translated from the Romanian by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea

The Borderline

I search for the beginning of evil
Just as, when a child, I searched for the edges of the rain.
I ran as hard as I could to find
A place to sit on
The ground and contemplate the
Rain on one side and no rain on the other.
But the rain always stopped
Before I could find its borders
And later it rained again before
I could discover how far the clear sky reached.
I’ve grown up in vain.
I still keep running with all
My might to find a place
To sit on the ground and contemplate
The line between good and evil.
But the evil always stops before
I can find the border
And it starts again
Before I find out how far the good goes. 
I search for the beginning of evil
On this earth
That’s sometimes cloudy,
Sometimes sunny.        

from The Third Sacrament (1969)

Hibernation

Don’t listen to my brothers, they’re asleep,
They don’t understand the words shouted out,
While they howl like complacent beasts
With souls that dream of beehives
And they swim among seeds.

Don’t hate my brothers, they’re asleep,
They’ve covered themselves with a bearskin
That keeps them implacable and cruel and alone
In this senseless cold
That has no end.

Don’t judge my brothers, they’re asleep,
At times, one may be obliged to wake up
And, if he doesn’t go back it means he’s dead,
And it’s night and it’s cold
And the sleep goes on.

Don’t forget my brothers, they’re asleep
And while they sleep they give birth and the children grow
And they imagine that life is sleep, and they
Can hardly wait, impatient, to wake up
Into death.

from The Cricket’s Eye (1981)

The Hunt

I’ve never hunted for words,
I’ve only searched for their long
Silver shadows,
Drawn across the grass by the sun,
Pushed across the sea by the moon.
I’ve never hunted for anything more
Than the shadows of words:
An ingenious hunt
Learnt from the old ones
Who know
That its shadow is the most valuable
Part of a word
And that words that have no shadows anymore
Have sold their souls.   

from The Cricket’s Eye (1981)

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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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