THE TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The complexity of the translation act has often been talked about. Making
a text cross over the confines of a language and culture within the
borderlines of another language and culture is a deed of pride as the
translator re-creates the original text and a deed of humility and obedience
because translation is always a Luciferic fall. It is a subordinate(d)
text that has to admit the limits imposed upon itself by the original.
Translation is joy and pain.
Rodica Marian’s poetry is the work of an intellectual influenced by
her culture, by her knowledge as a linguist, semiotician, specialist in poetics.
Rodica Marian’s poetical exercise obviously belongs to a creator
aware of the linguistic mechanisms contributing to the creation of the
poetic. The unwareness of her talent goes hand in hand with the scholar’s
consciousness that she can no longer look at the world, at the artistic
act innocently. Rodica Marian’s poetry is laden with cultural allusions.
The well driven religious trend conceals profound experiences, regrets,
difficult questions about the individual’s destiny. Rodica Marian is a poetess
who has committed the sin of knowledge and she cannot return
to the pure, naive experience of living without cultural references. Numerous
voyages have offered her the occasion to re-read the world using
an intertextual key. Rodica Marian writes about and among her inner
and outer travels with the joy that only an authentic scholar carrying the
burden of her readings everywhere can have.
The selection of the poems from this volume points to the taste and
preferences of the translator who was happy to give Rodica Marian a
voice in the language of William Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath. The bitter
joys of this effort, which can always be improved, were special.
MIHAELA MUDURE
Manolis Aligizakis 