Demon in Brackets

This bilingual volume places Romanian poems beside their English versions. Maria Banuș, born in 1914, began publishing as a teenager, when she was only fourteen. She chose the selection herself, and it spans her career from quick, unguarded verse to pieces marked by exactness and gentleness. Across the collection, the poems read as a lyrical record of a long life that begins when she was twenty.

The poet's commitments shaped her early work. During the 1930s she took part in anti-fascist movements, and during the war she worked for the Resistance in Romania. Those years run beneath the lyric voice of the book without displacing its personal focus.

The Romanian text runs alongside the English, so readers can compare the two languages line by line. Critics have singled out the poet's standing in Romanian letters and the care taken in the translations.