As we were preparing for our Romanian reviews special this month, I had originally planned to review the forthcoming English translation of The Book of Perilous Dishes by Romania R
The town of the title of Mihail Sebastian’s 1935 novel is a vague, uncertain place. Referred to in the text only as ‘D…’, translator Gabi Reigh’s introduction (which is a
Ludovic Bruckstein was a Jewish-Romanian author and playwright who wrote in both Yiddish and Romanian. He grew up in northern Romania, in the village of Sighet, many of whose inhab
Neither one thing nor the other, yet Stelian Munteanu is known to all: the police force, the secret service, even the shady businessman whose daughter’s body is found on the seas
Imagine the moment when the Ceaușescu regime fell and suddenly people were in charge of their own lives for the first time. There was no road map, nor was it possible to call on l
Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia is one of the key works of twentieth-century Romanian fiction, winning the Romanian Academy prize when it was first published in 1989 as The Dream
Ion Cristofor is an established figure in Romania – a poet, literary critic and translator, and a member of the famous ‘eighties generation’. His poetry has been translated i
Ana Blandiana is considered one of the most influential poets in Romania. In fact, she is a kind of legend there, often compared to Anna Akhmatova in Russian literature and Václav
In the foreword to Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion, a collection of six translations by Jozefina Komporaly, theatre director Faynia Williams points out that ‘[t]he
Romania has long been an ‘outlier’ in Europe, a Romance-language island in a sea of Slavonic, peculiarly vulnerable to the political whims of foreign powers – the Ottomans, A
