Translated by: Enormi Stationis

Nora Iuga “The Circle’s Captivity”

The poems of Nora Iuga bear witness to the power of poetic imagination, one that responds to the experience of communist oppression while also exploring the most hidden recesses of the psyche, filled with the afterimages of dreams as well as with trauma and fascination. There is no doubt that this is private poetry: bodily, erotic, organic, rich in strikingly vivid imagery, mythical figures and creatures, filtered through the discoveries of the avant-garde and reflections of an existential kind. Individual poems come together to form a portrait of a woman – courageous, aware of the power of the word, searching, creative, and seeking independence in life within the space of literature, or rather within the space of writing understood as a process. She comments, directly or in a veiled manner, on realities in which the individual must struggle with misunderstanding, rejection and the lack of opportunities to fulfil personal plans and desires. She turns instead to the creation of alternative worlds which, rather than offering an illusion of safety, can prove more deceptive than the here and now. Enormi Stationis’s skilful translations demonstrate a keen sense of the subtle rhythm of the Romanian author’s poems, meandering between innovative metaphorical language, formally diverse passages filled with surprising, almost fairy-tale visions, and laconic restraint, structural condensation, at times punctuated with black humour, grotesque exaggeration or an expressive closing line. Iuga’s poetry resembles an alchemical laboratory of forms, a territory of free associations, subject both to the laws of synaesthesia and to narrative surprises. We travel through this richly coloured space with great reading pleasure, admiring the author’s courage and her uncompromising faith in the poetic word – honest towards humanity, the world and language itself.

Jakub Kornhauser

 

The book was co- financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage  within the framework of Culture Promotion Fund.

Nora Iuga

NORA IUGA (real name ELEONORA ALMOSNINO, b. 1931) is a Romanian writer, poet, and translator from German. Her poetry blends humour with subtlety, a permanent feature of her versatile body of work. Despite her enthusiastically acclaimed debut in 1968, her works were censored from 1971 to 1978, with her books removed from public Romanian libraries and bookstores. Nora Iuga has since received numerous literary awards and state honours. As a translator, she is also recognised for promoting German culture in Romania. She remains an active blogger and commentator of Romanian literary life. In 2023, a documentary was released about her life and work. To date, only one of her novels, The Sixty-Year-Old Woman and the Young Man, has been translated into Polish (by Kazimierz Jurczak).

Enormi Stationis

ENORMI STATIONIS (real name BARTOSZ RADOMSKI, b. 1983) is a classical philologist, poet, and translator. A graduate of Polish philology at the University of Warsaw, he is a member of the Polish Writers’ Association. He has received multiple translation scholarships from the Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest, the National Museum of Romanian Literature in Iași, and the Mihai Eminescu National Research Centre in Botoșani. During his doctoral studies, he was also a fellow of the Francophone University Agency (AUF) in Romania. Stationis debuted as a poet with the collection Centaurydy (2016) and has authored four poetry books to date. He also organises and participates in poetic manifestations. He lives and works in Warsaw.