Poetry and Living in Two Voices. Ana Blandiana and Ileana Mălăncioiu

Ana Blandiana feels, with unrelenting pain, the powerlessness to discern the limits of good and evil, to decribe moral values with sufficient rigour, to discern that unstable, hairline border that separates moral extremes. Out of this suffering, clearly expressed in melancholic-austere verses, the poet's gnoseological and ontological intransigence is reborn, summing up a conception of clear colours, unequivocal forms, inviolable and firm values; the dynamics of the poetic images is based on the antinomic tension between the cognisable and the unknowable, between thought and word, between the uncreated and the created, all these oppositions expressing, of course, the need to clarify ethical notions, to translate the moral will into the reality of the unequivocal materialised option. Some of Ilena Mălăncioiu's poems suggest mythologies made up of mysteries and archetypal guilt, of disturbing phantasms and figures of the shadow, the nothingness or the melancholic funereal, sublimated in a rhetoric of fear, of the fall, of the decline into the ephemerality of things, or into the labyrinth of the sensorial, the grim geography of the imaginary coming from acute perceptions of suffering, of the torments of history and the annihilation of being. Important voices of contemporary women's poetry, Ana Blandiana and Ileana Mălăncioiu essentialize their suffering in sharp verses, which repudiate any seduction, delusion or illusion, in a lyric that refuses ornamentation, stylistic pampering or aestheticizing narcosis, in favour of the ultimate and essential truth of being.