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Eminescu
Eternal Longing,
Impossible Love

    Four years in the making, the audio disc and its companion book offers for the first time an easy and direct means of acquaintance with a world poet.


CD tray


Track titles
(hear samples below)

1. Ode in Ancient Meter
Odă în metru antic/
Stars in the Sky – Stelele-n cer
2. Unto the Star – La steaua
3. The Legend of the Evening Star - Legenda Luceafărului
excerpt ('The Flight')
4. Over Tree Tops
Peste vârfuri /
listen
Why Don't You Come? --
De ce nu-mi vii?
5. Wretched Dionis --
Sărmanul Dionis
excerpt
6. With My Thoughts…
-- Cu gândiri şi cu imagini
7. Glossa - Glossa
listen
8. First Epistle-Satire
Scrisoarea I Satiră
excerpt
9. The Pairless Poplars --
Pe lângă plopii fără soţ
10. With Yearning Last...
Mai am un singur dor...
listen
11. A Sad Enchantment and Obscure --
Un farmec trist şi nenţeles


Dumitru Radu Popa - writer, New York, excerpt from Introduction to “The Legend of the Evening Star”, Prospero Press, 1996:
  "To me, these Eminescu translations are a clear winner! Adrian George Sahlean wagered and won a major and exciting bet: first with himself, and then with all scholars and translators who contend that the Romanian national poet’s works are untranslatable.... The classic dilemma of any translation, i.e. belles infideles versus laides fideles was solved here in an original, superior manner. Sahlean’s English translations of Eminescu give us belles fideles!"

    The poems are narrated by actor Jeremy Geidt (American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA )


Jeremy Geidt - narrator


and set to music performed by Romanian pianist Horia Mihail.


Horia Mihail - piano


    The book follows the order of the poems on the audio disk where the sequence reflects the artistic intention of the poems' translator, Adrian George Sahlean, who directed and produced the entire project.


Book sold out!
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$19.99
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Part of the proceeds will be used to fund Global Arts projects such as described throughout these pages.

Nina Cassian - poet, New York, excerpt from Introduction to “The Legend of the Evening Star”, Prospero Press, 1996.
  "…The work accomplished by Adrian George Sahlean is undoubtedly quite a feat. He is not the first who dared to climb the 'steps of perfection' and, I am sure, he will not be the last… On reading it, though, some of his solutions seem impossible to surpass. I consider this most recent translation of the 'Evening Star' a true cultural event which should be welcomed."


View other Eminescu translations by A. G. Sahlean and others @ www.luceafarul.com


CD

Reactions to the CD/Book

Terrence Montgomery - Director and Narrator of New York off-Broadway production of “The Evening Star,” 2005 and, again, in 2008:
  "Adrian G. Sahlean’s translations are for the English speaking world a great gift. The words of a poet true to the soul of his people and never sentimental, the beautiful poems in these faithful and inspired translations bring a music not yet heard by our American ears, and an awareness of a culture little known or understood. A triumph of light in a modern world shrouded in violence and darkness, it resurrects hope against despair."


Maurice Edwards - Writer, Performer, Former Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra:
   "
Like those other great Romantic lyric poets, Pushkin and Heine, Romania's greatest poet, Eminescu, resists translation. But, lo and behold, Adrian George Sahlean has done the seemingly impossible: he has given us the essence of Eminescu in these remarkably fluent, yet still faithful to the original, English versions."


Calin-Andrei Mihailescu - University of Western Ontario, excerpt from “Haunting Hedonism of Sound,” Literary Research Review, 2000:
  "
Sahlean has chosen the primacy of music. While loyally and almost flawlessly rewriting Eminescu’s prosody, this music’s accomplished task overcomes the translator. It also overcomes the readers, no longer pressed to claim the authorship of their reading: to poems in read, readers in love…. This “untranslatable” poet translates well, in the sense in which the loss of sublimity can be tamed and retained beautifully… Adrian George Sahlean joins the club, en maître…"