The Bridge

Winner of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation.

The Bridge is Marin Sorescu's farewell to life: a book of wryly quizzical poems composed from his sickbed over five weeks as he waited for death to take him, his testament not just to human mortality and pain but to resistance and creative transformation. The Bridge is unlike any other poetry book: like a medieval dance of death but sombre in movement, a procession of breathlessly spoken, painfully comic poems.

Marin Sorescu (1936-96) was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most original voices in Romanian literature. His mischievous poetry and satirical plays earned him great popularity during the Communist era. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the régime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. But later like a hapless character from one of his absurdist dramas the peasant-born people's poet was made Minister of Culture, in Ion Iliescu's post-Ceauçescu government.

A prolific writer and a prominent dramatist, Sorescu published over 20 books of poetry in Romania, with several English translations of his poetry and plays appearing in Britain and America. Michael Hamburger's translation of his Selected Poems (1983), drawing on six collections published between 1965 and 1973, introduced him to English readers. The Biggest Egg in the World followed in 1987, a selection of mostly later work edited by Edna Longley with translators including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.

Virgil Nemoianu has described how Sorescu's black humour and keen feeling for the absurd enabled him to survive as a writer: 'His reactions to an increasingly absurd political régime were always cleverly balanced: he never engaged in the servile praise of leader and party usually required of Romanian poets, but nor did he venture into dissidence. He was content to let irony do its job... His texts are masterpieces of allusion and adroit manoeuvring... All this time, however, he was also writing the secret poems he dared not publish then because as Dan Zamfirescu commented the gesture would have been the equivalent of suicide.' Censored Poems (2001), translated by John Hartley Williams and Hilde Ottschofski, is a selection from two books published in Bucharest after 1989, including borderline poems censored by the authorities as well as the risker secret poems censored by the author.

The Bridge (2004), translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, published in Romania in 1997, was Sorescu s farewell to life, a book of painfully quizzical poems composed from his sickbed over five weeks as he waited for death to take him. He died from liver cancer on 8 December 1996, in the same year that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.