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The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country’s strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.

This new translation combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania’s integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana’s poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014).

After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one’s time and insists that it is ‘not a series of events, but a sequence of visions’.

Blandiana’s poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.

'Blandiana is a pure lyricist, focused entirely on the event of how imagination finds words and rhythms that make certain mental experiences memorable. Her poems characteristically achieve strange precisions by having pervasive metaphors unfold her sense of "sacred void" as negative plenitude.' – Charles Altieri, UC at Berkeley

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The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country’s strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.

This new translation combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania’s integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana’s poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014).

After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one’s time and insists that it is ‘not a series of events, but a sequence of visions’.

Blandiana’s poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.

'Blandiana is a pure lyricist, focused entirely on the event of how imagination finds words and rhythms that make certain mental experiences memorable. Her poems characteristically achieve strange precisions by having pervasive metaphors unfold her sense of "sacred void" as negative plenitude.' – Charles Altieri, UC at Berkeley

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The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses

The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses

The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses
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The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses

The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses

Overview

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country’s strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.

This new translation combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania’s integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana’s poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014).

After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one’s time and insists that it is ‘not a series of events, but a sequence of visions’.

Blandiana’s poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.

'Blandiana is a pure lyricist, focused entirely on the event of how imagination finds words and rhythms that make certain mental experiences memorable. Her poems characteristically achieve strange precisions by having pervasive metaphors unfold her sense of "sacred void" as negative plenitude.' – Charles Altieri, UC at Berkeley

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781780373850
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication date: 11/23/2017
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 133
File size: 662 KB

About the Author

Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 in Timişoara, Romania. She is an almost legendary figure who holds a position in Romanian culture comparable to that of Anna Akhmatova and Vaclav Havel in Russian and Czech literature. She has published 14 books of poetry, two of short stories, nine books of essays and one novel. Her work has been translated into 24 languages published in 58 books of poetry and prose to date. In Britain a number of her earlier poems were published in The Hour of Sand: Selected Poems 1969-1989 (Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), with a later selection in versions by Seamus Heaney in John Fairleigh’s contemporary Romanian anthology When the Tunnels Meet (Bloodaxe Books, 1996). She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change. She also re-founded and became President of the Romanian PEN Club, and in 1993, under the aegis of the European Community, she created the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. In recognition of her contribution to European culture and her valiant fight for human rights, Blandiana was awarded the highest distinction of the French Republic, the Légion d’Honneur (2009). She has won numerous international literary awards. Her latest book My Native Land A4 was published in Romania in 2010, and was first published in English by Bloodaxe Books in 2014 (translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea), followed by The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses in 2017, a volume also translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea combining her two previous collections. Ana Blandiana was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Prize for 2016 by the city of Gdansk for My Native Land A4, published in Polish in 2016, the award shared with her Polish translator Joanna Kornaś-Warwas.


Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer in American literature at the University of Valencia. His main field of interest encompasses Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their influences on subsequent artistic and intellectual manifestations of the 20th and 21st centuries. His critical works include Thinking for a Change: Gravity’s Rainbow and Symptoms of the Paradigm Shift in Occidental Culture (1994) and We stand before the secret of the world: Traces along the Pathway of American Transcendentalism (2003). He has edited and co-translated into Spanish a number of critical editions of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson (Spanish and Catalan), Henry Adams and Sarah Orne Jewett. He is co-editor, with Viorica Patea, of Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi, 2007) and is, with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, co-editor of The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt, 2011). With Miguel Teruel, he has published a translation of Richard Berengarten’s Black Light into Spanish (Luz Negra, JPM Ediciones, 2012); and with Viorica Patea, translations into English of Ana Blandiana's My Native Land A4 (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). He is currently coordinating a series of critical studies and Spanish translations of Emily Dickinson’s fascicles.


Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca, where she teaches American and English literature. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca 1989), a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (Cátedra: 2005). She has edited various collections of essays, such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2001) and, together with Paul Scott Derrick, Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi 2007). Her most recent publication is a collection of essays, Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Rodopi 2012), which received the Javier Coy Research Award for the best edited book (2013) from the Spanish Association of American Studies. Her research interests include comparative studies in witness literature of East European countries. In collaboration with Fernando Sánchez Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish the annotated edition of El diario de la felicidad by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las Cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Periférica 2008, 2011). She is also co-translator, with Paul Scott Derrick, of Ana Blandiana's My Native Land A4 (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses (Bloodaxe Books, 2017).

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Changing Voice for Changing Times 9

The Sun Of Hereafter (2000)

North 23

Ocean 24

Landscape 25

Self-Sufficiency 26

Ships 27

Clock 28

To and Fro 29

Plea 30

I Glide, I Glide 31

Starting Again 32

Fulfilment 33

Happy You 34

Clinging to the Branches 35

Apollo 36

Two Crosses 37

The Whole 38

Pietà 39

Just Visiting 40

The Wound at the End of the World 41

Alabaster Circle 42

If We Were Going to Die 43

Ship of Poets 44

Cemetery 45

The End of the World 46

Let Me 47

No 48

Ballad 49

Not One Letter 50

Nothing Happens by Chance 51

Beneath the Clods of Snow 52

A Saint 53

The Knell of Fruit 54

There Is No Answer 55

Definition 56

The Middle of the Way 57

Confusion 58

Poem 59

Instalments 60

Hourglass 61

Lament 62

Buzesti Square 63

The Old and the Young 64

EBB of The Senses (2004)

Mixture 67

Illusion 68

Old Angels 69

What I Don't Understand 70

To Be a Rock in the Sea 71

Op. Cit. 72

A Young Horse 73

Thistles and Gods 74

Selection 75

Ash 76

Curriculum Vitae 77

The Line 78

A Cathedral of Wool 79

This Mirror 80

And Yet 81

Indian Ink 82

Reserve 83

Eyelids of Water 84

A Game of Wills 85

Laurel Leaves 86

Ocean 87

In the Absence of Sounds 88

Lascivious Landscape 89

The Painted Wardrobe 90

More and More Alone 91

Motion 92

Castle in the Water 93

Song 94

A Few Points 95

Mire 96

Seed 97

The Programme 98

Beach 99

Transparence 100

Unaware 101

A Wild Beast 102

Swamps 103

Goodbye 104

Asleep 105

Prayer 106

The Calendar 107

The Despot 108

Sieges 109

The Same 110

Light and Words 111

Sister 112

Newspaper 113

Dependent 114

That Day 115

To Get Out 116

Consequences 117

Hölderlin 118

Meanings 119

Within a Pod 120

Our Century 121

Degraded Sonnet 122

Transvestite 123

God of Pastors 124

The Question 125

Quadrant 126

It's Nighttime 127

On a Cathedral Façade 128

Mandala 129

In Memoriam 130

This Poem 131

The Translators 133

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