Avondale PhD student’s new anthology receives celebrity-like acclaim
The launch of an anthology of modern Romanian poetry has solidified the status of an Avondale PhD student in the country’s canon of literature.
The publication of Daniel Ionita’s Testament: Anthology of Modern Romanian Verse 2nd Edition has reached “near-celebrity coverage in Romania as a highly significant event and literary work,” says translating assistant and brother-in-law Associate Professor Daniel Reynaud, an academic at the college of higher education.
Interviews on state-owned television broadcaster TVR, positive reviews by literary critics and recitations by Romanian actors and folk musicians have supported the launch.
Ionita’s first publication Testament, an anthology of translated Romanian poetry featuring English translations of 55 poets and 80 poems, proved popular in Romania. The country’s foremost contemporary literary critic and historian Alex Stefanescu, writing about the anthology on the Literary Confluence website, describes Ionita as being “adept in selecting his poems, which are attractive from the first reading. He has developed an aesthetical consciousness [in translating] and is perhaps one of the last romantics among anthology writers.”
Ionita’s second publication Hanging Between the Stars is a compilation of his own poems written in English and in Romanian and self-translated into both languages. Testament: Anthology of Modern Romanian Verse 2nd Edition is a revision and expansion—93 poets and 125 poems—of the first publication.
Stefanescu also writes about the appeal of the second edition of Testament in “convincing an English language reader, who has perhaps never heard about Romania, to pick up and read Romanian literature.” Another Romanian literary critic, Florin Ionescu, describes the second edition as “a cultural product with deep temporal scale—an entire literary history with globalisation integrated.” It is, he adds, a “true poetic panorama of diversity that defines Romanian literature.”
And what of the author himself? Ionita says translating poetry is a “long, narrow and dangerous path between two languages.” He associates the adventure of translation with “passion, courage and insanity.”
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