to the balcony opened wide, people stepped aside, letting me go first.
Then, the moment I crossed the threshold, all hell broke loose (as if the movement of my step had pressed a button). An acoustic inferno of boos, whistles, unintelligible shouts, and horns. I tried—probably hoping that this would make it stop as suddenly as it started—to step back, but behind me came the others. I bumped into Mihai Ursachi and unintentionally moved forward. We lined up on the narrow balcony: three poets and a very young worker. We should have started talking, but the din was so overwhelming it seemed crazy. I looked down, saw the compact crowd with many hands outstretched towards us, and the only logical connection between these gestures of friendlines and the hateful booing was that there were two groups of protesters in the square, of opposite orientations. “Go ahead,” somebody whispered from behind, as if they were deaf and didn’t understand that it would be pointless. “Go ahead!” I can’t remember if I started, or what I said. It was obvious that neither those below nor even those beside me could hear me, and the undertaking I had accepted seemed unreal, with such a strange sense of futility that I had the feeling I was talking to God. Nor did I hear what the other three said, any more than they heard me; but we looked into each other’s eyes, replacing words with the feeling that the early Christians must have had when, instead of any explanation, they drew a fish. Then, down below in the square, something happened. The crowd seemed to sway to one side; suddenly the tumult ceased and, in an utterly unnatural silence, the last words of the young worker from Brasov were heard. The crowd erupted in cheers and applause and we re-entered the hotel room where there were even more people. Then we headed down the corridors and stairs to get out as everyone tried to hug us and congratulate us on our success. It felt like I was in a nightmare, both terrifying and comical at the same time.
“Was it a success?” I asked.
“But didn’t you see how many people there were?”
“Lots of people, who came to whistle and boo!”
“Oh, no,” the people in the square tried to explain with a laugh. “Don’t you understand? It was just a small group doing that, but they had very powerful megaphones. But the balcony microphones were good too. It was great. It was the first time the police had to step in and move those that they had brought in to protect them from the fury of the crowd. This is the first time there were more of us. In fact, the police had been safeguarding them from the beginning, so they could shout and boo in peace; but eventually the police also got scared of us and stopped them. This is the first time . . .”
We were all talking at once, laughing and hugging each other. It was a generalized excitement, and I could hardly understand what it was all about, especially after the shock on the balcony. Teams of hecklers had been organized to prevent us from speaking, and to do this their megaphones targeted the four figures on the balcony. The aim was to embarrass us and shut us up, so the fact that so many people had gathered to listen to us (which the police had been unable to prevent), overturned their plans.
We returned by night train to Bucharest. While waiting to depart we tried to find out on TV if there was any news about the rally in Bucharest. To our enormous surprise, our rally there of hundreds of thousands of people, which had blocked the capital’s entire center, was extensively and objectively covered by the official television broadcaster. This could be considered a real miracle, were it not surpassed by the second news item of the day that a delegation from the Council of Europe was in Bucharest and saw it all live. We had started off on the right foot and, given our lack of means and even skill, for one day, good luck had been on our side.
Light spectrum 473
I am reminded of a question I first asked myself as a teenager, when I was learning that the spectrum of light is made up on the left of hertz and infrared waves, in the middle of a thin band of visible light, and on the right, of the known limitless range of ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays. But what if, I said to myself at the time, the spectrum of human light is the same? On the left is the infra and the subconscious, in the middle, the narrow band of consciousness, and on the right, the infinite field of ultra-consciousness, gathering, in a jumble, intuition, genius, parapsychological powers, magical powers, and the power of faith?
[i] In Romanian the word “manipulation” is commonly used to express not only personal deception but also political instrumentalization, as in the Romanian democratic slogan “I want to be informed, not manipulated.” (This footnote provided by Ellen Hinsey. Subsequent footnotes provided by the translators.)
[ii] In April 1990, peaceful protests were organized in University Square by Romanian civil society and were supported by the opposition. Following this were the May 20, 1990, elections won by the National Salvation Front (FSN). On June 13, 1990, the newly elected President Ion Iliescu, in an attempt to put an end to the demonstrations, called upon the the Jiu Valley coal miners to “clean” University Square of protesters who were “endangering” the achievements of the 1989 December revolution, as well as to protect the party in government against the opposition. What followed were the three days of violent events, June 13–15, in Bucharest during which the miners, armed with clubs, left six dead and fourteen hundred injured. The aggression against the capital’s civilian population, including women and students, the destruction of newspapers and political party headquarters, and the manhunt that followed for the leaders of the opposition who were attacked in their homes, were ordered by the party in power and were a reflection of their intolerance of democratic pluralism. The President congratulated the miners.
[iii] Petre Mihai Băcanu (b. 1944) a journalist and dissident, was arrested in 1988 and accused of preparing the publication of a clandestine newspaper called Romania, even before the first issue was had been printed. Released on December 22, 1989, he became the first editor of România liberă, which went on to be an anti-communist newspaper with a firm democratic orientation. Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu (1928–2008), a lawyer and a leading figure in the anti-communist resistance in Romania, was arrested twice, in 1949 and 1958, due to his political activities. He became senator from 1992–2000 and president of the Association of Former Romanian Political Prisoners. He promoted laws that protect citizens against the persecution of the Romanian secret police and militated on behalf of the interests of political prisoners. Gabriel Andreescu (b. 1952) is a former dissident, journalist, professor of political science, and human rights activist. Florin Gabriel Mărculescu (1940–2000) was an economist and the main editor and journalist at România liberă and other major publications specializing in internal affairs. Horia Bernea (1938–2000) was a famous painter and director of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant.
[iv] Writer, film critic, historian, and editor, Romulus Rusan (1935-2016), wrote more than twenty books including America of the Greyhound, A Journey to the Inland Sea, The Chronology and Geography of Repression, Census of the Concentration Camp Population. A co-founder of the Civic Alliance, he was Ana Blandiana’s husband and co-responsible for the creation of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance in Sighet. He was director of the International Centre for Studies on Communism and editor of the collections of historical documents and studies published by the Civic Academy Foundation. He was also coordinator of the Romanian Addendum to the Black Book of Communism (1997) edited by Stéphane Courtois.
[v] Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1820–1873) was the first ruler of the Romanian Principalities who in 1862 achieved the union of the two Romanian states, Moldavia and Wallachia, formerly provinces subject to Ottoman rule. The Traian Hotel bears the name of the Roman emperor Trajan who reigned from 98–117 and who in 106 conquered Dacia, a province that corresponds to today’s Romania.
[vi] Jailed in the 1960s for trying to swim across the border in the Danube, Mihai Ursachi (1941–2004) was a Romanian poet and translator who taught in the US from 1981–1990 and returned to Romania after the revolution. Emil Brumaru (1938–2019) was a writer and poet renowned for erotic poetry.
Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 in Timişoara, Romania. Considered one of the major European poets of her generation, she has published seventeen books of poetry, two volumes of short stories, eleven books of essays, one memoir, and one novel. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Blandiana was cofounder and president of Romania’s Civic Alliance starting in 1990, an independent nonpolitical organization that fought for freedom and democratic change. In 1993, under the aegis of the European Community, she created the Memorial for the Victims of Communism in Sighet Prison. In recognition of her contribution to European culture and her struggle for human rights, Blandiana was awarded France’s Légion d’Honneur (2009). She is the recipient of international awards including the Gottfried von Herder Award and the Vilenica International Literature Award. Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea have translated numerous collections of her work including My Native Land A4 (Bloodaxe, 2014) and The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses (Bloodaxe, 2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Five Books, combining five collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry, was published in 2021 (Bloodaxe). Early English-language translations of her poems include The Hour of Sand: Selected Poems 1969-1989 (trans. Anca Cristofovici, 1989), and versions by Seamus Heaney in When the Tunnels Meet (Bloodaxe, 1996). Ana Blandiana was awarded the 2016 European Poet of Freedom Prize by the city of Gdansk for My Native Land A4. She received the Griffin Trust’s Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018.
Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer (retired) in American literature at the University of Valencia. His critical works include Thinking for a Change: Gravity’s Rainbow and Symptoms of the Paradigm Shift in Occidental Culture (1994), We Stand Before the Secret of the World: Traces along the Pathway of American Transcendentalism (2003), and Lines of Thought: 1983–2015 (2015). With Viorica Patea, he has translated a number of works by Ana Blandiana, including My Native Land A4 (Bloodaxe, UK 2014), Sun of the Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses (Bloodaxe 2017), and Five Books (Bloodaxe 2021), which was presented in The Guardian as being among the best books of 2021. A new collection that gathers together four books of poems by Blandiana entitled The Shadow of Words will be published shortly by Bloodaxe.
Viorica Patea is Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca, where she teaches American and English literature. Her published books include studies on Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (Cátedra, 2022). She has edited numerous collections of essays, such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (Ediciones U. Salamanca, 2001), Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Rodopi, 2012, which received the 2013 Javier Coy Research Award for the best edited book from the Spanish Association of American Studies), and, together with Paul Scott Derrick, Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi, 2007). Recently she has co-edited with John Gery a bilingual anthology of verse, “Song Up Out of Spain”: Poems in Tribute to Ezra Pound,and a book of essays, Ezra Pound & the Spanish World,both published by Clemson UP in 2023. She has written extensively on Ana Blandiana’s oeuvre, which she has translated into Spanish. Patea has collaborated with Fernando Sánchez Miret on two of Blandiana’s short story books and, with Natalia Carbajosa, on the complete poems, which was ranked among the best fifty books of the year by leading Spanish journals and critics. She has translated into English, with Paul Scott Derrick, eight collections of Blandiana’s poetry in three volumes published by Bloodaxe (2014, 2017, 2021). A new collection, The Shadow of Words, including four books of poems by Blandiana, will come out shortly from Bloodaxe.
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