UK/Romania Poetry Collaboration: Found in Translation

I was invited last week by the National Science and Arts Foundation and the Mayor of Sector 2 in Bucharest to help give out the prizes at the fifth edition of the “Om Intre Oameni” awards ceremony. The event, held on Romania’s National Cultural Day, the birth date of poet Mihai Eminescu, honoured Romanians who had made outstanding contributions in all walks of cultural life, from the rector of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Professor Ioan Aurel Pop, to swimmer Camelia Potec, a gold medal winner at the 2004 Olympics.

The reason for my invitation was that the international award was to be given to a celebrated British poet, Alan Brownjohn. It was a real pleasure to learn, over dinner after the event, more about his close connections with Romania, a country he has visited on numerous occasions, dating back to the Ceaușescu era, and in which he has built many friendships within the poetry community and more broadly. Poet Lidia Vianu, the founder of the Bucharest University Centre for the Translation and Interpretation of the Contemporary Text, is a longstanding associate, after a chance encounter when Alan Brownjohn spotted a Romanian translation of T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” on a Bucharest stall. She spoke warmly at the event about Alan’s support for Romanian poetry. Alan described to me too his love for the therapeutic waters in Covasna. And he set a novel, “The Long Shadows”, in Ceaușescu’s Romania.

One lasting result of Alan’s support for Romanian poetry followed the tragic death in the 1977 earthquake of a hugely gifted 19 year old named Corneliu M Popescu. The only son of a lawyer, Popescu translated, for the challenge of the task, a large part of the work of Eminescu into English, rendering the work in the style of the English romantic poets he so loved. Popescu had never even visited the United Kingdom. After his death, his father sent a copy of Popescu’s translations to the Poetry Society in London, where Alan, being already acquainted with the country, took them home to read, and rapidly discovered that they were works of great quality.

The Poetry Society agreed to establish the Corneliu M Popescu prize, a biennial award for poetry in translation from a European language into English, to honour the young man. Generous funding support was received from dissident politician Ion Rațiu, then living in London. The prize continues to flourish (the 2015 edition is under preparation) and provides a testament to the close links in the field of poetry between the United Kingdom and Romania.