Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Romanian poet exiled after a visit to America, known for her poetry, satires, and translations that capture her homeland's spirit.
On the island
Eight records
St Matthew Passion, BWV 244: "Ach, Golgatha!"Favourite
Michael Chance, English Baroque Soloists and John Eliot Gardiner
Because this masterpiece is somehow the essence of all music of all times. Bach is always. Above and beyond everything else, he stays there in his aura forever.
London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras
So that sorcerer's apprentice opened my my mind and my imagination to poetry and music together.
Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus
I love Messian because he is incredibly vital. He has his spirituality and his mystic and whatever, but the approach and the the the sound is so tremendously vital and terrestrial. And I like the combination.
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez
I think that Bartok together with Shostakovich are somehow the two Beethovens of the twentieth century. ... That's why I like Baltok to be with me on the desert island.
It's a love peace. It's about a love ma but it's la plucalante. It's about a special love. A love of um nuances. It's not y like this, I love you. It's I love you in a very special way.
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
London Symphony Orchestra and English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britten
I was very impressed not only for its uh didactical side, because it tr truly teaches you orchestra and orchestration, but for its wit and um humour. It makes me laugh.
Mazurka in A minor, Op. 17, No. 4
I think that he's still partly misunderstood. Uh the um people consider him, you know, sentimental uh romantic. He is romantic, but he's also extremely rigorous. This mazulka proves his subtlety and his vanguard spirit.
This speak low is also an insinuating song. As you see, I prefer from the expression of love, not the plain one, not the most direct one, a little aside, a little insinuating, like that speak low.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:51You were declared a non person overnight. You were just written out of everything in your homeland. That must have been a paralysing experience.
Actually I uh went to America to teach a course of creative writing at New York University. And it's during that period of three months that I found out that my friend Georgie Ursu ... was arrested and finally that he died. ... I thought the moment was too hot for me to go back right away, but I didn't want to ask for political asylum because I knew what will happen. I mean that they are going to erase me as a person and taking away all my my library and my belongings and whatever. So I hesitated for one year and a half, but I had no choice finally.
Presenter asks
3:35That kind of experience and having nowhere to go back to, being cut off and having lost everything, it must be a kind of death.
I felt like being trapped, literally, like being trapped, I mean, in a foreign country, surrounded by foreign people, by a foreign language. And as a poet I you can't imagine yourself, but expressing yourself in your mother tongue. It's uh it seems an impossibility. ... to uh change voices, you know, like uh boys in adolescence when they change voices. It it seemed impossible at first. Finally I did it.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Well, of course everybody says I would like to have paper and a pen and a small piano. That would be nice. Uh but uh if that's not quite uh a luxury, I would like to have uh cigarettes and whisky.
Presenter asks
Your first book, as I understand it, under Stalin, you wrote just after the war, it was not only banned, it was burned, wasn't it? What was so terrible about it?
I suppose so. Uh I I don't know exactly the facts. Anyway, it disappeared. And it was such an innocent book, I think. It had, in my opinion, nothing subversive. It was a book of uh fantasy, of uh joy, uh colorful, full of uh metaphors and so on
Presenter asks
9:01So was it ever defined under these regimes what you could and couldn't write? Did they say surrealism is out? Fantasy is out.
Out by all means. That was decadent. That uh belonged to a uh declining uh human society. It wasn't written for the people to understand. ... They uh obliged us to use a limited vocabulary as if uh all people around us were illiterates and not to use metaphors, which is uh absurd because our folk poetry is full of metaphors or adjectives.
Presenter asks
16:35Looking back, why do you think you were so gullible? Why do you think you didn't spot that it was all about control and dictatorship?
Well, at first When I was told how to write, I thought they are right. that that it should be and the party knew better because I was too young and unexperienced and whatever. But uh I realized very quickly that it um made me dry, it emptied me of all um joy of writing, so I stopped.
Presenter asks
29:45Why doesn't she go back? Why doesn't she reclaim her territory, her language, her life, her people?
I went back, actually. I was eight times in Romania after the revolution. But I have no place to stay here. ... The authorities never liked me. Absolutely never. Not the former ones, not the current ones. ... they forbade me, they uh kicked me out, I found a place, they kicked me out from that place, so I was literally and practically I was banned from Romania twice, once before the revolution and the second time after.
“I felt like being trapped, literally, like being trapped, I mean, in a foreign country, surrounded by foreign people, by a foreign language. And as a poet I you can't imagine yourself, but expressing yourself in your mother tongue. It's uh it seems an impossibility.”
“Communism for me was a kind of a golden sphere. harmonious which abolished all the the bloody antagonisms between the races, classes, genders. It was the big, big, big embrace.”
“I know now that it was a gigantic lie, that those wonderful ideas which keep their halo in some way They are logical, they are uh beautiful, uh They were just taken as pretext to install bloody dictatorships all over. And probably Communism will probably remain a utopia never to be achieved.”