Translating a Moving Target: Poetry of a New Romania

Hosted by Center for International Relations and AGNI

Liliana Ursu, author of eight books of poetry in Romanian, and her translator, Sean Cotter, read and discuss Ursu’s poetry as part of a post-Communism literary movement in the country. Ursu says her childhood in the city of Sibiu, where she lived with her parents and then her grandparents when her family moved to Bucharest, gave her a sense of home and shelter that influences her work.

“It’s a town that gives you a feeling of protection — there were Germans, Hungarians, Jews; and we were all friends,” she says. “When we said ‘Sibiu,’ we knew it was our island. And I think we all have our islands. Artists, most of them live on islands. If you don’t have one, you build it: through poems, through paintings, or just by closing your eyes and saying, ‘This is my island, and I’m happy.’”

Ursu calls herself a latecomer within the postwar generation of writers, which Cotter says experienced a “remarkable flowering” at the end of the 1960s and 1970s. At the beginning of the Communist period, in the late 1940s, the presence of the Soviet Army dominated both life and literature, notes Cotter.

“You can see the actual control, just by looking at people,” Cotter says. “If you go and read the journals, you’ll see poems called things like ‘The Two Tractor Drivers.’”

Ursu, who read a selection of her poems in Romanian while Cotter read them in English, also responds to questions about how her work bridges both European and American cultures.

“It’s a question of adapting yourself, and I think I’m very adaptable,” she says. “I’m here, and I miss Romania. I’m in Romania, and I miss America. But, in order for poetry to work, you need nostalgia; and missing two countries makes you more nostalgic, and stronger as a poet.”

Askold Melnyczuk, a professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts–Boston and Bennington College, moderated the discussion.

March 26, 2009, 6:30 p.m.
Photonics Center

Video length is 01:47:53.

About the speakers:
Liliana Ursu, born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1949, has published eight books of poetry in Romanian. Her first book in English, The Sky Behind the Forest (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), became a British Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was shortlisted for Oxford’s Weidenfeld Prize. She has been a Fulbright Lecturer at Pennsylvania State University, a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville, and Poet-in-Residence at the Stadler Center for Poetry, Bucknell University. Her third book to appear in English, Lightwall, will be published by Boston’s Zephyr Press in 2009.

Sean Cotter is a professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas in Dallas, where he collaborates with the Center for Translation Studies. He worked in Romania from 1994 to 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer, and from 2001 to 2002 on a Fulbright-Hays research grant. Cotter has translated several books of Romanian poetry, including Second-Hand Souls: Selected Writings of Nichita Danilov and Goldsmith Market by Liliana Ursu.

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