Links to and about Romanian Poetry of now and all times

An essay by Adam J Sorkin, one of the most important translators of Romanian Poetry in English, on Romanian Poetry in the second half of The XX-th Century:

“It strikes me that the concept of a fortunate fall is the best description of the major sustaining myth among Romanian poets during the communist period, especially during the quarter century before the December 22, 1989, overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu. His increasingly repressive regime had become, to use Norman Manea's description, "the most cruel and dark dictatorship" (Manea 4). Poets in Romania who wrote during these times of oppression frequently testified about the direct and indirect influences of censorship even at the very core of their work, more or less determining literary strategy and coloring purpose, content, and theme. Their belief in the ironic, covert benefit of censorship is not just desperate wishful thinking, making a virtue of what was black necessity. Rather, in the form of a belated declaration of a kind of hidden, inward independence, it is an interpretation of the secret to the high quality of Romanian poetry in its seemingly impossible response to the ideological constraints of the party-state. To many writers in the Socialist Republic, the fall into censorship occasioned a fruitful disobedience in which the poet, deprived by state policy of the paradise of free speech in the world about, believed he or she is compensated with (as Michael soon says to Adam before they wake Eve from her dreams) "a paradise within," to some poets perhaps "happier far" (XII. 587). (1)”. (from “The Literary Review” June 22, 2002)

Links for and about Romanian Poetry in English:

• a pretty comprehensive history of Romanian literature
  
• links to - Romanian poetry in English
  
• A web-page on Paul Celan in German and English
  
• A pretty concise companion to Romanian poetry in the last two centuries & the same here
  
• A list of different anthologies of Romanian Poetry in English

They call their hobby astropoetry. Poetry as a hobby for a Romanian group of friends