Ilarie Voronca: Ulysses. Translation by Imre József Balázs. Illustrated by Rebeka Hatházi. Târgu Mureș, Lector Publishers, 2023.

Category: poetry
Pages: 84
Cover: hardback
ISBN 978-606-8957-45-6

The figure of Ulysses represents the key human experience of the eternal traveller who longs for home. The Romanian surrealist poet Ilarie Voronca’s (1903-1946) Ulysses shows the modern man in a constant state of wandering, searching and travelling as part of the zeitgeist. The poem summarises the poet’s life experiences, depicting urban and rural landscapes, personal and communal experiences, all linked by the poet’s trademark dense surrealist verse language. Voronca’s poem focuses on the commonplace, on the evocative wonders of the banal, and paints a mosaic-like picture of an era he calls ‘the century of mediocrity’.