Two Romanian poems among the fifty greatest modern love poems of the last 50 years
The poetry team at Londons Southbank Centre has worked on a list of fifty greatest modern love poems of the past 50 years.
România Internațional, 08.07.2014, 13:00
It took them a whole year to come up with “a truly international and stylistically diverse selection of poems.” The poets come from 30 countries, from Saint Lucia to Iraqi Kurdistan. Romania is represented in the ranking by two women writers: Nina Cassian and Doina Ioanid.
Lady of Miracles, one of the selected poems, was published by Nina Cassian 45 years ago. During the communist regime, Nina Cassian was banned from publishing and all her books were withdrawn from libraries and bookshops. In 1985 she traveled to the US as a visiting professor and decided to seek asylum there. It was only after the fall of communism that she returned to Romania. Nina Cassian was also a translator, journalist and film critic. She rendered into Romanian the works of William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Yiannis Ristos and Paul Celan.
Doina Ioanid is the other Romanian poet whose work was selected by the poetry team at the Southbank Centre among the 50 greatest modern love poems. The poem is entitled “Yellow Dog” and was composed quite recently, in 2010.
“It was tough restricting ourselves to just 50 poems, but I think weve come up with a wonderfully rich and varied offering of some of the worlds greatest love poems,” the head of literature and spoken word at the Southbank Centre, James Runcie said. The poems will be read on July 20 as part of what the Southbank Centre describes as an “unprecedented event”, which will see 50 readers, from actors to poets, taking on one poem each from the list. The event is part of the Festival of Love and biennial Poetry International Festival, which was set up by Ted Hughes in 1967.
