Pain Is a Foreign Country

After joining the EU, over the last decade, as a consequence of both the free cultural exchange with Western Europe and with the world in general, facilitated by the new technologies and the social media, Romanian poetry evolved significantly, fusing a sort of emerging "global poetics" with its strong local neo-realistic cosmopolitan sensitivity. The poems included in the anthology by highly-accomplished younger Romanian poets bear witness to a poetics rooted in Romania but with branches spreading all across Europe and the Americas. The poems included in the book are all original translations from Romanian and have been specially prepared for this anthology. This is an extraordinary collection that will appeal to a wide audience.

Paul Doru Mugur is a Romanian writer, translator, and editor. As a translator and editor, he co-translated and co-edited four poetry anthologies: Born in Utopia, an Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2006), The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011), Locul Nimănui, O Antologie de Poezie Americană Contemporană (Cartea Românească, București, 2006) (Nobody's Place; An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry; in Romanian translated from English), and Poeme din Zona de Tranzit, Antologie de Poezie Hispanică Contemporană (Tracus Arte, București, 2020) (Poems from the Transit Zone; an Anthology of Contemporary Hispanic Poetry: in Romanian translated from Spanish). He has also translated poems by Octavio Paz, Mihai Eminescu, Nichita Stănescu, Cesar Vallejo, Roque Dalton, Abul Alaa Al Maari, Bhartrahari, René Char, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, and others. In 2000, he founded Respiro (www.respiro.org), a multi-lingual cultural magazine acknowledged as one of the best online Romanian cultural magazines. His own work includes two volumes of poetry, a booklet of aphorisms, and a collection of short stories.