Balkan Library

"Mirrored Corridors", Ana Blandiana

© Anna Blandiana, 1990
Translator: Rumiana Stancheva
First edition, 2005. Rumanian. 312 pages. Price 2,5 euro

The selection for the Bulgarian edition of poetry and essays by Anna Blandiana, called “Mirrored Corridors” has been done on this famous Romanian writer’s lifetime work. Anna Blandiana (1942-) is considered to be the emblematic name of contemporary Romanian literature. Having begun her writing as a poet in communist Romania, she begins to address the uneasy truths, even though most often in an Aesopic language. Criticism for the desperate society is also suggested through glorification of youth’s freedom, and moral self-exigency, and the call to take action, and the love touch, and the humble search of a way out through uniting oneself with nature, the theme of decay, and the building of stone-wall of solidarity of the suffering. After the changes of 1989, she continues to stand up to her name of a poet of a calling to unite aesthetic beauty and civil obligation.
In all genres, her style is characterized by self-reflectivity, specific imagery, centered around the artist – a miraculous source of messages, connecting the ontological and transcendental with the responsiveness of an intellectual with the current enemy.
Translated into many languages, Anna Blandiana is a winner of the Herder Prize in 1982, as well as many other Romanian and world prizes for her works.