Oskar Pastior

Oskar Pastior (; 20 October 1927 – 4 October 2006) was a Romanian-born German poet and translator. He was the only German member of Oulipo.

Biography Born into a Transylvanian Saxon family in Sibiu (Hermannstadt) in the Kingdom of Romania, he was deported in January 1945, This became known in 2010, years after his death.

He was an informer until 1968, when he obtained a scholarship to Vienna and defected from Communist Romania.

Pastior left for Germany, living at first in Munich, then in West Berlin, where he lived the rest of his life. He was known for his translations of Romanian literature into German (among others, the works of Tudor Arghezi, George Coşbuc, Tristan Tzara, Gellu Naum, Marin Sorescu, and Urmuz).

He received the highly prestigious Georg Büchner Prize in 2006.

The Hunger Angel, the 2009 novel of Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller, is based partly upon Pastior's experiences as a forced laborer in the USSR. Initially, Pastior and Müller had planned to write a book about his experiences together, but he died in 2006 in Frankfurt.

Herta Müller said she thought that Pastior, as a homosexual, was vulnerable and susceptible to blackmail (in Romania, homosexuality was punishable by several years in prison).

Selected works