The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry, ed. Paul Doru Mugur with Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea
ISBN: 978‐1‐58498‐088‐9, paper, $26.95,
Contemporary Romanian poetry is one of the most significant literary phenomena in Eastern Europe of the post‐communist
decades. With an almost reckless urgency, young Romanian poets reject the verbal games of the self‐consciou postmodernism of their predecessors, the infinite textual mirrors of deconstruction, by dropping any pretense to a privileged,
high‐culture poetic discourse. Out with stylistic pirouettes and embroideries, rhythms and rhymes, away with poetic language along with its distortions and liesabout experience and human nature that seem too comfortably in congruitywith the deposed,
moribund social order. Instead, they turn their attention to the anti‐lyrical banality of day‐to‐day life, including its squalor and triviality, yet also to the myriad of little pleasures and the fragments of miraclethat typically go unnoticed in humdrum human existence. They express this vision –with its fundamental resistance to anything visionary – by means ofan unadorned argot that oscillates between violence and miserabilism on one hand, and a minimalist “langue des enfants et des anges” on the other. The only solution for contemporary poets is to renounce poetry; miraculously, from its vanishing point, poetry arises anew like the phoenix, grown livelier, more honest, freer than ever.
“Waking up from a familiar nightmare into an unknown reality is not for the faint‐hearted. More than two decades after the world and the poetry that buzzed in it shattered, Romanian poets are putting on lab coats, turning on recording devices, scouring the web they broadcast on, photoshopping bits and pieces of shards and routine, and questioning the tragic undertone of the hardwired lament in a culture that questions itself incessantly. Anyone able to hear the sound this poetry makes will be rewarded with a sharpening of their own tools of perception.” --Andrei Codrescu
“Today’s young Romanian poets couldn`t care less about literary theories and aesthetics and no longer show any interest for
taxonomies, generations, trends and groups, the hierarchy of value. For them, poetry is a basal instinct, unsophisticated, like the reflex of breathing or vomiting. Immediate, ethical, political, above all else existential, their poetry is a dense texture of individual fibers grown uninhibited like the wild life itself.” --Mircea Cărtărescu
“While reading Vanishing Point That Whistles, the Latin word ‘artus’ came to mind: related to anatomy, it indicates a joint; symbolically the word refers to strength or power (and, poetically, to the limbs). My feeling is that this anthology of new Romanian poetry exists as an important ‘artus’ point: a place where one historical/literary tradition bends into another. At the same time itʹs a locus of strength, with a natural ability to reach powerfully outward. Evenmore, though, itʹs a source of pure reading pleasure from one of the worldʹs most poetic places. If you havenʹt yet gotten acquainted with the brilliance of contemporary Romanian poetry, enter here.” --Sharon Mesmer
“This Romanian poetry arrives in the 21st century like a much needed remedy for the excessive stylistic inventions that seem to accompany what is soon becoming an almost universal postmodern aesthetic. Itʹsa book that Iʹd want my graduate students of poetry and literary translation to read.ʺ --Roger Sedarat
“The poetry included in this volume reflects the alienation and the crisis of communication brought by the so‐called “transition” period of the last twenty years in Romania from the beginning of the post‐communist period in 1990 to the close of the first decade of the twenty‐first century. This twenty‐year span was defined not only by uncertainty and fears, social inequities and misery, but also by both an enthusiasm and a hope for the future that the recent inclusion of Romania in the European Union made real.” —from the introduction by Paul Doru Mugur
“The Vanishing Point contains mainly poetry published after the revolution in 1989 and recognizes the richness of contemporary Romanian poetry in its diversity and complexity. It includes gifted poets such as Cristian Popescu, Adina Dabija, Ruxandra Novac, George Vasilievici, and many others. The translation team is impressive. Adam J. Sorkin has delighted American readers with a lifetime of translations that have received well-deserved recognitions and awards. Claudia Serea boasts, in addition to a rich experience with translation, several books of poetry in English and a wide experience as a superb poet in her own right. In fact, most of the translations in the volume are done through a complex process of collaboration, which reaffirms the dialogic structure of the book and the thorough research and labor behind it. Many other sophisticated translators contributed to the success of the book, such as Ioana Ieronim, Oana Sânziana Marian, Bogdan Ştefănescu, and Livia Vianu, to mention only a few of them.” --Lucia Cherciu
Poetry by Cristian Popescu, Ioan Es. Pop, Mihail Gălăţanu, Daniel Bănulescu, Floarea Ţuţuianu, Radu Andriescu, Simona Popescu, Emilian Galaicu‐Păun, Ruxandra Cesereanu, O. Nimigean, Constantin Acosmei, Nicolae Coande, Mihai Ignat, Marius Ianuş, Dumitru Crudu, Adina Dabija,Ştefan Bălan, Teodor Dună, Ruxandra Novac, Mugur Grosu, George Vasilievici, Ioana Nicolaie, Radu Vancu, Andrei Peniuc, Dan Sociu, Adrian Urmanov, Răzvan Ţupa, Claudiu Komartin, Elena Vlădăreanu, Dan Coman, Miruna Vlada, V. Leac, Svetlana Cârstean, T.S. Khasis,Gabi Eftimie, Marius Conkan, Andrei Gamarţ, Michel Martin, Aida Hancer, and Anonymous.
See also:
http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/138545784_Rutherford_poet_goes_back_to_her_Romanian_roots_with_anthology.html
http://pcccwriting.blogspot.com/2013/02/national-translation-month-vanishing.html
http://www.smith.edu/metamorphoses/links/Lucia.pdf
“The Vanishing Point contains mainly poetry published after the revolution in 1989 and recognizes the richness of contemporary Romanian poetry in its diversity and complexity. It includes gifted poets such as Cristian Popescu, Adina Dabija, Ruxandra Novac, George Vasilievici, and many others. The translation team is impressive. Adam J. Sorkin has delighted American readers with a lifetime of translations that have received well-deserved recognitions and awards. Claudia Serea boasts, in addition to a rich experience with translation, several books of poetry in English and a wide experience as a superb poet in her own right. In fact, most of the translations in the volume are done through a complex process of collaboration, which reaffirms the dialogic structure of the book and the thorough research and labor behind it. Many other sophisticated translators contributed to the success of the book, such as Ioana Ieronim, Oana Sânziana Marian, Bogdan Ştefănescu, and Livia Vianu, to mention only a few of them.” Lucia Cherciu
and then of course we have the blurbs:
Contemporary Romanian poetry is one of the most significant literary phenomena in Eastern Europe of the post‐communist
decades. With an almost reckless urgency, young Romanian poets reject the verbal games of the self‐consciou postmodernism of their predecessors, the infinite textual mirrors of deconstruction, by dropping any pretense to a privileged,
high‐culture poetic discourse. Out with stylistic pirouettes and embroideries, rhythms and rhymes, away with poetic language along with its distortions and liesabout experience and human nature that seem too comfortably in congruitywith the deposed,
moribund social order. Instead, they turn their attention to the anti‐lyrical banality of day‐to‐day life, including its squalor and triviality, yet also to the myriad of little pleasures and the fragments of miraclethat typically go unnoticed in humdrum human existence. They express this vision –with its fundamental resistance to anything visionary – by means ofan unadorned argot that oscillates between violence and miserabilism on one hand, and a minimalist “langue des enfants et des anges” on the other. The only solution for contemporary poets is to renounce poetry; miraculously, from its vanishing point, poetry arises anew like the phoenix, grown livelier, more honest, freer than ever.
“Waking up from a familiar nightmare into an unknown reality is not for the faint‐hearted. More than two decades after the world and the poetry that buzzed in it shattered, Romanian poets are putting on lab coats, turning on recording devices, scouring the web they broadcast on, photoshopping bits and pieces of shards and routine, and questioning the tragic undertone of the hardwired lament in a culture that questions itself incessantly. Anyone able to hear the sound this poetry makes will be rewarded with a sharpening of their own tools of perception.” --Andrei Codrescu
“Today’s young Romanian poets couldn`t care less about literary theories and aesthetics and no longer show any interest for
taxonomies, generations, trends and groups, the hierarchy of value. For them, poetry is a basal instinct, unsophisticated, like the reflex of breathing or vomiting. Immediate, ethical, political, above all else existential, their poetry is a dense texture of individual fibers grown uninhibited like the wild life itself.” --Mircea Cărtărescu
“While reading Vanishing Point That Whistles, the Latin word ‘artus’ came to mind: related to anatomy, it indicates a joint; symbolically the word refers to strength or power (and, poetically, to the limbs). My feeling is that this anthology of new Romanian poetry exists as an important ‘artus’ point: a place where one historical/literary tradition bends into another. At the same time itʹs a locus of strength, with a natural ability to reach powerfully outward. Evenmore, though, itʹs a source of pure reading pleasure from one of the worldʹs most poetic places. If you havenʹt yet gotten acquainted with the brilliance of contemporary Romanian poetry, enter here.” --Sharon Mesmer
“This Romanian poetry arrives in the 21st century like a much needed remedy for the excessive stylistic inventions that seem to accompany what is soon becoming an almost universal postmodern aesthetic. Itʹsa book that Iʹd want my graduate students of poetry and literary translation to read.ʺ --Roger Sedarat
“The poetry included in this volume reflects the alienation and the crisis of communication brought by the so‐called “transition” period of the last twenty years in Romania from the beginning of the post‐communist period in 1990 to the close of the first decade of the twenty‐first century. This twenty‐year span was defined not only by uncertainty and fears, social inequities and misery, but also by both an enthusiasm and a hope for the future that the recent inclusion of Romania in the European Union made real.” —from the introduction by Paul Doru Mugur
“The Vanishing Point contains mainly poetry published after the revolution in 1989 and recognizes the richness of contemporary Romanian poetry in its diversity and complexity. It includes gifted poets such as Cristian Popescu, Adina Dabija, Ruxandra Novac, George Vasilievici, and many others. The translation team is impressive. Adam J. Sorkin has delighted American readers with a lifetime of translations that have received well-deserved recognitions and awards. Claudia Serea boasts, in addition to a rich experience with translation, several books of poetry in English and a wide experience as a superb poet in her own right. In fact, most of the translations in the volume are done through a complex process of collaboration, which reaffirms the dialogic structure of the book and the thorough research and labor behind it. Many other sophisticated translators contributed to the success of the book, such as Ioana Ieronim, Oana Sânziana Marian, Bogdan Ştefănescu, and Livia Vianu, to mention only a few of them.” --Lucia Cherciu
Poetry by Cristian Popescu, Ioan Es. Pop, Mihail Gălăţanu, Daniel Bănulescu, Floarea Ţuţuianu, Radu Andriescu, Simona Popescu, Emilian Galaicu‐Păun, Ruxandra Cesereanu, O. Nimigean, Constantin Acosmei, Nicolae Coande, Mihai Ignat, Marius Ianuş, Dumitru Crudu, Adina Dabija,Ştefan Bălan, Teodor Dună, Ruxandra Novac, Mugur Grosu, George Vasilievici, Ioana Nicolaie, Radu Vancu, Andrei Peniuc, Dan Sociu, Adrian Urmanov, Răzvan Ţupa, Claudiu Komartin, Elena Vlădăreanu, Dan Coman, Miruna Vlada, V. Leac, Svetlana Cârstean, T.S. Khasis,Gabi Eftimie, Marius Conkan, Andrei Gamarţ, Michel Martin, Aida Hancer, and Anonymous.
See also:
http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/138545784_Rutherford_poet_goes_back_to_her_Romanian_roots_with_anthology.html
http://pcccwriting.blogspot.com/2013/02/national-translation-month-vanishing.html
http://www.smith.edu/metamorphoses/links/Lucia.pdf
“The Vanishing Point contains mainly poetry published after the revolution in 1989 and recognizes the richness of contemporary Romanian poetry in its diversity and complexity. It includes gifted poets such as Cristian Popescu, Adina Dabija, Ruxandra Novac, George Vasilievici, and many others. The translation team is impressive. Adam J. Sorkin has delighted American readers with a lifetime of translations that have received well-deserved recognitions and awards. Claudia Serea boasts, in addition to a rich experience with translation, several books of poetry in English and a wide experience as a superb poet in her own right. In fact, most of the translations in the volume are done through a complex process of collaboration, which reaffirms the dialogic structure of the book and the thorough research and labor behind it. Many other sophisticated translators contributed to the success of the book, such as Ioana Ieronim, Oana Sânziana Marian, Bogdan Ştefănescu, and Livia Vianu, to mention only a few of them.” Lucia Cherciu
and then of course we have the blurbs: