Lil' Bit of Lit. Crit.: Legend of the Walled-Up Wife

This Fall, Wake Forest University Press looks forward to releasing Legend of the Walled-Up Wife, a selection of poems by Ilena Mǎlǎncioiu. The selection was translated from Romanian by our very own Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. The opportunity to share this work was Ní Chuilleanáin’s sole purpose for learning the language. However, in looking at Ní Chuilleanáin’s own poetry, one can see that her empathy as a Mǎlǎncioiu’s translator extends far beyond her mastery of both languages. Here at the Press, what we’ve found most striking about Ní Chuilleanáin’s translation of Mǎlǎncioiu is the poetic empathy that these two writers undoubtedly share. The fact that both women find inspiration in history, mythology, and folklore is noticeable just from the titles of Mǎlǎncioiu’s works, such as After the Rising of Lazarus and Antigone. But more importantly, as one uncovers more of Mǎlǎncioiu’s life story, it is uncanny to see how much her experiences seem to unravel like something straight out of a Ní Chuilleanáin poem themselves.

The title of the collection, The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife, comes from a Romanian folktale. The legend tells the story of a man who was told in a dream that he could build a beautiful monastery so long as he sacrificed someone he loved by trapping them in the building's walls. The man chooses his wife, and in the end, the beautiful monastery is completed. For Mǎlǎncioiu, the myth resonated deeply with her own experiences writing under the oppressive Ceaușescu regime, who censored her work heavily in 1992. Nevertheless, Mǎlǎncioiu  makes a way for herself. Ní Chuilleanáin summarizes it best when she writes that “Like many Eastern European Poets of her generation [Mǎlǎncioiu] guardedly learned to make the oblique statement both her art and political instrument. Her visionary, sometimes frightening, poems are inhabited by those trapped in fables not of their own making.” In reading of Mǎlǎncioiu’s struggles, I thought immediately of poems like Pygmalion’s Image, St. Mary Magdalene Preaching at Marseilles, and St. Margaret of Cortona, in which Ni Chuilleanáin masterfully creates speakers whose voices are floating around them, seemingly inaccessible, but then, are brought to life through myth. Ultimately, I could not think of a better poet to articulate Mǎlǎncioiu’s afflictions for us, and in reading this selection, I hope you feel the same.

Posted by Gigi