Adam J. Sorkin, distinguished professor of English, Delaware County campus, has recently published three new books of translation of Romanian poetry.
Two are single author volumes.
The first, just published in December, is "Paper Children," containing 45 poems by Mariana Marin which Sorkin translated with four Romanian collaborators, as well as some without co-translator. The dual-language, 144-page book in the East European Poets Series of Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, N.Y., has an introduction by Sorkin and a preface by Nina Cassian. Marin was an important dissident voice of the 1980s under the communist dictatorship and continued publishing until her death in 2003 at the age of 47.
The second, "The March to the Stars," contains 35 by Mihai Ursachi, two-thirds of which were translated by Sorkin with Ursachi as his co-translator. Sorkin also wrote the introduction. Publication of the 78-page book was in Bucharest and New York by Vinea Press, 2006. Mihai Ursachi was a major Romanian poet of the last third of the 20th century. After an attempt to escape Romania in the early 1960s while he was still a philosophy student at the University of Iasi, Ursachi became a political prisoner in the 1960s. He defected to the United States in the 1980s but returned to Romania to great acclaim after the December 1989 revolution. Ursachi was Romania's Nobel Prize nominee in literature in 2001.
The third is an anthology, "Born in Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry," of which Sorkin is principal translator. Edited by Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur with Edward Foster and published in Jersey City by Talisman House, the 355-page book contains 66 poets, of whom Sorkin, with various co-translators, translated works by 35.