Poets attending the event: Rita Chirian, Val Chimic (Valentina Chiriţă), Claudiu Komartin and Răzvan Ţupa – from Romania and Almog Behar, Shai Dotan, Anat Levin and Yael Tomashov – from Israel.
Through this workshop, RCI Tel Aviv and Helicon wish to constitute a common corpus of translations from the Romanian and Israeli contemporary poetry. The Romanian and Israeli poets will translate each other’s work into their mother tongue, through an elaborate analysis of the text on a linguistic level and meeting the technical requirements of this type of translation, thus elaborating the translations without mediators. During their stay in Israel, the Romanian poets will have the opportunity to get acquainted, on a close level, both with the Israeli literary environment and its social context.
The Israeli poets that are attending the event are spokesmen of the new generation and are addressing in their works, among other topics, social themes, but also modern interpretations of Biblical passages.
Attempting the experiment that would disolve the line between practice and theory in literature, exploring the senses and the connections that establish themselves among human beings, approaching themes such as womanliness or various addictions of the common man are just a few of the elements that characterize the lyrics of the four Romanian poets.
Rita Chirian (born 1982): poet, translator, literary critic. She translated French poetry and prose, she is preparing a literary criticism book referring to Romanian post-communist poetry, and also a novel. Her poetry has appeared in international anthologies and has been translated in Swedish, French, English, Italian and German. Works: Sevraj [Withdrawal] (2006); Poker Face (2010).
Val Chimic / Chemical Wave, pen name for Valentina Chiriţă (born 1983): poet, translator, editor, performance artist. She graduated philology and theory of literature. Her poems are included in poetry anthologies in Romania and abroad. As a performance artist, she integrates poetry into interdisciplinary projects: Contaminations 2 at the National Center of Dance Bucharest – collective project, lecture performance, writing and dancing; AlterText, 2007, an itinerant project presented in four Romanian cities – multimedia project, installation, lecture performance; lecture-performances at the Goethe Institute in Bucharest, The French Institute in Bucharest, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest. EGG NO EGO has been, since 2011, the anonymous name she likes to use for performance art activities (http://eggnoego.tumblr.com/). Works: The Humiliation of Animals (2010).
Claudiu Komartin (born 1983): poet, literary critic, translator. His debut poetry collection, The Puppeteer and Other Insomnia (2003, 2007), has won numerous literary prizes, including Mihai Eminescu National Award and it's considered one of the best poetry volumes of the young generation. For the second poetry collection, Domestic Circus (2005), he was awarded the Romanian Academy Poetry Prize. Claudiu Komartin has translated poetry and prose from French, English and Italian. His poems have appeared in international anthologies and literary reviews and have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Polish, Swedish, Serbian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Hebrew and Korean. He is the editor in chief of the Poesis International literary magazine and of Max Blecher Publishing House. Works: The Puppeteer and Other Insomnia (2003, 2007); Domestic Circus (2005); A Season in Berceni (2009).
Răzvan Ţupa (born 1975): poet, journalist. He studied History of Religions and Culture and worked as a journalist. Between 2005 and 2007 he was in charge with a new poetry magazine, Versus-Verso. Since 2006 he has been Editor in chief for Cuvântul magazine but at the end of 2008 he decided to leave the Romanian cultural press. Since 1996 performed poetry in different places in Bucharest. He read poetry in Paris, Rome, Prague, New York, Stockholm and Berlin. His first collection of poetry was Fetish in 2001, awarded ex aequo the Mihai Eminescu National Award for first book of poetry. He published Romanian bodies a second book of poetry, in 2005, and Poetic. the Sky in Delft and other Romanian Bodies in 2011. His poems were selected for No Longer Poetry- New Romanian Poetry, an anthology published in UK (2005) and The Vanishing Point that Whistles an anthology of Romanian poetry released in United States (2012).
In 2005 he launched a series of weekly literary meetings. The initial Poetics of the quotidian format was changed in 2010 in Atelierelational, aimed to promote a relational aproach to poetry and counted more than 150 public events aimed in promoting contemporary literature. He developed workshops and concept events promoting relational poetry.
Works: Fetish (2001); Romanian Bodies (2005); Poetic. the Sky in Delft and other Romanian Bodies (2011).
