Ana Blandiana receives Princess of Asturias Award
Romania's Ana Blandiana received the 2024 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature at a gala cultural awards ceremony at the Campoamor Theatre in Oviedo, Spain, in October 2024 attended by King Felipe VI of Spain with Queen Letizia and Leonor, Princess of Asturias.
The jury statement for the the award reads:
'Ana Blandiana is heir to the most brilliant European traditions, as well as a radically unique creator. Combining transparency and complexity, her writing raises fundamental questions about the existence of human beings, both alone and within society, in the face of nature and of history. Through her indomitable poetry, she has shown an extraordinary capacity for defying censorship.'
The text of Ana Blandiana's laureate's speech is translated below the video.
The latest translation of her work to appear in English is The Shadow of Words, published by Bloodaxe in February 2025, translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea. This book follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021), completing Bloodaxe’s presentation of Blandiana’s collected poems to date in English translation.
As always when I receive an award, my very first thought goes to Plato and the laurel wreaths he proposed for the poets who were then banished from the Republic.
My second thought has always been for my country.
Just as, once they’re grown, poor children always have to return home to help their families, or send packages and money to support the children still in school, every recognition I’ve received brings me back to where I started out, a place that in history was called Dacia Felix, the province conquered by the Emperor Trajan, which in Romanian fairy tales is called “the land where mountains butt heads”, a region located at the crossroads of numerous feuding empires, a realm which all its neighbours, save the Black Sea, have always wished ill. Forsaken at the far end of the continent, our Latin heritage has singled us out and, along with the awareness of how we differ from those surrounding us, has left us standing terribly alone in history. Never have I been able to distance myself from such loneliness, but it has also roused in me poetry as my very means for survival.
Nonetheless, the thought of Plato and of my country leads me to wonder at this astonishing moment when poetry stands in the spotlight, what exactly the bond is – or what it might be – between the poet and others, between poetry and society; what the role of poetry is in our secularised, technicalised, computerised, and globalised world.
Can the tremendous honour that the Princess of Asturias Foundation has bestowed on me for my poetry be considered evidence of the significance of the fount of hope that poetry still represents in this world? More precisely, can “that fragile, winged and holy thing”, as Plato defines poetry through the poet – detain our downward spiral into nothingness?
In fact, the real question – which I am not asking myself here for the first time, in fact – is “Can poetry save the world?” And my tentative but affirmative answer is supported by surprising truths.
Incredible as it may seem, in the 1950s and 60s, Romania’s communist prisons were the scene of authentic resistance via poetry. The world’s first Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Sighet has a room whose walls and ceiling are entirely covered with poems written by those detained there. Without pencil and paper, which were forbidden, each poem required three people to exist: the one who composed it, the one who memorised it, and the one who transmitted it in Morse code. Yet, despite these harsh conditions, thousands of poems were written and managed to pass from cell to cell and from prison to prison. In fact, the memoirs of political prisoners regularly describe the sacred ritual of the moment when new poems were passed on, when one prisoner was moved from one prison to another. Later, when the prisons were finally opened, the first thought of those released was to transcribe what they had memorised, without the names of the poets or those wrongly attributed to poets, in a veritable symphony of spiritual resistance, of turning the mystery of poetry into a weapon of defence against madness. Here lies proof that, under extreme conditions, when they felt their very essence was in jeopardy, people turned to poetry as a means of salvation. When the last molecules of freedom were concealed in poems, people who had been choked by repression, would search for them, find and inhale them, in order to survive. They could do this because poetry does not merely portray reality, but constructs another reality, a reality in which we can save ourselves. Strangely, etymologically, in ancient Greek the word for poetry itself comes from the verb poiein, which means to make… to construct.
However, cannot what saved us yesterday from fear, hatred and madness save us today from loneliness, from indifference, from the lack of faith, from the excesses of materialism and consumerism, and from the lack of spirituality? André Malraux, author of The Human Condition, predicted that “the 21st century will be religious or it will not be.” If, however, we are just too tired and lacking in religious fervour, might we not save ourselves instead by planting poetry in this wasteland?
For the very reason that robots will soon overshadow humans, we must do what is necessary to remain in touch with everything they cannot understand. For although they may be able to make verses, rhymes, rhythms, iambs, trochees, dactyls, sonnets, roundels or epic poems, they will never understand the suffering nor the stubbornness to express the inexpressible hidden under all those trappings, given that mystery that can be neither defined nor defeated. Clearly, Theodor W. Adorno was wrong when he wrote that “after Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric”, since he did not understand that suffering does not preclude poetry, but rather empowers it, lending it brilliance and meaning. Meaning of which freedom is only a small part.
At the end of the Roman Empire, which seemed to be the very end of the world, Christianity brought the ‘good news’, the gospel of love for one’s neighbour which, despite the vicissitudes of history, managed to keep us in balance for more than two thousand years, until, in the 20th century, hatred (of class or race, between women and men, between children and parents) came to the fore. Modern poetry, in fact, is the heart-rending expression of this existential imbalance.
I am happy to be able to confess, before a hall full of Spaniards, the impact that Miguel de Unamuno’s exclamation, “I grieve for Spain!” has had on my own intellectual and spiritual formation. I have used the Spanish philosopher’s grief at the tearing to pieces of his country as a touchstone and support in the current universe, in which nations become blurred in the face of ideologies, as an anchor in the depths of time, on the surface of which the ever-changing waves of post-modernity crash, a circumstance which I must resist because I grieve for Spain, I grieve for Romania, I grieve for the world.
Through Unamuno’s cry, which I discovered in my youth and have never forgotten, through the ten volumes of my work now translated into Spanish, spread throughout the immense Hispanic sphere, and through the honour conferred on me this evening, thanks to the kindness of the University of Salamanca, I am forever linked to Spain.
On this evening with a privileged echo, I am elated to be able to express my gratitude not only for this honour that has moved and touched me deeply, but for the opportunity it gives me to pronounce these words and know they will be heard.
The Princess of Asturias Award is different from every other prize for poetry because in its very definition it unites the mystery of poetry and the mystery of royalty, so strangely related to each other that, without understanding them or even knowing what they are for, people nevertheless sense that our world would be much less beautiful and less virtuous without them.
Thank you.
[18 October 2024]
