On her birthday on January 4, the poet remains one of the most vivid presences of contemporary Romanian literature.
Nora Iuga (Eleonora Almosnino), poet, novelist and translator, turned 95 on Sunday.
Nora Iuga was born in Bucharest in 1931. She studied German and later taught German in Sibiu. He was a journalist, language assistant and editor.
His first book of poetry, “It’s not my fault” was published in 1968.
One of the constant features of his literature is the connection between fantastical humor and disturbing subtlety. He has a versatile poetry, difficult to place in a pattern, surrealistic, strange as a dream, Balkan and concrete at the same time.
Banned by the communist regime
In 1970, after the publication of her second book of poetry, “The Captivity of the Circle”, it was banned by the communist regime for a period of eight years.
He had Tudor Vianu and George Călinescu as teachers.
She has been a professional writer since 1985. He gives public lectures abroad and receives numerous scholarships. She began writing poetry in the second grade at the Catholic Institute: while her father played a poem by Jeno Hubay on the violin, Nora Iuga felt a strong vibration and the music began to turn into words.
In 2009 he received the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) scholarship offered by Germany for foreign writers. At 79, Nora Iuga became the oldest literary blogger.
Mircea Cărtărescu had written about her, in his epilogue to the volume of selected works “Dangerous Caprices”:
“Everything was different in Nora’s apartment. In an instant, I forgot the miserable conditions outside, the dictatorship, the hunger, the cold, the never-ending threat of ‘Security.’ We all lived in poetry then, in an atmosphere of inner freedom that we no longer encounter today, because we are truly free”Cărtărescu had written, writes Mediafax.
“The Girl with a Thousand Wrinkles”
Probably his best-known writing is the long prose poem, “The girl with a thousand wrinkles”, published in 2005 – a unique microcosm, where morbid eroticism sits neatly behind the screen of love for writing and meaning.
“the noise is coming from the sky, strawberries are flowing from the trunk like the hearts of frightened children; someone has a teapot, a strainer, a spoonful of sugar, he took them all with him. dushenka maia, your breasts are hot like the core of black radishes, he would have told her and she became wet like the grass at dawn. he was a blond boy, he would have dreamed that he was killing the tsar and the waters of the Dnieper have parted, said the Armenian, that was his spread, spread like the black cloth of the great casinos, and all of them have lost, the green one is left to us.”
Remarkable translator of the works of Thomas Bernhard, Paul Celan, Günter Grass, ETA Hoffmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Ernst Jünger, Herta Müller, Nora Iuga has a secret in her many beautiful lives, and Mircea Cărtărescu also describes this secret in the most meaningful way: “Her power as a woman and writer, to remain forever young. Even today, young poets consider her one of their own.”
