Historical and Personal Time in Mariana Marin’s Poetry

Romanian poet Mariana Marin (1956–2003) made her debut in 1981 and published her last collection in 2002, an interval that covers about one decade of communism followed by one decade of transition to democracy. Like a litmus test, her poetry, known for its existential radicalism and authentic textualism, reflects the cultural acidity of despotism and its crippling effects on individuals. Her courage to express the truth in poetry situates her among the poets interested not only in their own private aesthetic experiences, but also in the role of literature as a form of protest and a cultural instrument. Contrary to what some contemporaries living in diaspora or in Romania said about her, she did not consider herself a political dissident, but a nonconformist writer, member of the 1980s generation. She wrote against the fosilization of the communist regime, marked by limitations, oppression and imposture, trying to conceive an imaginary universe that reflects and transforms these realities by adopting a concise style accessible to any reader. This paper aims to explore the ways in which Mariana Marin combined her acute sense of history with her unique perspective of personal time in several poems published before and after 1989.