Poet

Magda Carneci

(Romania, 1955)

Biography

Magda Carneci is a poet, art essayist and prose writer. A cerebral poet, her work has been described as open “to daily life and the incandescent ‘real’, a trademark of Romanian poetry in the 1980s, on the one hand, and to programmatic and conceptual poetry on the other”, according to poet-translator Claudiu Komartin.

After the Revolution of December 1989, Carneci became actively involved in the political and cultural Romanian scene. Awarded a Ph.D. in art history in Paris in 1997, the poet has taken on diverse public positions: as a visiting professor at INALCO in Paris (2001-2005) and director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris (2006-2010). At present she is president of PEN Romania and a member of the European Cultural Parliament.

Komartin notes that:

If in the first part of her poetic evolution (her first three books) Magda Carneci built large poems, abstract and with a philosophic dimension, her discourse has shifted, since the volume Political Poems in 2000, towards a more direct and involved poetry, in which she discusses “the essence of patriotic feeling”, as Andrei Bodiu put it. In her latest volume, she takes on (as she has in her novel FEM) a delicate and crude exploration of femininity… lucid and sceptic, with both ontological and aesthetic aims.

Carneci is the author of many books of literature and art history. Some of her volumes of poetry in Romanian have been translated into English (Chaosmos, USA, 2006; A Deafening Silence, Great Britain, 2017), Dutch (Chaosmos, Go-Bos Press, 2004) and French (Psaume, 1997; Trois saisons poétiques, 2008, Chaosmos, 2013). Her Ph.D. thesis was published in French under the title Art and Power in Romania 1945-1989 (Paris, 2007) and in Romanian (Bucharest, 2013). Her novel FEM has been translated into French (Paris, Non Lieu, 2018). She also published several books of cultural essays in different languages. Her poems have appeared in translation in anthologies and international reviews.

LINKS
Bibliography
The poet’s web site