ABSTRACT
Northern Ireland and Romania occupy the “extreme sides of Europe”, in “cultural blind spots”, often overlooked or subsumed by the cultures around them, and an underexplored relationship exists between them, politically and poetically (Stadnicka). During the Northern Irish Troubles and in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, censorship at both the state and individual level was rampant, yet poetry proved to be a place one could bypass censorship, and therefore was a place of intersection where transcultural exchange could occur. Repositioning the work of Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson (1948–2019) and Romanian poet Marin Sorescu (1936–1996) in this interstitial space makes a remarkable overlap between their work apparent: In response to censorship, the poetry of Carson and Sorescu is rife with coded and evasive language, themes of uncertainty and the replaceability of self, and deconstruction of language as a stand-in for violence. By tracking similarities in the work of Carson and Sorescu both during and after censorship, this chapter looks beyond borders and languages to affirm poetry’s ability to communicate, connect, transcend, and transform.
