Kaddish - by Radu Vancu (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Writing from a mass grave to his living wife, a poet who was murdered by Nazis in 1944 reports on what happened to him, and the role of poetry and beauty when confronted with evil.

In Kaddish, Romanian poet Radu Vancu assumes the voice of the murdered Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, taking as his starting point the notebook that was found with Radnóti's body when it was exhumed in 1946. Vancu imagines Radnoti addressing his wife in these poems -- remembering their time together, but also conversing and joking with the dead around him (including his close friend, the violinist Miklosz Lorsi, who was executed just a few days before him), and invoking such historical figures as Dante, Shelley, Borges, Freud, Schumann, and Oppenheimer. Radnoti's mass grave is a place of bones, torture, and blood, 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. The book is bilingual (Romanian and English) on facing pages.

About the Author

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).