Photo by Daniel Mihăilescu
In times of calamity and social distress, it was often the writers who were called to imagine how the world would heal its wounds and begin again. Inspired by the creative examples of the past, we have summoned an extraordinary ensemble of authors and translators and challenged them to picture by way of prose and poetry how life re-emerging from the black silence of the pandemic may look like. We continue the series, created together with the National Museum of Romanian Literature, with sophisticated poet, novelist and academic SIMONA POPESCU, a true heiress of the influential Romanian avant-garde generation of the interwar years, translated by Phoenixian ANDREW K. DAVIDSON, academic, translator and poet who now calls Bucharest his home.
Poet, novelist and essayist SIMONA POPESCU teaches avant-garde and postmodern Romanian literature and creative writing at the Literature Department of the University of Bucharest. She published five volumes of poetry (the first,Xilofonul şi alte poeme / The Xylophone and Other Poems, 1990, also appeared in Hungarian, eight years later; and the latest, Lucrări în verde. Pledoaria mea pentru poezie / Works in Green. My Plea for Poetry, 2006, has been partly translated in French and German), a novel,Exuvii / Exuviae, now in its sixth edition, a collection of essays, and two books of critifiction about the Romanian surrealist poet Gellu Naum. In 2015, she published her doctoral thesis entitled The Author, a Character. Simona Popescu co-ordinated the writing of the collective novel Rubik, authored by twenty-nine of her students. Her books have been awarded several prizes and are studied in highschools and universities in Romania. Simona Popescu’s works are included in numerous Romanian and foreign anthologies and she was invited in poetry festivals and literary readings all over the world. In 2005 she was invited to represent Romanian literature as part of Les belles étrangères literary tour organised by the French Ministry of Culture. She is a member of PEN Club Romania, the Writers' Union of Romania, and the Association of Professional Writers. She organizes the Gellu Naum Poetry Festival in Bucharest.