The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
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
Ana Blandiana
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. Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea have translated all her poetry into English. Their first translation to appear from Bloodaxe was of My Native Land A4 (2010) in 2014. This was followed by The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses in 2017, combining her two previous collections, and a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Further compilations are forthcoming: Five Books in 2021 followed by The Shadow of Words. 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. She received the Griffin Trust’s Lifetime Recognition Award at the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist readings in 2018.
Read more from Ana Blandiana
Five Books Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Native Land A4: Patria Mia A4 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses
Related ebooks
Oranges and Snow: Selected Poems of Milan Djordjević Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWomen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDream in a Suitcase: The Story of an Immigrant Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Beautiful Young Wife Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5At the End of Sleep Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Aurora Leigh Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOn the Docks in Brăila Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Barrelling Forward: Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOverland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Contours of the City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNikolai Gogol: The Complete Works Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Akeing Heart: Letters Between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYanko the Musician and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Chestnut Horses Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Career Goes Bung Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hothouses: Poems, 1889 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The South Country Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Minus Love Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Current Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLove in the Afternoon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out: Selected Poems by Ana Enriqueta Terán Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kew Gardens Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One Lark, One Horse: Poems Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe True Book of Animal Homes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Going Home Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters to a Young Poet (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (ReadOn Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses
0 ratings0 reviews