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Review introductionto focus: Contemporary Romanian Poetry in Translation and in Interstitial English Andrei Codrescu, Focus Editor The idea of a "Focus" on Romanian literature in English translation in the US looked simple enough at first, until I started surveying the field. The field is strewn with a variety of products of varying quality and intent that will simply not sit under one umbrella, no matter how Romanian-sounding the authors' names. The Romanian presence in American letters is fairly substantial, but only some of it is literature, and the "some of it" is not always representative of Romanian literature. Worse, the translations of even the "some ofit" that may be representative are spotty at best and atrocious in many instances. In addition to bad translations of haphazard work, there is disagreement within the Romanian literary community as to what is and what isn't "representative." Before 1989 and the fall of the Ceau§escu regime, there was very little worthwhile Romanian work in English. Unlike their Czech, Polish , or Hungarian contemporaries, Romanians produced no earth-shaking dissident tomes. Romanians excused their absence from the Cold War literature ofprotest by pointing to the greatness oftheir poetry. In Romania, it was said, poetry carried the weight of the opposition, and it was mightily feared by the tyrant and much loved by the people. In the absence of decent translations, there was no way to verify its subversive efficacy, so that assertion remained mostly unproven. On the other hand, Tristan Tzara, Paul Celan, Ilarie Voronca, Benjamin Fondane, and Gherasim Luca were well-known poets in the West since before the Second World War. These Romanian-born, Jewish poets, writing for the most part in French, had been translated almost simultaneously into English. They had, in fact, created an international idiom for poetry , a kind ofur-ground hospitable to infinite poetic experiment. The nationalist and communist epochs severed the connection with this international avantgarde . Romanian poets within the Romanian borders condemned themselves (and were condemned by the official ideologues) to provincialism. After 1989, Romanian writers felt the urgent need to be heard outside their borders, and there was a stampede of traducing. Well-respected writers , whether pre- or post- 1989, felt that they had to be read on the "outside," hoping for recognition that the increasingly bitter internecine polemics made impossible. The Romanian literary scene is contentious , the heir of innumerable storms in teapots and art-hostile political ideologies. Needless to say, most fiction didn't make it this time around either, with the exception of Mircea Cärtärescu's work. Cärtärescu, however, is the exception among Romanian fictioneers : primarily a poet, his prose has more in common with the masters of the international dream idiom pioneered by Tzara. In Romania, it was said, poetry carried the weight ofthe opposition. The poets crossed over into American English in great numbers and in a variety of craft. At first, there was only a single boat, a canoe really, named Adam J. Sorkin. The canoe that is Sorkin brought to the US dozens, maybe over a hundred, Romanian poets. Sorkin translated indefatigably for over three decades, often with the help of the poets, sometimes with the help ofthe dictionary. Even as we speak, the sea-worthy craft of Sorkin's labor is being offloaded by small press publishers far and wide. In 2006, Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur's anthology Born in Utopia inaugurated a whole new understanding of Romanian poetry. For the first time, a picture of an entire poetic culture became visible. Other poets crossed in their own vessels in the first decade of the new millennium when the Internet and the open border made it possible for some younger poets to begin writing directly in English. This English (American-flavored mostly) seems to me a new language, something I call "interstitial English," a language in which a great many foreign-born writers are becoming fluent. Some of these writers have learned their English from MTV and Animal Planet before actually and physically coming to the US. Others are practicing in the interstices between literary and pop-cultural English, mixing in a variety of accents from the ethno-enclaves of...

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