Silent Voices [antikvár]

Introduction Romanian poetry has a flavour of its own which can be experienced even in translation. It shares certain qualities (notably an inclination towards fable, allegory and extended metaphor) with the poetry of its East European neighbours, but it also has its own clear individuality. This has in part grown out of the language itself, a Romance language derived from Latin and kept alive, in spite of the powerful forces which threatened it, for two thousand years. The other Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish) had a relatively easy passage through the centuries, since their countries bordered upon each other and mutual understanding was not impossible, but the Romanian people were linguistically isolated and subject to constant pressures from outside. Although their language now contains Slavonic, Turkish and other elements which bear witness to its history, its basic fabric has not been eroded. The survival of the language confirms and symbolizes the survival of the nation itself, and the strong identity of the Romanian people has much to do with this continued refusal to surrender to any linguistic takeover. In the twentieth century Romanian literature has, of course, been influenced by the currents of international literary fashion, but this has been part of a process of give and take, with Romanian writers contributing their own particular ideas and enthusiasms to European culture. Tristan Tzara, the inventor of Dadaism, was Romanian, as were some of the early Surrealists and the playwright Eugene Ionescu, a pioneer of the Theatre of the Absurd'. These movements have had their day, but they have left traces on the work of succeeding writers; Romanian poetry is still given to fantasy, irony, and bursts of startling inventiveness. The poetry in this book is recent, and reflects the relaxation in Romanian cultural attitudes which occurred in the 1960s. It can never be entirely easy for poets to write in a society where