Maria Banuș

Maria Banuș (born Marioara Banuș; April 10, 1914 – July 14, 1999)

After the war and with the rise of the communist regime, she entered opinion journalism, writing for Gazeta literară, Contemporanul, Steaua and Viața Românească. Her books Bucurie (1949), Despre pământ, (1954), Ție-ți vorbesc, Americă (1955), and Se arată lumea (1956) were expressions of the regime's officially sanctioned socialist realism. She used animal epithets to depict the former elite of the "bourgeois-landlord regime," from politicians to industrialists and kulaks, and foreign enemies, with a place of honor reserved for British and American "imperialists" ("the packs hungry for a new war", "cursed high-born dogs ready to murder", "let the ravens learn", "nothing scares me, neither the snakes, nor the jackals"). These writings brought her prizes and medals, public recognition, publication in schoolbooks and translation into foreign languages, as well as lavish praise from subservient critics such as Dumitru Micu, but also Tudor Vianu. During this period, she translated poets favored by the authorities (Pablo Neruda, Nâzım Hikmet, Nikola Vaptsarov), as well as fine versions of classic authors such as William Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. She wrote several short poetry books in the same style: Torentul (1957), Poezii (1958), Magnet (1962), Metamorfoze (1963), and Diamantul (1965). the special prize of the Romanian Writers' Union in 1986, and the Herder Prize in 1989.

Banuș died in Bucharest in 1999 and was buried in the city's Filantropia Cemetery.