Acerca de Ana Blandiana: Poet, essayist, and prose writer, Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 inTimişoara, the city where the 1989 revolt began. She is one of the most significant contemporary Romanian writers, and one of the country’s best-known poets in Europeand beyond. She has authored 46 books, and her works have been translated into 23 languages. The poems translated here all come from her first three poetry collections, Persoana întâia plural [First Person Plural] (1965), Călcâiul vulnerabil [Achilles’ Heel] (1966) and A treia taină [Third Sacrament] (1969), which received the Herder Prize. Her poems were banned in the 1980s by the Ceausescu regime, but they continued to circulate by word of mouth or in clandestine handwritten copies, samizdat. An opponent of the communist regime, after 1989 Blandiana assumed an important role in Romanian public life as president of the “Civic Alliance” and founder of the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Sighet Resistance”. Framing metaphysical thought in a personal and intimate tone, Blandiana’s poems are profound meditations on human fate, otherness/alterity, artistic creation, moral responsibility and love as an absolute inspiration. She has also published literary essays and articles of political analysis and has given lectures and participated in conferences and symposia in a large number of European countries.

Acerca de Paul Scott Derrick: Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. His main field of interest is Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in the art and thought 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 Romanticism (2003). He has co-edited several critical studies, including: Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, with Viorica Patea (2007); and with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt Publishing, forthcoming). As a translator, he has published bilingual English-Spanish editions of various works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson and most recently, has co-authored with Juan López Gavilán a critical Spanish edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs [La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos] (2008). He has also published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luís Borges, Luís Cernuda and Pablo Neruda, and together with Miguel Teruel, a small selection of Richard Berengarten’s poems in Spanish, Las manos y la luz [Hands and Light] (2008).

Acerca de Viorica Patea: Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Her main fields of interest are American Romanticism, Modernism, twentieth-century American poetry, utopian literature, and the short story.  She has published books and articles on American poetry and fiction.  She is the author of various studies on Emily Dickinson, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); and a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad: El Prefacio de 1855 de Hojas de hierba (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999). She wrote a book and edited the bi-lingual edition on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (La tierra baldía: Ediciones 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 a most recent volume Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first-Century Perspective (Rodopi in press). Together with Paul Derrick, she has coedited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Together with Prof. Dr. Fernando Sánchez Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish Jurnalul fericirii by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Cáceres: Periférica, 2008, 2011). At present she is working on a Spanish and English edition of of Ana Blandiana’s collected poems.

About Ana Blandiana: Poet, essayist, and prose writer, Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 inTimişoara, the city where the 1989 revolt began. She is one of the most significant contemporary Romanian writers, and one of the country’s best-known poets in Europeand beyond. She has authored 46 books, and her works have been translated into 23 languages. The poems translated here all come from her first three poetry collections, Persoana întâia plural [First Person Plural] (1965), Călcâiul vulnerabil [Achilles’ Heel] (1966) and A treia taină [Third Sacrament] (1969), which received the Herder Prize. Her poems were banned in the 1980s by the Ceausescu regime, but they continued to circulate by word of mouth or in clandestine handwritten copies, samizdat. An opponent of the communist regime, after 1989 Blandiana assumed an important role in Romanian public life as president of the “Civic Alliance” and founder of the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Sighet Resistance”. Framing metaphysical thought in a personal and intimate tone, Blandiana’s poems are profound meditations on human fate, otherness/alterity, artistic creation, moral responsibility and love as an absolute inspiration. She has also published literary essays and articles of political analysis and has given lectures and participated in conferences and symposia in a large number of European countries.

About Paul Scott Derrick: Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. His main field of interest is Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in the art and thought 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 Romanticism (2003). He has co-edited several critical studies, including: Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, with Viorica Patea (2007); and with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt Publishing, forthcoming). As a translator, he has published bilingual English-Spanish editions of various works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson and most recently, has co-authored with Juan López Gavilán a critical Spanish edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs [La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos] (2008). He has also published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luís Borges, Luís Cernuda and Pablo Neruda, and together with Miguel Teruel, a small selection of Richard Berengarten’s poems in Spanish, Las manos y la luz [Hands and Light] (2008).

About Viorica Patea: Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Her main fields of interest are American Romanticism, Modernism, twentieth-century American poetry, utopian literature, and the short story.  She has published books and articles on American poetry and fiction.  She is the author of various studies on Emily Dickinson, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); and a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad: El Prefacio de 1855 de Hojas de hierba (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999). She wrote a book and edited the bi-lingual edition on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (La tierra baldía: Ediciones 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 a most recent volume Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first-Century Perspective (Rodopi in press). Together with Paul Derrick, she has coedited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Together with Prof. Dr. Fernando Sánchez Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish Jurnalul fericirii by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Cáceres: Periférica, 2008, 2011). At present she is working on a Spanish and English edition of of Ana Blandiana’s collected poems.

Harvest

The sky begins at the tip of the wheat,

As though each stem was crowned

With a brimful goblet of burning blue.

And the wind, as it pushes their foreheads,

Stirs the wine of the sky.

The sky begins at the tip of the wheat,

And when, beneath the scythe,

The stems bend over and softly fall,

It will be as though they bowed with reverence

To pour out their goblets of sky on the earth.

Recolta

Cerul începe din creştetul spicelor,

De parcă fiecare din ele-ar purta

Pe cap un vas mare umplut cu cer fierbinte,

Vinul cerului l-ar clătina

Cerul începe din creştetul spicelor,

Si atunci când sub secerătoare

Spicele se vor frânge cu duioşie, câzând,

Va părea doar că se-apleacă să pună

Vasul cu cer pe pământ.

Acerca de Ana Blandiana: Poet, essayist, and prose writer, Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 inTimişoara, the city where the 1989 revolt began. She is one of the most significant contemporary Romanian writers, and one of the country’s best-known poets in Europeand beyond. She has authored 46 books, and her works have been translated into 23 languages. The poems translated here all come from her first three poetry collections, Persoana întâia plural [First Person Plural] (1965), Călcâiul vulnerabil [Achilles’ Heel] (1966) and A treia taină [Third Sacrament] (1969), which received the Herder Prize. Her poems were banned in the 1980s by the Ceausescu regime, but they continued to circulate by word of mouth or in clandestine handwritten copies, samizdat. An opponent of the communist regime, after 1989 Blandiana assumed an important role in Romanian public life as president of the “Civic Alliance” and founder of the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Sighet Resistance”. Framing metaphysical thought in a personal and intimate tone, Blandiana’s poems are profound meditations on human fate, otherness/alterity, artistic creation, moral responsibility and love as an absolute inspiration. She has also published literary essays and articles of political analysis and has given lectures and participated in conferences and symposia in a large number of European countries.

Acerca de Paul Scott Derrick: Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. His main field of interest is Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in the art and thought 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 Romanticism (2003). He has co-edited several critical studies, including: Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, with Viorica Patea (2007); and with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt Publishing, forthcoming). As a translator, he has published bilingual English-Spanish editions of various works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson and most recently, has co-authored with Juan López Gavilán a critical Spanish edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs [La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos] (2008). He has also published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luís Borges, Luís Cernuda and Pablo Neruda, and together with Miguel Teruel, a small selection of Richard Berengarten’s poems in Spanish, Las manos y la luz [Hands and Light] (2008).

Acerca de Viorica Patea: Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Her main fields of interest are American Romanticism, Modernism, twentieth-century American poetry, utopian literature, and the short story.  She has published books and articles on American poetry and fiction.  She is the author of various studies on Emily Dickinson, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); and a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad: El Prefacio de 1855 de Hojas de hierba (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999). She wrote a book and edited the bi-lingual edition on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (La tierra baldía: Ediciones 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 a most recent volume Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first-Century Perspective (Rodopi in press). Together with Paul Derrick, she has coedited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Together with Prof. Dr. Fernando Sánchez Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish Jurnalul fericirii by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Cáceres: Periférica, 2008, 2011). At present she is working on a Spanish and English edition of of Ana Blandiana’s collected poems.

Harvest

The sky begins at the tip of the wheat,

As though each stem was crowned

With a brimful goblet of burning blue.

And the wind, as it pushes their foreheads,

Stirs the wine of the sky.

The sky begins at the tip of the wheat,

And when, beneath the scythe,

The stems bend over and softly fall,

It will be as though they bowed with reverence

To pour out their goblets of sky on the earth.

Recolta

Cerul începe din creştetul spicelor,

De parcă fiecare din ele-ar purta

Pe cap un vas mare umplut cu cer fierbinte,

Vinul cerului l-ar clătina

Cerul începe din creştetul spicelor,

Si atunci când sub secerătoare

Spicele se vor frânge cu duioşie, câzând,

Va părea doar că se-apleacă să pună

Vasul cu cer pe pământ.

About Ana Blandiana: Poet, essayist, and prose writer, Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 inTimişoara, the city where the 1989 revolt began. She is one of the most significant contemporary Romanian writers, and one of the country’s best-known poets in Europeand beyond. She has authored 46 books, and her works have been translated into 23 languages. The poems translated here all come from her first three poetry collections, Persoana întâia plural [First Person Plural] (1965), Călcâiul vulnerabil [Achilles’ Heel] (1966) and A treia taină [Third Sacrament] (1969), which received the Herder Prize. Her poems were banned in the 1980s by the Ceausescu regime, but they continued to circulate by word of mouth or in clandestine handwritten copies, samizdat. An opponent of the communist regime, after 1989 Blandiana assumed an important role in Romanian public life as president of the “Civic Alliance” and founder of the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Sighet Resistance”. Framing metaphysical thought in a personal and intimate tone, Blandiana’s poems are profound meditations on human fate, otherness/alterity, artistic creation, moral responsibility and love as an absolute inspiration. She has also published literary essays and articles of political analysis and has given lectures and participated in conferences and symposia in a large number of European countries.

About Paul Scott Derrick: Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. His main field of interest is Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in the art and thought 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 Romanticism (2003). He has co-edited several critical studies, including: Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, with Viorica Patea (2007); and with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt Publishing, forthcoming). As a translator, he has published bilingual English-Spanish editions of various works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson and most recently, has co-authored with Juan López Gavilán a critical Spanish edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs [La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos] (2008). He has also published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luís Borges, Luís Cernuda and Pablo Neruda, and together with Miguel Teruel, a small selection of Richard Berengarten’s poems in Spanish, Las manos y la luz [Hands and Light] (2008).

About Viorica Patea: Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Her main fields of interest are American Romanticism, Modernism, twentieth-century American poetry, utopian literature, and the short story.  She has published books and articles on American poetry and fiction.  She is the author of various studies on Emily Dickinson, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); and a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad: El Prefacio de 1855 de Hojas de hierba (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999). She wrote a book and edited the bi-lingual edition on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (La tierra baldía: Ediciones 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 a most recent volume Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first-Century Perspective (Rodopi in press). Together with Paul Derrick, she has coedited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Together with Prof. Dr. Fernando Sánchez Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish Jurnalul fericirii by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Cáceres: Periférica, 2008, 2011). At present she is working on a Spanish and English edition of of Ana Blandiana’s collected poems.

In the course of a march organized by the members of Morena (“Simpatizantes de AMLO piden vigilar casillas en comicios”, El Financiero, 20.05.12), Elena Poniatowska, the author and journalist who is a Vice-President of Interlitq, expressed her view that the left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador will win Mexico’s forthcoming presidential election, and that he will prove to be a salutary influence on Mexican society (“le va a ir muy bien a México con él”).

En la marcha organizada por los integrantes del Morena (“Simpatizantes de AMLO piden vigilar casillas en comicios”, El Financiero, 20.05.12) la escritora Elena Poniatowska, la escritora y periodista que es la Vice-Presidenta de Interlitq, aseguró que Andrés Manuel López Obrador iba a ganar los comicios “y le va a ir muy bien a México con él”.

In the article ”Twenty-five years on, academic minds are still closed” (The Australian, 30.05.12), Melbourne-based author Jennifer Oriel, writing on the 25th anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, states that, vis a vis Bloom, Martha Nussbaum, a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, “questioned his philosophic capability in The New York Review of Books.”

In “Assange battle not over, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson says” (Herald Sun, 30.05.12), Geoffrey Robertson QC, a leading human rights lawyer and a Consulting Editor for Interlitq, is cited as stating to the ABC, with regard to the recent decision to extradite Julian Assange to Sweden, that “there are technical possibilities and of course the main issue is the European Court of Human Rights because that is the final court in Europe, and certainly he has a reasonable prospect there, but it is unlikely that they would halt the extradition.”

El libro “La vida en México (1910-2010)”, presentado el 27.05.12 en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, la Ciudad de México (Milenio, 29.05.12) editado por el historiador y periodista Agustín Sánchez González, y recopilando los testimonios de más de 50 autores, incluye una crónica de Elena Poniatowska, la escritora y periodista que es la Vice-Presidenta de Interlitq, sobre el seismo de 1985.

Acerca de Ana Blandiana: Poet, essayist, and prose writer, Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 inTimişoara, the city where the 1989 revolt began. She is one of the most significant contemporary Romanian writers, and one of the country’s best-known poets in Europeand beyond. She has authored 46 books, and her works have been translated into 23 languages. The poems translated here all come from her first three poetry collections, Persoana întâia plural [First Person Plural] (1965), Călcâiul vulnerabil [Achilles’ Heel] (1966) and A treia taină [Third Sacrament] (1969), which received the Herder Prize. Her poems were banned in the 1980s by the Ceausescu regime, but they continued to circulate by word of mouth or in clandestine handwritten copies, samizdat. An opponent of the communist regime, after 1989 Blandiana assumed an important role in Romanian public life as president of the “Civic Alliance” and founder of the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Sighet Resistance”. Framing metaphysical thought in a personal and intimate tone, Blandiana’s poems are profound meditations on human fate, otherness/alterity, artistic creation, moral responsibility and love as an absolute inspiration. She has also published literary essays and articles of political analysis and has given lectures and participated in conferences and symposia in a large number of European countries.

Acerca de Paul Scott Derrick: Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. His main field of interest is Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in the art and thought 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 Romanticism (2003). He has co-edited several critical studies, including: Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, with Viorica Patea (2007); and with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt Publishing, forthcoming). As a translator, he has published bilingual English-Spanish editions of various works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson and most recently, has co-authored with Juan López Gavilán a critical Spanish edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs [La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos] (2008). He has also published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luís Borges, Luís Cernuda and Pablo Neruda, and together with Miguel Teruel, a small selection of Richard Berengarten’s poems in Spanish, Las manos y la luz [Hands and Light] (2008).

Acerca de Viorica Patea: Viorica Patea is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she teaches twentieth-century American poetry and nineteenth-century American literature. Her main fields of interest are American Romanticism, Modernism, twentieth-century American poetry, utopian literature, and the short story.  She has published books and articles on American poetry and fiction.  She is the author of various studies on Emily Dickinson, R. W. Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and George Orwell. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1989); and a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad: El Prefacio de 1855 de Hojas de hierba (Ediciones Universidad de León, 1999). She wrote a book and edited the bi-lingual edition on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (La tierra baldía: Ediciones 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 a most recent volume Short Story Theories: A Twenty-first-Century Perspective (Rodopi in press). Together with Paul Derrick, she has coedited Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Together with Prof. Dr. Fernando Sánchez Miret, she has translated from Romanian into Spanish Jurnalul fericirii by Nicolae Steinhardt (Sígueme 2007) and Proyectos de Pasado and Las cuatro estaciones by Ana Blandiana (Cáceres: Periférica, 2008, 2011). At present she is working on a Spanish and English edition of of Ana Blandiana’s collected poems.