Un arcángel manchado de hollín

This volume brings together three central books by the Romanian poet Ana Blandiana (1942), one of the highest voices in contemporary European literature: "Predator Star", written during the intervals in which her work was not banned by the dictatorship of Ceausescu; "The architecture of the waves", the first published in freedom; and the most recent "The Clock Without Hours", which expresses her response to the old suffering from a here and now touched by alienation and strangeness. The four poems published in the magazine Amfiteatru (1984) that motivated the second of the three prohibitions that the regime imposed on the author are included as portico. This volume bears witness to a black and hopeless period in Romanian history, when the very existence of poetry offered something akin to hope. But also, in its final stretch, it reflects an oasis of calm and the need to maintain a balance, however precarious, between purity and fall, between loneliness and commitment to history. We live in an age in which being free is more difficult than not being free, in which, paradoxically, freedom of speech reduces the importance of speech.