In time of calamity and social distress, it was often the writers who were called to imagine how the world would heal its wounds and begin again. Inspired by the creative examples of the past, we have summoned an extraordinary ensemble of authors and translators and challenged them to picture by way of prose and poetry how life re-emerging from the black silence of the pandemic may look like. We continue the series, created together with the National Museum of Romanian Literature, with polygraph writer, influential cultural journalist and president of the International Literature Festival of Timișoara (FILTM), ROBERT ȘERBAN, translated by American academic, translator, and poet, ANDREW K. DAVIDSON, a son of Phoenix, Arizona living in Bucharest.
ROBERT ȘERBAN (b. Romania, 1970) is a writer, journalist, and president of the International Literature Festival of Timișoara (FILTM). His first volume,Of course I’m exaggerating (poetry, 1994), was awarded the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for Best Debut. It was followed by Odyssex (poetry, 1996),Pepper on tongue (interviews, 1999),Timişoara in Three Friends (co-author, poetry, 2003),The Pink Book of Communism (co-author, memoirs, 2004),The Fifth Wheel (interviews, 2004), Feathertales / Annusdazumal (prose, 2005),Home Cinema (poetry, 2006),The Para-fine Death (poetry, 2010),Below the Line (poetry, 2015),Hiding in Transparency (poetry, with Pavel Veres - digital art), Grandma's Four Wings (2018),Camouflage Techniques (poetry, 2018). Robert's poems have been translated into Polish, Serbian, Hungarian, Czech, English, Spanish, Italian, Dutch,Yiddish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Hebrew, and Portuguese and published in numerous anthologies and literary magazines in Romania and abroad.