Petre Stoica was born in 1931 and has been publishing books since 1957, with more than twenty volumes to his name, including, recently, The Master of the Hunt Visits (2002), An Old Man’s Insomnia (2000), and, to jump back, in the early post-communist period, the important  Tienamen Square II (1990). He has published steadily while also being a major translator of German-language poetry into Romanian, and he has won numbers of prizes including the Writers’ Union Grand Prize in 2001 and the National Mihai Eminescu Poetry Prize in 1994. Prominent Romanian critic Bogdan Lefter has called his poetry of the last two decades “radically anti-metaphoric, . . . impetuous-ironic and parodic,” “playful-ingenuous.”  His subject is often rural, but completely divorced from peasant traditions, with a playful fantasy, a refined satiric atmosphere.  He is an notable precursor of the Romanian postmodernism of the 1980s and on, but in his continued literary achievement, he may well also be seen to future generations as one of the movement’s most significant exemplars.
 
My co-translator, Ioana Ieronim, is an important Romanian writer, the author of ten collections of poetry; she has four books in English in my translation with her:  The Triumph of the Water Witch (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2000), a volume of prose poems that was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Prize, Oxford with a special commendation from the judges; 41, a bilingual volume of poetry (Cartea Românească Publisher, Bucharest, 2003); and two new books that came out in early 2005, Dragon Kites over the Pyrenees (a trilingual volume of new poems with their English versions and Catalan versions as well) and Escalator.

As for me, (Adam J. Sorkin) my translations have appeared widely. Recent volumes of translation include Radu Andriescu’s The Catalan Within, translated with the poet, just out from Longleaf Press, and three 2006 books: Magda Cârneci’s Chaosmos, translated with Cârneci (White Pine), Mihai Ursachi’s The March to the Stars, mostly with the poet (Vinea Press), and Mariana Marin’s Paper Children, with various collaborators (Ugly Duckling). My 2004 book, Marin Sorescu’s The Bridge (Bloodaxe), won the 2005 European Poetry Translation Prize of The Poetry Society, London). My other Bloodaxe books of Liliana Ursu (The Sky Behind the Forest, 1997) and Ioana Ieronim (The Triumph of the Water Witch, 2000) were both shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Prize, Oxford. I received an NEA Poetry Translation Fellowship for 2005-2006.