Traci Brimhall | Poetry
translated from the Romanian by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea
NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey talks with Romanian poet and writer Ana Blandiana about destiny, resurrecting collective memory in a time of post-Communism, and how metaphors defy censorship.
One of Romania’s most renowned poets, Ana Blandiana was born in Timişoara in 1942. She has published over thirty books of poetry, essays, short stories, and a novel, and her work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Due to her outspoken opposition to the Ceaușescu regime, her work was frequently banned during the Communist period, and she was subjected to secret police surveillance. At the center of her work is her courageous insistence on the power of culture and ethics as the basis of civil society. In 1990 she cofounded Civic Alliance, a pro-democracy nongovernmental organization that strove to set Romania on the path of tolerant, democratic change. Blandiana was also responsible for the creation of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance, located in Sighet prison. She continues to be one of Romania’s most important poetic and democratic voices.
Photo of Ana Blandiana courtesy of Artista Photo Agency
Ellen Hinsey: Ana Blandiana, you are known throughout Europe as one of today’s foremost poets. Recently, however, you have published two indispensable volumes of prose. The first is a memoir, False Treatise of Manipulation, which has just appeared in Italian translation. Your second prose work, More-Than-the-Past, is a journal that you began in August 1989 after the Communist authorities placed a third ban on your work, following earlier ones in 1959–64 and 1985. More-Than-the Past covers the critical final sixteen months leading up to the end of 1989, with its momentous changes—
Ana Blandiana: More-Than-the-Past is the title I gave to the more than five hundred pages of diaries written during the last year of the Communist dictatorship that have now rather unexpectedly become a book. I started writing this diary on August 31, 1988, when I learned that I had once again been deprived of the right to publish (the first time being at the age of eighteen when, after publishing my first poem, it was discovered that my father was a political prisoner). I wrote in this diary every day until December 12, 1989, when, ill—and without any hope or the slightest idea of what was about to begin a few days later in Timișoara—I no longer had the strength to continue.
I decided to write down, as accurately and meticulously as I could, everything that I saw, experienced, and understood, not because I had the idea at the time that anyone would ever read it, but in order to give substance and meaning to my life, which otherwise I felt was falling to bits. The unexpected destiny of these four notebooks—handwritten and left unread on a corner of my writing desk—is due to the fact that, after the whirlwind of the 1990s, their contents seemed obsolete, rendered irrelevant by the ever more madly turning wheel of history. Then they disappeared. I thought that someone must have taken them, and then I simply forgot about them, until I discovered them in a cupboard of old manuscripts, in the silence between the life and death of the pandemic. At this point, the writing was beginning to fade on the bad paper, and I no longer recalled many of the details described in them. But what I found there more than thirty years later was a portrait of an era far more terrible than I remembered. I believe that the unusual success of More–Than-the-Past is due, on the one hand, to the almost shocking sense of disbelief of those who lived through this period, but who had tried to forget what it was like. On the other hand, its reception is due to young people who have finally discovered an interest in a history that they did not personally experience, but which continues to influence their destinies.
EH: Both of these prose works are important contributions to our knowledge of the twentieth century. With a sense of immediacy and urgency, they convey the deforming nature of totalitarianism as experienced in Communist Romania. One foundational memory with which you begin False Treatise of Manipulation—and which we are honored to feature here in NER—is finding yourself present at a very young age during a house search by the Securitate, after which your father was arrested on trumped-up charges. But these two books are just a part of your prose writings—
AB: I started writing prose after I turned thirty, following the publication of five or six volumes of poetry. It was at a time when I felt that I had to put a certain distance between reality and poetry, something more than the weekly musings I published in literary magazines. More precisely, I felt that if I didn’t try to describe everything that I saw, experienced, and understood (which I could only do in prose), the reality that surrounded me would enter my poems surreptitiously, with all its sordid details, its promiscuous happenings, its duplicitous characters, and its befouled meanings. And it wasn’t hard for me to imagine my poems eventually sinking like paper ships loaded with iron ore.
I felt an equal obligation to poetry and to reality, because obviously, reality had to be exorcised through writing. And if I did not decide to use the means of prose to imitate it, I would be obliged to sacrifice my poetry in order to banish its demons, transforming my verse into an exterminating angel. Besides, I have always been convinced that, despite its immateriality, poetry can become a formidable weapon—although it is never a good cleansing tool. And I needed to cleanse myself of all the residue that history and life continually deposited in me. I needed to empty that residue every evening onto the page, so that the next day, again, more of its dregs could be disposed of without the danger of my drowning one day in their mire. I began to write prose, a prose whose central task is not to narrate things that happen, but rather obsessions: a prose whose authenticity lies not in the skill of merely copying reality, but rather in stubbornly endowing it with meaning.
Writing prose gave me the feeling that I was not only shielding poetry from reality, but also protecting myself from it by enclosing it in the book.
False Treatise on Manipulation was my first book of memoir prose born out of a desire to narrate an obsession; it originated in my need to ground the text in events from my own life. And because my understanding was that manipulation was the driving force of Communist society and eliminated all forms of freedom (for I, myself, could not freely determine what I wanted to do), the book became a portrait of an era constructed out of fragments of my life, but reflective of more than a single destiny. It is a book about manipulation and the epoch I’ve lived through: a period of ebullience, buffeted by the wind ever blowing from the uncertain direction of history, shattering its meanings but not my stubbornness to understand them.
EH: You have called the memory of the house search by the Securitate your “first political manipulation.” Throughout your childhood your father would be subjected to random arrests and prison terms. Your ability to attend college was threatened by this, and the first ban issued on your writing was due to his imprisonment as an “enemy of the people.” At the same time, early on, your internal sense of resistance to the regime began to grow and progressively manifested itself, especially through poetry—
AB: Manipulation is one of the most subtle ways to prohibit freedom of thought, and therefore, of all forms of freedom. Its perversity lies in the fact that the ideas of the manipulator are inoculated into the victim without the victim fully realizing that they have given up their own ideas and have ceased to be free. The final stage is brainwashed individuals. In the twentieth century this operation played a central role in both Communism and Nazism, and was used for political ends. In the twenty-first century this phenomenon has become more generalized, and we observe it being employed across the spectrum: from marketing to political correctness, with the notions of post-truth and fake news simply becoming the tools of any form of power.
EH: Poetry is a powerful force under such circumstances. In More-Than-the-Past you recount the rather absurdist story of having to explain to a Communist apparatchik the relationship that exists between the writer and the reader, above all the way in which the reader, by bringing their experiences and understanding to a poem, completes the “sphere” of a literary creation. While this dynamic is a constant in literature, during the Communist period its importance was of course intensified[i]—
AB: Under Communism, all culture was a form of resistance, and poetry was the best placed of the arts to resist in both senses of that verb (to stay alive and to resist), because metaphor—which is a simile that omits the second part of its comparison—gives poetry the possibility of being borne over the head of censorship. A poem under a dictatorship can exist halfway between the poet and the reader, who completes its half-spoken truth. The importance and celebrity of poets in countries like Romania, Poland, and the USSR, where in the midst of Communism volumes of verse printed by the tens of thousands sold out immediately, demonstrates this.
EH: Over the last thirty years we have seen much revisionism concerning the Communist period, and younger people, who didn’t experience it personally, sometimes have difficulty understanding what the conditions were really like—not just as concerns daily life, but also psychologically and ethically—
AB: Often, before 1989, I wondered how those who came after us would look at us and judge us, how the free generations coming after the end of this nightmare would despise or pity us for our lack of freedom. But it never occurred to me that, in fact, they wouldn’t care, that they wouldn’t be interested in what we had experienced, or that they wouldn’t try to understand. Or even that eventually they would begin to have similar beliefs, allowing themselves to be dragged along by the wheel of the same barely disguised manipulations. That’s why the success of my latest book among young people—with lines of schoolchildren and students at bookstores and autograph signings—makes me rejoice as I never have before. Emil Cioran used to say that one is glad to be useless, because when one is useless one cannot be used. In this case, I enjoy, as never before, the usefulness of my writing.
EH: As was the case with the writer and dissident Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, in Romania after 1989 your name was put forward as a possible candidate for president. Although you declined, this nomination was a reflection of your literary work’s importance, as well your profile as a leading civic figure who inspired the hope that Romania could renew itself after the underworld of totalitarianism. But the task that faced post-1989 Romania was not the same as Havel’s in Czechoslovakia following the Velvet Revolution—
AB: In the history of Europe there are two years which are strangely similar, 1848 and 1989. In two different centuries and in several European countries at the same time, the social order and the world changed so suddenly that the old political class became unusable, and the new countries that emerged were provisionally led by writers and poets, who were known as the bearers of new ideas. Lamartine became Prime Minister of France, while in Poland, in Romania, in Bulgaria the masses were led by Romantic poets. After 1989 we saw not only Havel in Czechoslovakia, but also the poet Blaga Dimitrova in Bulgaria and the prose writer Árpád Göncz in Hungary briefly occupy the top of the political hierarchy, until they were replaced by new politicians. Havel, who was the longest-serving of them all, lent his country his own prestige for as long as he was president. In my case, my refusal to enter into this equation was a reflection of my very definition of myself. My biggest and most painful problem throughout the years of dictatorship was my remorse in not doing more—by which I mean, doing something other than protesting through my writing—against the evil that was undermining our lives and our country. But I knew, on the one hand, that direct political protest would have no effect in the absence of solidarity, and on the other, that I could never imagine giving up writing—which would have been the consequence of assuming an elected political post. But just as I couldn’t give up writing in order to oppose power, I couldn’t give up writing for power.
EH: As a part of your work on memory, following the changes of 1989, you were responsible for the creation of the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance, a research center located in Sighet prison where many of the country’s political prisoners were held—
AB: The idea of the world’s first Memorial to the Victims of Communism and Resistance, in Sighet, Romania, was born in our minds a few years after ’89 when we realized that in December ’89 Communism was defeated as a system, but not as a mentality. We understood that Romania could not become a constitutional state until Romanians discovered what they had experienced—besides the cold, hunger, and fear—during almost fifty years of dictatorship. It was created under the aegis of the Council of Europe and is today officially considered, along with the Auschwitz Memorial and the Normandy Peace Memorial, one of the three most important places of European memory. Communism was an extremely closed, and in many ways secret, society in which crimes and repression were known only to their victims. The greatest victory of Communism—a victory whose importance was dramatically revealed after 1989—was the creation of a new brainwashed man without memory, who was not supposed to remember who he was, what he had, or what he did before Communism. Memory is a form of truth that had to be shattered in order to destroy or manipulate the truth. The deconstruction of memory—a crime against nature and history in equal measure—is the primary achievement of Communism.
For us, the creation of the Sighet Memorial was not an end in itself. What we set out to do and what we desperately sought was a means of resurrecting collective memory. For unlike all dictatorships and all the terrors of human history, Communism not only demands that its subjects be submissive, it also demands that they be happy and submissive. The humiliation and aberration—that only memory could face—are the exact opposites of human rights.
EH: Over the last decade, in Europe—as well as in the US—we have seen a turning towards different forms of illiberalism and authoritarianism. Can you speak a bit about the impact of this trend on Romania today?
AB: Romania is and always has been, as they say in fairy tales, “the place where mountains beat their heads.” Now it is a member country of the European Union and a member of NATO, which does not change our place in space, but saves us from loneliness and perhaps even saves us outright.
Not only in Romania, but in all former Communist countries, thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall we are still in a time called post-Communism. This is a murky period dominated not so much by a fear that history may turn back the clock, but by the persistence of mentalities and the capacity for manipulation about which I have been speaking, inherited from Communism, which can hinder the construction of the rule of law and allow a dangerous totalitarian inflection to persist.
Fortunately, the illiberal danger threatens Romania less than other countries in the former Lager (“socialist camp”), an incredible Soviet term that is tantamount amounts to a confession.
At present, Romania is a member of NATO and the European Union, and therefore on the democratic side of the world, the “free world,” as it was called when we were not part of it. Yet it is a country badly governed by a mediocre and corrupt political class, where the rule of law has not yet been consolidated—a state lacking a true national project, other than the rules of the EU, which are reluctantly respected. It is a country, however, with a growing economy and middle class, more or less similar to the other European countries, but more pro-European than some of them because it is more threatened than others by what is happening in its immediate vicinity to the east.
EH: Let’s return to poetry—your creative work is very intimate and personal, but at the same time deeply philosophical and universal. Do you think it is possible to talk about intimacy without also discovering in it a resonance of the whole? How do you consider your poetry, in this sense? Further, as one finds in it things that are also essentially political, combative, and rebellious?
AB: As a person, as an intellectual, I am interested in the world and the country, socially, historically, and politically. I am combative and perhaps even rebellious—traits of the personal which I tried to convey in the poetry I wrote. Strangely, however, without asking me, and somewhat against my will, poetry, as it came to me, created a careful filter to eliminate all that was too closely tied to the contingent, all that was too fleeting and too earthly—too sudden, with too sharp contours—retaining from history only pain, from struggle only rebellion against evil, and from the passage of time only eternity.
[i] A classic example of this was Blandiana’s poem “Totul” (“Everything”), a simple list of words that reflected the real conditions of Communist Romania. “Everything” (1984) was published in the avant-garde journal Amfiteatru, but was withdrawn a few hours later when its meaning was detected.
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.
Ellen Hinsey is the International Correspondent for New England Review. She is the author of nine books of poetry, essay, dialogue, and translation. Her most recent books include The Invisible Fugue and The Illegal Age, which explores the rise of authoritarianism. Hinsey’s essays are collected in Mastering the Past: Reports from Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Hinsey’s other poetry collections include Update on the Descent, The White Fire of Time and Cities of Memory (Yale University Series Award). Magnetic North, Hinsey’s book-length dialogue with Tomas Venclova on totalitarianism and dissidence was a finalist for Lithuania’s book of the year. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Poetry, and New England Review. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, she has most recently been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.
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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