Wake: Up to Poetry

The Pen is Mightier Than the Wall

Ileana Mălăncioiu, a Romanian born in 1940, lived during the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the country’s head of state from 1967 to 1989. This was an intense period of censorship and violence, and as such, many of Mălăncioiu’s poems were heavily censored by the government.
Her book, Legend of the Walled-Up Wife, serves as an extended metaphor for the dark times that Romanians struggled through. Originally written in Romanian, Legend of the Walled-Up Wife presents history through fable and truth through allusion.
To bring Ileana Mălăncioiu’s work to a wider audience, Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin learned Romanian specifically to translate her poetry. Wake Forest will publish this book later this month.
The titular poem retells the fable of a woman who is both metaphorically and physically trapped in a walled enclosure that has been built to silence her. Mălăncioiu places herself as the victim in the poem, and obliquely attacks the Ceauşescu Regime as having trapped her -- and all Romanians-- inside. With biting lines such as “the one who walled in/ Has never had a dream in his life,” Mălăncioiu becomes the voice of all her fellow Romanians who were voiceless for so long.

“Legend of the Walled-Up Wife”

I am inside a wall like Manole’s wife Ana
Only that I am not Ana, and the one who walled me in
Has never had a dream in his life.

He enclosed me in a wall ready made,
In his own defensive wall
So that I would be neither inside his boundary
Nor outside.

He dreams only now at last
And moves to release me from the dry stone,
But he no longer knows where he walled me in.


Posted by Mike