The year 2013 begins for Contemporary Literature Press with an Anthology of poems written by members of the Romanian PEN Club. The selection was made by a veteran of Romanian poetry, Constantin Abăluță. The illustrations belong to a young artist, Cristina Ioana Young. Both poems and illustrations convey the essence of Romanian lyricism during communism and after. It would be difficult to find a more contemporary book than It Might Take Me Years. These poems are the perfect X-ray of what poetry has been in Romania since the 1950's to this day: a web of confusion, creation and frustration.
The careful reader cannot fail to notice a drama of survival in this book: the survival of the intellectual in the dark Orwellian years, as well as his condition now, twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, if a "fall" it was. It might indeed take years to explain what censorship did — or does — to the poet's mind. One fact appears clearly in this book: in spite of harsh recent history, the Romanian poet has fought bravely for the "dialect of the tribe". Romanian intellectuals owe him their freedom of the mind, partly at least.
We are publishing here poems by 39 poets, all born between the years 1931 and 1967. The texts have been translated by 21 English poets, together with the graduate students of the MA Programme for the Translation of the Contemporary Literary Text, under Bucharest University. This is more than a book: it is a door open into the privacy of minds. The texts published here say just this: "I write, therefore I am." They may look like picturesque pastimes to the outsider, but they are in fact a Memento of the fight of the Romanian intellectual with the political circumstances of his century.
It Might Take Me Years edited by Lidia Vianu, is formally launched on Friday 11 January 2013. But it is available for consultation and downloading on receipt of this Press Release, at the following internet address:
http://editura.mttlc.ro/Vianu-Romanian-PEN-Club-Anthology.html
