Translator’s Introduction to Claudiu Komartin

On Christmas Day, 1989, Romanian Communist tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were arrested, tried, and executed, a pivotal moment for the country that was broadcasted to the rest of the world. Ceausescu was attempting to flee the country after he was overthrown for persecuting and starving his people to settle the national debt. Today’s Romania is a displaced nation, no longer a place of Nazi Germany or Soviet influence. It is as if the country’s history started with the 1989 revolution that ended forty-two years of Communist rule. This is a nation with a rich cultural history but is just beginning to find its identity. Even the native language is out of place, geographically—Romanians speak a Latin language but are surrounded by Slavic-speaking countries. It is in this context that Claudiu Komartin’s poetry was born.

This young Romanian poet is interested in reconciling the old Romania with the new. He isn’t afraid to use slang and allusions to Facebook or his friends, but he also includes archaic terms that recall rural life in Romania. This dichotomy shows a hyper awareness of a past that influences the present. Komartin is unafraid to make his audience wince, because he knows they’ve seen worse. He takes on modern tragedies by mocking them, surveying the world from above and, most skillfully, inviting us to join him.

In “Together 1000 W,” Claudiu Komartin writes “We got over the illusion that we had a different mother tongue together,” which reads like an invitation for translation, rejecting the notion that language barriers should prevent us from sharing experiences together. It’s no accident that, at 34, Komartin has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Flemish, Slovenian, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Korean, and now English.