Carmen Bugan – författare

A first-hand account of the creative process that engages with the language of oppression and with politics in our time.How does the poet become attuned to the language of the world's upheaval? How does one talk insightfully about suffering, without creating more of it? What is freedom in language and how does the poet who has endured political oppression write himself or herself free? What is literary testimony?Poetry and the Language of Oppression is a consideration of the creative process that rests on the conviction that poetry is of help in moments of public duress, providing an illumination of life and a healing language. Oppression, repression, expression, as well as their tools (prison, surveillance, gestures in language) have been with us in various forms throughout history, and this volume represents a particular aspect of these conditions of our humanity as they play out in our time, providing another instance of the communion, and sometimes confrontation, with the language that makes us human.

This book looks at how the poetry of Seamus Heaney, born of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has encountered the 'historically-tested imaginations' of Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Zbigniew Herbert. It argues that East Europeans have made a strong impact on Heaney's work.

‘A modern classic’ – The Sunday Times‘This story starts roughly in the 1970s, a few years after I was born, about the time when I began to have memories and my father’s codename was already long established as “Andronic”, a name we learned about only last summer . . .’Burying the Typewriter is the haunting true story of life behind the Iron Curtain, and one teenage girl’s flight from the Romanian secret police and the Ceausescu regime.At 2 a.m. on 10 March 1983, Carmen Bugan’s father left the family home, alone. That afternoon, Carmen returned from school to find officers of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, in her living room. Her father had been detained for his protests against the Communist regime in Romania, and the family home was now laced with surveillance devices. Overnight, Carmen’s life became a living hell of paranoia and small-scale resistance, her schoolteachers and the friends and neighbours all around her transformed into potential informants.Burying the Typewriter is the extraordinary story of Carmen’s coming of age in the twilight years of Ceausescu’s rule. Above all, it is a luminous, compassionate, and unflinchingly honest book about the price of courage, the pain of exile, and the power of memory.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Carmen Bugan is the author of the collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians, the memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police, and the monograph Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. The House of Straw is her second collection.

In 1989 the five members of the Bugan family were allowed to leave Ceausescu's Romania with one suitcase each and death-threats in their wake. In 2010 the poet Carmen Bugan took possession of 1,500 pages of Securitate files on her father and in 2013 a further 3,000 pages of secret files on her mother, sister, brother and herself. Releasing the Porcelain Birds is about the transformation of that extraordinary history of Cold War Europe into poetry; it is about writing the self free and how poetry drawn in a new and tender narrative can do this. In this manner Releasing the Porcelain Birds is one continuous poem which faces down dispossession and reaches towards exuberance.

"[...] a word-smithy that is now owned by an incorruptible woman of letters. Her words are in open view and in plain hearing for the eyes and ears of people who value every single tongue but not the forked one." -Christopher Ricks, Dead Ground 2018-1918"I can certainly attest [...] now, after being in Bugan's world of `frail syllables', that such an equilibrium between history and art is not only possible, but is often the only way to assuage pain, to release the caged birds, to free oneself from the shackles of grief." -Simon Gatev, Dundee University Review of the Arts"Carmen Bugan has the ability to transform deeply personal experiences into poetic language without losing the radiant particulars from which they sprang." -Frank Beck, The Manhattan Review

"In these poems, many addressing the 'long Sunday' of the pandemic years, Carmen Bugan reflects on the impact of the virus through the prism of personal family moments and local experience. She writes with disciplined precision, always attendant to the necessary nuance poetry demands. Her lyric voice and moral imagination in these poems gathers its energy from the urgency of daily concerns and anxieties, as well as the need to witness. Set against a time of crisis, she maintains a sense of wonder at the resilience of nature, her children, her own spirit. At the heart of this compelling collection is assurance and the poet's good instruction to herself 'to feel the real, to protect myself against the imagined': advice each of us should heed." -Gerard Smyth, Poetry Editor, The Irish Times

In Tristia, Carmen Bugan tests the lyric against loss once again, as everything collapses around her, but this time much closer to home. These are poems about forging a stronger self in the fires of her lifetime, whether they are the forest fires that cover the American continent, the war in Ukraine, or her own world turned to ashes. The speaker in the poem 'Enheduana' laments: He spat on my oven full of food, Walked over my baskets full of bread,Soiled the marriage bed, left the children crying, And my heart toiling with heaven and earth.Her poems insist on the beauty of the natural world, itself under threat, as a source of strength, as in 'Hawk,' where the speaker prays:Hawk, take everything That is weak in me, In your claws: eat it. Leave me wise and patient.