The Bridge
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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 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.
Lidia Vianu
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Lidia Vianu, a poet, novelist, critic, and translator, is Professor of Modernist and Contemporary British Literature at the University of Bucharest, where she is also Director of the publishing house Contemporary Literature Press (http://mttlc.ro) and of the eZine Translation Café. She has been Fulbright professor at the University of California Berkeley and SUNY Binghamton. Vianu has published over 20 books of literary criticism, including The AfterMode and T.S. Eliot: An Author for All Seasons. She has also published several English learning manuals, and has translated over 70 books into English and Romanian, including two translated with Adam J. Sorkin and published by Bloodaxe, Marin Sorescu’s The Bridge (2004), winner of the 2005 Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation, and Mircea Dinescu's The Barbarians' Return (2018). She has published both in Romania and abroad: see Censorship in Romania (Central European University Press, 1997).
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