The Shadow of Words

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now one of her country’s strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceaușescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of a moral consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.

The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana’s early collections published from 1964 to 1981, as well as including uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. It follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021) in completing Bloodaxe’s presentation of Blandiana’s collected poems to date in English translation. She published these poems during the brief period of political thaw of Romania’s communist regime, when aestheticism took on a more subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art.

The title of First Person Plural (1964) expresses the desire of the self to define its personality in relation to the world. Blandiana celebrates the cheerfulness of youth, the joy of nature and the discovery of sensuality and eros. Exalting the sense and the intimacy of matter in a sleepy universe, these lyrics lead on to ascetic pronouncements and the puritanical rigour of the ethics of Achilles’s Heel (1966). With The Third Sacrament (1969), Blandiana moves towards a new stage in which poetry approaches mysticism and takes a path that will lead it to the depths of being, on the border between dream and reality, life and death. She returns obsessively to the motif of sleep in Sleep within Sleep (1977), a true treatise on the multiple meanings of sleep. Blandiana's imaginary is pastoral and bucolic. The defining note of The Cricket’s Eye (1981) is the search for candour and communion with nature. These visionary and romantic poems attempt to decipher the impalpable essences of the universe.

In her early poems, Blandiana’s voice articulates a pure and vibrant spiritual language of unmistakable ethical clarity, calling for for moral regeneration in the face of indifference. Their ethical idealism and steadfastness override the many masks of degradation. These youthful books announce from the outset the sense of responsibility and faith in the survival of the collective soul that has always characterised Blandiana’s poetry.

***

‘Romanian author and political activist Blandiana enthrals in this anthology of her early work. Fidelity to truth, ethical inquiry, union with nature, and the ubiquity of the soul underscore narratives that resuscitate awe and riot against passivity […] With nonpareil enlightenment, valor, and spectral beauty, Blandiana’s visions make an indelible impression.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of The Shadow of Words

'The Romanian Ana Blandiana is one of Europe’s greatest living poets, and she’s well served by this substantial volume containing five previously untranslated collections. Ranging across her writing life, they create a layered portrait of a complex yet consistent poetic identity.' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian, on Five Books

'... one of Europe's most important living poets. Blandiana is not concerned with elegant artifice. Her poems are mostly short in line and in length. And the voice, one of the most remarkable features of her work, is simple, calm and intimate... Yet that voice is capable of surprising and resonant shifts of focus that at times produce brilliant perspectives on her political situation, on her efforts to understand what connections are possible to spiritual forces, and late in her career on the various ways love can pervade life.' - Charles Altieri, The London Magazine, on Five Books

'This is writing from the front line, visceral and powerful... while the poetry in the later books is more lyrical and reflective, celebrating ''freedom andsolidarity'. An invaluable resource for the library to supplement history and politics courses with poetry written in extremis.' - Frank Startup, The School Librarian, on Five Books