Transcript (English)

Transcript 7 Romania

in this issue

Alone in the World Ion Caraion

Transcript is a
Literature
Across
Frontiers
publication

Ion Caraion

Umschlag_jpg_-_ein_garten_ist_in_mir[1]111

POEMS tr. with intro. Marguerite Dorian and Elliot Urdang. Romanian & English texts. Ohio University Press (Athens OH) 109pp (intro. 1-5) 1981 paper & cloth.

GREASEALA DE A FI/THE ERROR OF BEING Poeme/Poems tr. with pref. Marguerite Dorian and Elliot Urdang {Urdang, Elliot} Romanian and English texts. Forest Books (London & Boston MA)/Editura Fundatiei Culturale Romane (Bucharest) 142pp, 1994.

Ion Caraion (1923-1986) spent most of his life oppressed by the Communist dictatorship which took control of Romania in 1948. As a young man he stated: 'by destroying the reaction to Evil (Fascism) the Western powers have left unscathed the cause of Evil (Communism)'. Caraion's first book of poetry was banned. He was arrested in 1950 and charged with trying to publish his poems abroad. He was stripped of all civil rights, had all his property confiscated, and was sentenced to life imprisonment on the Danube-Black Sea canal. Freed in 1955, Caraion was rearrested in 1958. This time, he was sent to the copper mines of Cavnic and Baia Sprie where he survived eleven years before being released in 1964 under a general amnesty. In 1981 he asked for political asylum in Switzerland, where he died five years later, isolated and mistrusted by his fellow Romanian émigrés.

site by CHL