The Phoenix Poets-The Rope in Bloom

The first English translation of a Romanian poet’s celebrated and devastating 2012 collection.

In 1997, when he was nineteen, Radu Vancu discovered the body of his father, who had hanged himself in the family home. In the dark years that followed, Vancu turned to literature and self-medication. By 2009, after a decade of “Schopenhauer and vodka” and the publication of seven influential volumes of poetry and essays, Vancu was married, newly sober, and expecting his first child. With these themes in mind—bereavement, love, fatherhood, and poetry—he began writing Frânghia înflorită, or The Rope in Bloom, a poem of Dantesque ambition and scope. Through twenty-four cantos interwoven with prose vignettes, Vancu revisits the scene of the suicide and speaks with the lost soul of his father, who guides and advises him. Each canto begins with the same lines:

What your dead one, what the best-

beloved of your dead loved ones says to you

when you have the heart to dream of him:

Vancu’s verse depicts a nightmare underworld, at once terrible and banal, containing both rivers of blood and family movie nights. Prose vignettes punctuating the book narrate tender years in the early life of a new family. Here, the poet appears in everyday moments, watching cartoons with his son and seeing his wife off to work. Together, the cantos and prose accumulate into a charged collection, where the loss of a father looms over the joy of becoming one.

This volume is the first full-length English translation of Vancu’s work, marking a long-overdue introduction of the poet to anglophone audiences.