Five Books: Change Your Work and Your World from the Inside Out

Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism. Over the years, her poetry became symbolic of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian governments. This new translation combines five of her collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry. The poems of Predator Star (1985) and The Architecture of Waves (1990) chronicle a convulsed history and pose the question of how to resist the terror of history. Clock without Hours (2014) marks a return to rhyme, as Blandiana attempts a courageous renovation of traditional verse forms. Her fiercely militant voice - that helped inaugurate the postmodern idiom in Romanian poetry in 1984 - has modulated over time into a new tone of forgiveness and renunciation, expressed in meditations on the fragility and vulnerability of being.

She has also written two collections of love poems which rank among the most beautiful in contemporary Romanian poetry - October, November, December (1972) and Variations on a Given Theme (2018) - the second of these composed after the death of her husband, Romulus Rusan, in 2016. A prolific and expansive poet, Ana Blandiana constantly re-invents herself. Her work ultimately reflects on universal issues, on human existence itself in our 21st-century consumer society.

'... 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 suprising 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

Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 in Timişoara, Romania. She is an almost legendary figure who holds a position in Romanian culture comparable to that of Anna Akhmatova and Vaclav Havel in Russian and Czech literature. She has published 14 books of poetry, two of short stories, nine books of essays and one novel. Her work has been translated into 24 languages published in 58 books of poetry and prose to date.

In Britain a number of her earlier poems were published in The Hour of Sand: Selected Poems 1969-1989 (Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), with a later selection in versions by Seamus Heaney in John Fairleigh’s contemporary Romanian anthology When the Tunnels Meet (Bloodaxe Books, 1996). She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change. She also re-founded and became President of the Romanian PEN Club, and in 1993, under the aegis of the European Community, she created the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. In recognition of her contribution to European culture and her valiant fight for human rights, Blandiana was awarded the highest distinction of the French Republic, the Légion d’Honneur (2009). She has won numerous international literary awards.

Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea have translated all her poetry into English. Their first translation to appear from Bloodaxe was of My Native Land A4 (2010) in 2014. This was followed by The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses in 2017, combining her two previous collections, and a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Five Books, combining five collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry, was published in 2021. This will be followed by a further compilation, The Shadow of Words. Ana Blandiana was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Prize for 2016 by the city of Gdansk for My Native Land A4, published in Polish in 2016, the award shared with her Polish translator Joanna Kornaś-Warwas. She received the Griffin Trust’s Lifetime Recognition Award at the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist readings in 2018.