Winner of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation The Bridge is Marin Sorescu's farewell to life: a book of wryly quizzical poems composed from his sickbed over five weeks as he waited for death to take him, his testament not just to human mortality and pain but to resistance and creative transformation. The Bridge is unlike any other poetry book: like a medieval dance of death but sombre in movement, a procession of breathlessly spoken, painfully comic poems. Marin Sorescu was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most original voices in Romanian literature. His mischievous poetry and satirical plays earned him great popularity during the Communist era. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the régime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. But later - like a hapless character from one of his absurdist dramas - the peasant-born people's poet was made Minister of Culture.

Marin Sorescu (1936-96) was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most original voices in Romanian literature. His mischievous poetry and satirical plays earned him great popularity during the Communist era. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the régime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. But later - like a hapless character from one of his absurdist dramas - the peasant-born people's poet was made Minister of Culture, in Ion Iliescu's post-Ceauçescu government.Like Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia, Sorescu used plain, deceptively straightforward language, believing that poetry should be 'concise, almost algebraic'. Seamus Heaney wrote that behind Sorescu's 'throwaway charm and poker-faced subversiveness...there is a persistent solidarity with the unregarded life of the ordinary citizen, a willingness to remain at eye-level and on a speaking terms with common experience'.A prolific writer and a prominent dramatist, Sorescu published over 20 books of poetry in Romania, with several English translations of his poetry and plays appearing in Britain and America. Michael Hamburger's translation of his Selected Poems (1983), drawing on six collections published between 1965 and 1973, introduced him to English readers. The Biggest Egg in the World followed in 1987, a selection of mostly later work edited by Edna Longley with translators including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon.Virgil Nemoianu has described how Sorescu's black humour and keen feeling for the absurd enabled him to survive as a writer: 'His reactions to an increasingly absurd political régime were always cleverly balanced: he never engaged in the servile praise of leader and party usually required of Romanian poets, but nor did he venture into dissidence. He was content to let irony do its job... His texts are masterpieces of allusion and adroit manoeuvring...' All this time, however, he was also writing the 'secret poems' he dared not publish then because - as Dan Zamfirescu commented - 'the gesture would have been the equivalent of suicide'. Censored Poems (2001), translated by John Hartley Williams and Hilde Ottschofski, is a selection from two books published in Bucharest after 1989, including borderline poems censored by the authorities as well as the risker secret poems censored by the author.The Bridge (2004), translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Lidia Vianu, published in Romania in 1997, was Sorescu's farewell to life, a book of painfully quizzical poems composed from his sickbed over five weeks - and dictated to his wife - as he waited for death to take him. Suffering from hepatitis and cirrhosis, he died from a heart attack on 8 December 1996, in the same year that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hatched in Belfast by a clutch of poets, egged on by the Romanian poet, eight writers well up the poetry pecking order cooked up this book in tribute to the Romanian master chef. These are not hard-boiled translations but lightly scrambled versions, and if some seem flavoured with Heaney, Hughes, or Constantine, that's quite in keeping with the anarchic free-ranging spirit of Sorescu's comic genius. Our poets have poached freely from the original ingredients and whisked up a souffle of intriguing flavour and virtuosity. The translations are by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, D.J. Enright, David Constantine, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoo, and William Scammell working with literal versions by Ioana Russell-Gebbett, and by Michael Hamburger.

Romania's comic genius Marin Sorescu was so popular during the worst of the Ceausescu years that his readings had to be held in football stadiums, and his books sold hundreds of thousands of copies. While his witty, ironic parables were not directly critical of the régime, Romanians used to a culture of double-speak could read other meanings in his playful mockery of the human condition. All this time, however, he was also writing the 'secret poems' he did not dare publish then because - as Dan Zamfirescu commented - 'the gesture would have been the equivalent of suicide'. Censored Poems is a selection from two books published in Bucharest after 1989, including borderline poems censored by the authorities as well as the riskier secret poems censored by the author.

A Nobel Prize nominee, Sorescu is internationally renowned for his irony and humor; his poetry and plays are widely translated.

Translated from the Romanian by Andrea Deletant & Brenda Walker, Jonah, The Verger, and The Matrix are existential plays in surrealist poetry. A mixture of poetry, metaphysics, and common sense, they are ideal for the imaginative director and are easily adapted for radio or small acting areas.

"If anybody except a poet were saying the things Sorescu says in his poems, he or she would be found insane. But this is what poetry should be doing, putting this kind of material into rational form." (Russell Edson) In this collection the Romanian's poems are expertly translated by two other Romanian writers and Stuart Friebert, with an introduction by noted Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

"What has fifteenth century Wallachia to do with twentieth century civilization? Everything! This play, by Romania's most controversial poet and playwright, shows a ravaged land - a world full of whispers and spies; injustice and despair, where suspicion is rife - ruled by...martyr or madman?"--