Syllables of Flesh

Romania’s Floarea Ţuţuianu is a fiercely sensual poet and visual artist, known for her provocative playfulness with words and images.

The 2007 recipient of the Lucian Blaga International Poetry Festival Prize, she is the only woman to be included in Bucharest’s definitive anthology of contemporary poets, Manualul de literature. In Romania, she has published six books of poetry, and her words and images have traveled the world. Now, for the first time in the United States, her poems—masterfully translated by Adam L. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti—are gathered in this book, some with their original counterparts, paired with arresting photo plates wrought by the artist herself. Strange, ferocious, and lovely, her images and words leave a lingering echo.

Floarea Țuțuianu [“Tsu-tsu-ya’-nu”] graduated from the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of the Fine Arts in Bucharest and turned to publishing poetry after the Romanian revolution at the end of 1989. She has published six books of poetry: The Fish Woman (Femeia pește, Editura Cartea Românească, 1996); Libresse oblige (Editura Crater, 1998); The Lion Mark (Leul Marcu, Editura Aritmos, 2000); a volume of selected and new poems, The Art of Seduction (Arta seducției, Editura Vinea, 2002); and Your Magnanimity (Mărinimia Ta, Editura Brumar, 2010). Recently, she compiled an anthology of her erotic poetry gathered from previous collections throughout her career, Sappho (Editura Cartea Românească, 2012). Țuțuianu has commented, “Sappho and Emily Dickinson are my favorite poets. I would like to live like Sappho and write like Emily. Or to live like Emily and write like Sappho.” Țuțuianu is a graphic designer at the Romanian Cultural Institute Publishing House in Bucharest, where she lives. She continues to work as a visual artist as well as a poet, and her numerous exhibits have appeared not only in Romania but also in Greece, France, Italy, Turkey, Israel, England, Holland, Germany, and Austria. In 2011, Adam J. Sorkin and Irma Giannetti published My Dog—the Soul/Câinele meu—sufletul, a dozen poems in a dual-language chapbook published in New Zealand from Cold Hub Press. Țuțuianu’s poems in Sorkin’s and Giannetti’s translations have appeared in notable poetry magazines in the U.S. and the U.K., including The Marlboro Review, Artful Dodge, Turnrow, Tampa Review, New Letters, Puerto del Sol, 5 AM, Diode, Poetry International, Blood Orange Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, St. Petersburg Review, and two anthologies, The Vanishing Point That Whistles: Contemporary Romanian Poetry, ed. Paul Doru Mugur, Sorkin and Claudia Serea (Talisman House, 2011), and Romanian Writers on Writing, ed. Norman Manea and Sanda Cordoș (Trinity University Press, 2011). Her poetry has also been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Czech, and Turkish. In 2007, she was awarded the Poetry Prize of the Lucian Blaga International Poetry Festival.

Adam J. Sorkin has published more than fifty books of translation, and his work has won the Poetry Society (U.K.) Prize for European Poetry Translation as well as the International Quarterly Crossing Boundaries Award, the Kenneth Rexroth Memorial Translation Prize, the Ioan Flora Prize for Poetry Translation, and the Poesis Translation Prize, among others. His recent publications include A Sharp Double-Edged Luxury Object by Rodica Draghincescu, translated with Antuza Genescu (Červená Barva Press, 2014); Gold and Ivy/Aur și iederă by George Vulturescu, translated with Olimpia Iacob (Eikon, 2014); The Starry Womb by Mihail Gălățanu, translated with Petru Iamandi and the author (Diálogos Books, 2014); and The Book of Anger by Marta Petreu, translated with Christina Zarifopol-Illias and L[iviu Bleoca (Diálogos Books, 2014). The Hunchback’s Bus by Nora Iuga, translated with Diana Manole, appeared from Bitter Oleander Press in the fall of 2016. Eclogue by Ioana Ieronim, translated with the author, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press. Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of English, Penn State Brandywine.

Irma Giannetti grew up in Cluj-Napoca, in the Transylvania region of Romania, speaking Hungarian and Romanian. She studied English and French as an undergraduate in Romania, then English and Comparative Literature as a graduate student in the United States, including at Penn State. At Penn State University Park, she has worked in technology support and now serves as an adviser in the Division of Undergraduate Studies, an enrollment unit for first and second-year exploratory students. Her co-translations with Adam J. Sorkin have appeared widely in literary magazines, as well as in a number of anthologies. Giannetti has also contributed translations of articles from French and Romanian to a special issue of Dada/Surrealism, “From Dada to Infra-noir: Dada, Surrealism, and Romania” (2015).