Ion Caraion

Ion Caraion (pen name of Stelian Diaconescu; May 24, 1923 – July 21, 1986) was a Romanian poet, essayist and translator.

Born in Rușavăț, Buzău County, he attended primary school at Râmnicu Sărat from 1930 to 1934, followed by Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu High School in Buzău from 1934 to 1942. While there, together with Alexandru Lungu, he edited Zarathustra poetry magazine with his own funds from 1940 to 1941. He entered the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest, which he graduated in 1948. His published debut came in 1939, with verses and reviews in Universul literar and Curentul literar. Caraion's first book, the 1943 Panopticum, was followed by two other poetry collections: Omul profilat pe cer (1945) and Cântece negre (1946). An active anti-fascist during World War II, he was an editor at Timpul and Ecoul newspapers. According to his prison record published by the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, the original sentence in 1958 was imprisonment with hard labour for life and was handed for espionage.

Freed in 1964, Caraion returned to literary activity after a break of nearly two decades, publishing Eseu in 1966 and the retrospective anthology Necunoscutul ferestrelor (1969), which won the Romanian Academy's Mihai Eminescu Prize. Earlier, he had received the Editura Forum Prize for the book Omul profilat pe cer (1945) and the Romanian Writers' Union Prize for his 1968 translation of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. The numerous poetry books he published in the 1970s placed him at the forefront of contemporary Romanian verse; these included Cârtița și aproapele (1970), Deasupra deasuprelor (1970), Cimitirul de stele (1971), Selene și Pan (1971), Munții de os (1972), Frunzele în Galaad (1973), Poeme (1974), Lacrimi perpendiculare (1978), and Interogarea magilor (1978). His essays are of a very personal nature, and are collected in Duelul cu crinii (1972), Enigmatica noblețe (1974), Pălărierul silabelor (1976), Bacovia. Sfârșitul continuu (1977) and Jurnal (vol. I, 1980). He selected, translated and prefaced several volumes of poetry from abroad: Franco-Provençal (1972), French (vol. I-III, 1974-1976), Canadian (1978) and American (1979). Aside from the tens of authors translated in these anthologies, he also translated and often prefaced the work of Marcel Aymé, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Sherwood Anderson, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Anna Akhmatova, Ezra Pound, and Raymond Queneau. He prefaced books by Georg Scherg, Mihail Crama, and Tudor Arghezi. A street in Buzău now bears his name.