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Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now one of her country’s strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceaușescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of a moral consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.
The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana’s early collections published from 1964 to 1981, as well as including uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. It follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021) in completing Bloodaxe’s presentation of Blandiana’s collected poems to date in English translation. She published these poems during the brief period of political thaw of Romania’s communist regime, when aestheticism took on a more subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art.
In her early poems, Blandiana’s voice articulates a pure and vibrant spiritual language of unmistakable ethical clarity, calling for moral regeneration in the face of indifference. Their ethical idealism and steadfastness override the many masks of degradation. These youthful books announce from the outset the sense of responsibility and faith in the survival of the collective soul that has always characterised Blandiana’s poetry.
‘Romanian author and political activist Blandiana enthrals in this anthology of her early work. Fidelity to truth, ethical inquiry, union with nature, and the ubiquity of the soul underscore narratives that resuscitate awe and riot against passivity […] With nonpareil enlightenment, valor, and spectral beauty, Blandiana’s visions make an indelible impression.’ – Publishers Weekly, starred review of The Shadow of Words
‘This searching for shadows establishes the conditions for her brilliant career, of which the primary feature is a startling direct refusal of lyric rhetoric, combined with a startling and intimate structural organization. [...] the poet’s early work invites us precisely to inhabit a place where violence is projected toward comfortable states of self-consciousness, where every trace becomes a wound, and where memory is necessary or unavoidable because it remains incomplete. Pain is intensified here, as is isolation, violence, self-consciousness—but also acceptance, persistence, and liberation.’ – Charles Altieri, Asymptote, on The Shadow of Words
‘In the tradition of Anna Akhmatova and Václav Havel, Blandiana bears witness to eastern European history while also offering visionary and meditative verse in the spirit of Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke... Thanks to Derrick and Patea’s faithful rendering of Blandiana’s formal innovations in light of the poems’ evolving context, Five Books will ensure Blandiana’s legacy as a poet with international significance.’ - J. Rhett Forman, World Literature Today, on Five Books
'Blandiana is a pure lyricist, focused entirely on the event of how imagination finds words and rhythms that make certain mental experiences memorable. Her poems characteristically achieve strange precisions by having pervasive metaphors unfold her sense of "sacred void" as negative plenitude.' – Charles Altieri, UC at Berkeley
'The Romanian Ana Blandiana is one of Europe’s greatest living poets, and she’s well served by this substantial volume containing five previously untranslated collections. Ranging across her writing life, they create a layered portrait of a complex yet consistent poetic identity.' - Fiona Sampson, The Guardian, on Five Books
'... one of Europe's most important living poets. Blandiana is not concerned with elegant artifice. Her poems are mostly short in line and in length. And the voice, one of the most remarkable features of her work, is simple, calm and intimate... Yet that voice is capable of surprising and resonant shifts of focus that at times produce brilliant perspectives on her political situation, on her efforts to understand what connections are possible to spiritual forces, and late in her career on the various ways love can pervade life.' - Charles Altieri, The London Magazine, on Five Books
Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 in Timişoara, Romania. She is an almost legendary figure who holds a position in Romanian culture comparable to that of Anna Akhmatova and Vaclav Havel in Russian and Czech literature. She has published 14 books of poetry, two of short stories, nine books of essays and one novel. Her work has been translated into 24 languages published in 58 books of poetry and prose to date. In Britain a number of her earlier poems were published in The Hour of Sand: Selected Poems 1969-1989 (Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), with a later selection in versions by Seamus Heaney in John Fairleigh’s contemporary Romanian anthology When the Tunnels Meet (Bloodaxe Books, 1996). She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change. She also re-founded and became President of the Romanian PEN Club, and in 1993, under the aegis of the European Community, she created the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. In recognition of her contribution to European culture and her valiant fight for human rights, Blandiana was awarded the highest distinction of the French Republic, the Légion d’Honneur (2009). She has won numerous international literary awards. Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea have translated all of her poetry into English. Their first translation to appear from Bloodaxe was of My Native Land A4 (2010) in 2014. This was followed by The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses in 2017, combining her two previous collections, and a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Five Books, combining five collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry, was published in 2021. This will be followed by a further compilation from her early collections, The Shadow of Words (2025). Ana Blandiana was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Prize for 2016 by the city of Gdansk for My Native Land A4, published in Polish in 2016, the award shared with her Polish translator Joanna Kornaś-Warwas. She received the Griffin Trust’s Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018, and received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain in 2024.
40 Acknowledgements
First Person Plural (1964)
42 Childhood
43 Victors
44 Rain Chant
45 Harvest
46 Pride
47 The Joke
48 Dance in the Rain
Achilles’ Heel (1966)
51 The Gift
52 Return
53 I Know That Purity
54 At That Moment…
55 Intolerance
56 Parents
57 Quarantine
58 Hospital Visiting Hours
59 Eclipse
60 The Change on the Table
61 Concert
62 Cruises
63 We Should Be
64 Torquato Tasso
65 Where Is the Pride?
66 To the Stars
67 The Great Silence
68 Drawing in Pastel
69 The Surface of the Water
70 The Wisdom of the Earth
71 Be Wise
72 Flow
73 Self-portrait in Pastel
74 From Time to Time
75 Morning Elegy
76 Volcanoes
77 Have I Grown Up?
78 From a Village
79 Scherzo
80 I Gave You the Leaves
81 Night Is Falling
82 The Day Will Come
83 I Always Put Off Entering
84 Of Austerity and Naïveté
The Third Sacrament (1969)
87 No Choice
88 Humility
89 You Know Something
90 Ties
91 The Bird
92 The Borderline
93 Eye-blink
94 Oh, Laughing
95 By Our Own Will
96 North
97 Travel
98 Only Love
99 Requiem
100 Song
101 Love
102 The Docile Animal
103 Ancient Anchorites
104 I Hope
105 Grass
106 Far Away
107 Condition
108 The Eyes of Statues
109 Psalm
110 Fatigue
111 While We Still Have Time
112 Alternative
113 Elegy
114 Everything Simple
115 Indecision
116 Contratemps
117 The Fall
118 Pietá
from Fifty Poems (1970)
121 Encounter
122 Let the Words Fall
123 October
124 Frost
125 Up There
126 Psalm (II)
127 Death in the Light
131 The Soul
from Poems (1974)
134 Genealogy
135 Every Movement I Make
136 I’m Drowsy
137 The Ballad of the Custom-house
140 My Beauty Hurts Me
141 Ballad
142 Syllables
143 Between Worlds
144 Maybe Someone Is Dreaming Me
145 When I Wake Up
146 Prayer
Sleep within Sleep (1977)
148 Hills
149 Poem
150 Eyelids
151 In Winter the Stars
152 Shepherd of Snow
153 Native Land
154 A Stork’s Nest
155 As Though the Moon Had Something to Say
156 Hostile Snow
157 Wings
158 Avram Iancu
159 I Hear
160 Hymn
161 Everyone Living in the Village
162 Song
163 I Only Need to Go to Sleep
164 I Mustn’t End
165 I Do Not Sing the Leaf
166 The One Who Dreams Me
167 Covered with Dew
168 We’ve Learnt How to Laugh
169 In the Village I’m Going Back to
170 A Church Filled with Butterflies
171 This Floating
172 Anchor
173 When I’m Living
174 I Come Back to Autumn
175 Early Gathered Grass
176 Monastery of Wind
177 Sea
178 It’s So Cold
179 Sunday
181 At the Mill Pond
182 City of the Eastern Plain
183 In the Country’s Soul
184 Lascivious Fruit
185 In My Sleep
186 Lovers
187 Why?
188 To Stay Here in the Hay
189 Drawing in Pastel
190 Hamlet
191 Alone with Myself
192 Leaves of Animals
193 I Think Clouds
194 A Vase with Wild Daisies
195 Country of Birds
196 Who Said It Was Gold
197 Poplars and Maples
198 When I Grow Old Enough
199 The Morning after Death
The Cricket’s Eye (1981)
203 In Sleep
204 From Over There
204 As If
206 Egg
208 The Land Where Parents Lived
209 Behold
210 I’m Tired
211 Definition
212 Metamorphosis
213 Boat
214 Crossings
215 At Daybreak
216 Hymn
217 Clothing
218 Wonder
219 Inside a Walnut
220 Icons on Glass
221 Hibernation
222 Flight
223 Loneliness
224 Half of the Moon
226 Otherwise
227 Inhabited by a Song
228 In the Water
229 Nighttime on a Bed of Hay
230 The Step
231 One, Two, Three
232 The Line
233 The Name
234 I’m So Cold
235 Armour
236 One More Step
237 A Game
238 The Hunt
239 Shadow
240 Pathway
241 One Day
242 Proof
243 The Shadow of a Blade of Grass
244 Semantics
245 Camouflage
246 In the Deep, Dull Thud
247 Seed
248 Falling
249 Moon Just Touching
250 Brush Pen
251 Earth
252 Question
253 Illumination
254 If
255 Morphology
256 Thank You
257 Mirrors
258 Pity
259 Words
260 Every Trace
261 Nevertheless
262 Postponement
263 Home
264 Wind, Unroll
265 In Memoriam
266 Circle
267 Eleusis
268 Epitaph
269 Over the Tops of Plum Trees
270 I Breathe, I Breathe
271 Vowel
272 How I Would’ve Wished
274 Weave
275 Reflection
276 Instead of
277 Olly Olly Oxen Free
278 Feverish Planet
279 A Sign
280 There Are Some Mornings
281 Portrait with Cherry Earrings
284 Bibliography
286 The translators