Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania [Paperback]

Radu Andriescu (Author), Iustin Panta (Author), Cristian Popescu (Author), Adam J. Sorkin (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2009

Some of the most groundbreaking works of European literature, such as Rimbaud's Illuminations and Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, have been prose poetry. The present volume -- a substantial selection from three contemporary Romanian prose poets -- draws on this tradition.

Cristian Popescu experimented with personal myth by parodying his family and himself. The Bucharest found here is often sinister, cold, and dark. Displaying a mordant sensibility that could be called "urban pastoral" rather than political, he conducts his convivial disputations with God in the vernacular of the street.

Iustin Panta, from Sibiu in Transylvania, is more lyrical and intimate in exploring his personal autobiography. An amalgam of form, his prose poem takes on an aura of suspended meaning, a constellation of objects, gestures, conversations, and private associations that eschews the grotesquerie and solecism found in Popescu's work.

Radu Andriescu is from the artistic hotbed of Iasi, straddling the Moldavian border. His work is exuberant, direct, often manic, and he is completely comfortable appropriating the forms of today's digital and media culture. A complex topography of language, his work ranges from the quotidian to inner meditations to fantasy, creating a texture that is thick with images and phrases often bordering on the absurd.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Memory Glyphs makes a strong case for Romania's contribution to the evolution of the prose poem in the last few decades. ... In its diffuse nature, the prose poem demands both a poem and a theory of poetry. The three poets in Memory Glyphs may have little in common besides their Romanian heritage and the fact that they have individually mastered a form that few others have been brave enough to take on. For this reason, Memory Glyphs serves as an important addition to international poetics. --3:AM Magazine

A wildly roving narrative sensibility and the ability to render surreal images with poignancy and humor is a shared distinction in the work of these three poets, whose singular achievements and stylistic idiosyncrasies make Memory Glyphs a strange compound of elements, at once playful, confounding, inspiring and ultimately serious. ... Each poet ... takes his own path though darkness, humor, love, and mystery, and none is ashamed of groping aimlessly forward. The result is an unsettling pleasure, a collection of poems that grapple with our deepest questions, if only by representing the whims and cluttered wills of their authors. --Rain Taxi

If you thought that Romanian only comes into the spotlight when they usher forth their teenage uber-gymnasts during every summer Olympics, well, you're missing some seriously innovative literature. --Salonica

In his brief but illuminating translator's preface to the work of three Romanian poets born in the 1960s, Adam J. Sorkin describes prose poems as "a formless form, oxymoronic, with both lightness and heft, a chiseled, lapidary, elliptical poetry" that, according to Radu Andriescu, is "an abnormal mode of writing, marginal, irrelevant, and bookish." But anyone interested in the form or simply in challenging and sometimes brilliant writing will see through this false modesty. --World Literature Today

Paradoxically, although Romania is a very Francophile culture, and Romanian is the only Romance language in that part of the world, what we could call the "Romanian prose poem" is less influenced by the French tradition of the prose poem, its beginnings being closer to various forms of journalism (lyrical or satirical)--still practiced in Romania, where the most common profession among writers is that of journalist. --Three Percent

Product Details

• Paperback: 159 pages
• Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press (July 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8086264327
• ISBN-13: 978-8086264325
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,788,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)