The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Louisiana State University are producing a US book launching tour of The Forgiven Submarine (Submarinul Iertat) by Ruxandra Cesereanu and Andrei Codrescu, published in April 2009 by Black Widow Press. The readings and signings of the book will begin in New York at the Romanian Cultural Institute on April 14, and will continue in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and points in-between, until April 19.

The event at RCINY will be joined by Calin Andrei Mihailescu (writer and professor of comparative literature & critical theory). Crusader-Woman, Ruxandra Cesereanu's collection of poetry published by the same Black Widow Press, will also be featured in dialogue with its translator Adam J. Sorkin.

The tour will be preceded by a NYPL Live! event on April 13, 7 pm:
Andrei Codrescu, Henry Alford & Mark Twain Interview Each Other! How To Live DADA.


The Forgiven Submarine was written in Romanian via e-mail by the noted Romanian poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, known for her brilliant use of the complexity and metaphorical innovation in her native language, and by Andrei Codrescu, who is now a well-known American poet. Andrei Codrescu began writing poetry in Romanian until he emigrated to the United States in 1970 and started working exclusively in American English. Codrescu returned to Romania in 1989 to report on the collapse of the dictatorship for NPR and ABC News, and began a slow return to the language of his birth.

Ruxandra and Andrei met briefly at the Black Sea at a Romanian Writers’ Union poetry conference in 2006, and started, in a playful way, to collaborate via e-mail. The play soon turned serious as both poets realized that they were involved in a major enterprise: for Ruxandra Cesereanu, a Transylvanian from Cluj, it became important to plumb new depths of language and defend a poetics that was both her own and peculiar to Romania’s rich poetic tradition; for Codrescu, also a Transylvanian, born in nearby Sibiu, there was, at first, the bravado of staying atop the fast linguistic horse that Cesereanu rode at top speed, then it became a matter of displaying an American-bred poetics that clashed in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways with his collaborator’s poetics. Not long after beginning what was no longer a game, the two poets engaged in a mortal combat that involved gender, language, memory, poetics, and culture. For Cesereanu, the poem was an opportunity to display her dazzling range, and for Codrescu it was a matter of regaining the language of his poetic beginnings. The result, Submarinul Iertat, was published in Romania by Editura Brumar in 2007, with a preface by Mircea Cartarescu, in a de-luxe edition with six paintings by Radu Chio.

The poets gave two readings of the complete work in Romania in 2007, one in Sibiu, and one in Cluj, before "officially" launching the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Submarinul Iertat received a great deal of comment in Romania’s literary press and won a major award. The cross-cultural resonance of the poem required that it be translated in English, and Codrescu took up the challenge of not only rendering Cesereanu’s nearly-impossible-to-translate nuanced language, but also of translating his own hard-earned Romanian into his America English. The result, a book-length poem in English that includes the Cartarescu preface and Chio’s art, is now being released in the U.S. by Black Widow Press, one of the most prestigious poetry publishers in the English-speaking world. "Beyond the splendor of its imagery, the Submarine is tragic like Luceafarul. In the oblong windows of the parabolic shape in the depths, we glimpse as if in reversed looking-glasses, Transylvanian and New York scenes from the pilots’ childhood and adolescence, moving displays of thought and dream."  - Mircea Cartarescu

[Image: Ruxandra Cesereanu and Andrei Codrescu at Art-Cafe in Sibiu, 2007 - the first integral reading of "The Forgiven Submarine"]