In Kaddish, Romanian poet Radu Vancu writes from the perspective of the Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, who was murdered by Nazis during a forced march in May 1944 and dumped in a mass grave. In 1946, Radnóti's body was exhumed, and with him a notebook was found.
Vancu’s Kaddish imagines the contents of that notebook, recounting Radnóti’s thoughts as he addresses his wife and remembers their times together; converses and jokes with the dead around him (including his close friend, the violinist Miklósz Lorsi, who was executed just a few days before him); and muses on the meaning of poetry. Along the way, he invokes a range of historical and literary figures, including Dante, Shelley, Borges, Freud, Schumann, and Oppenheimer. Vancu’s imagined mass grave is a place of bones, blood, and torture, but it also becomes the ground from which poetry emerges in its most stunning and powerful capacity: to find beauty despite the horror and to be able to resurrect the dead.
Radu Vancu is a poet, scholar, and translator who has written nine volumes of poetry, a novel, two children’s novellas, a collection of essays, and scholarly publications. He has received numerous awards for his literary works, and also edits Transilvania magazine and Poesis Internațional. He has translated works by Walt Whitman, John Berryman, and Ezra Pound into Romanian, and is the president of Sibiu’s international poetry festival. He also served as the president of PEN Romania.
Sean Cotter is the translator of many works of Romanian literature, and Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. His translation of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (Deep Vellum, 2022) was awarded the Dublin Literary Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Romanian Cultural Institute prize for best translation of the year. Other books have won or been short-listed for numerous other awards. Zephyr Press published Cotter’s translations of two volumes by Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, Lightwall (2009) and Goldsmith Market (2003).
Kaddish
Kaddish
Translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter
176 pages | Bilingual on facing pages (Romanian & English)
ISBN 978-1-938890-40-6
