'. . . they took out the mountain stone by stone,
And they looked again inside my freshly shorn head
As into a totally transparent egg
And there appeared even more hidden things.'
Ileana Malancioiu was born in 1940 in a village in Arges, about a hundred miles northwest of Bucharest. She has worked in journalism and films. In 2004 she received the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Opera Omnia (Complete Poems). She lives in Bucharest.
From her first collection (1967) onward, her poems draw on rural life and folklore, on religious and literary icons, but their true focus has been on the trauma of history . . . Ten more books of poems appeared in the 1970s and '80s, and in 1992 came the full text of Urcarea Muntelui (Climbing the Mountain, 1985) which had been heavily censored by the Ceausescu regime. Newer poems have been included in two recent enlarged collections spanning her whole career, on which this selection draws. Malancioiu's writing is valued in Romania as a moral force, and for the combination of formal language with frequently shocking imagery.
Eilen N Chuilleanin learned Romanian so that she could translate the poems of Ileana Malancioiu. The result is a book of uncommon empathy.
Publication Date: 5 October 2011
