Four years in the making, the audio disc and its companion book offered for the first time an easy and direct means of acquaintance with a world poet.
The book follows the order of the poems on the audio disk where the sequence reflects the artistic intention of the poems' translator, Adrian George Sahlean, who directed and produced the entire project.
The poems are narrated by the late actor Jeremy Geidt of the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA.
The entire audiobook was set to music tracks tailored to the content and performed by Romanian pianist Horia Mihail.
Reactions to the CD/Book
Nina Cassian - poet, New York, excerpt from Introduction to “The Legend of the Evening Star”, Prospero Press, 1996. "…The work accomplished by Adrian George Sahlean is undoubtedly quite a feat. He is not the first who dared to climb the 'steps of perfection' and, I am sure, he will not be the last… On reading it, though, some of his solutions seem impossible to surpass. I consider this most recent translation of the 'Evening Star' a true cultural event that should be welcomed."
Terrence Montgomery - Director and Narrator of New York off-Broadway production of “The Evening Star,” 2005 and, again, in 2008:
"Adrian G. Sahlean’s translations are for the English speaking world a great gift. The words of a poet true to the soul of his people and never sentimental, the beautiful poems in these faithful and inspired translations bring a music not yet heard by our American ears and an awareness of a culture little known or understood. A triumph of light in a modern world shrouded in violence and darkness, it resurrects hope against despair."
Maurice Edwards - Writer, Performer, Former Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra:
"Like those other great Romantic lyric poets, Pushkin and Heine, Romania's greatest poet, Eminescu, resists translation. But, lo and behold, Adrian George Sahlean has done the seemingly impossible: he has given us the essence of Eminescu in these remarkably fluent, yet still faithful to the original, English versions."
Calin-Andrei Mihailescu - University of Western Ontario, excerpt from “Haunting Hedonism of Sound,” Literary Research Review, 2000:
"Sahlean has chosen the primacy of music. While loyally and almost flawlessly rewriting Eminescu’s prosody, this music’s accomplished task overcomes the translator. It also overcomes the readers, no longer pressed to claim the authorship of their reading: to poems in read, readers in love…. This “untranslatable” poet translates well, in the sense in which the loss of sublimity can be tamed and retained beautifully… Adrian George Sahlean joins the club, en maître…"
Dumitru Radu Popa - writer, New York, excerpt from Introduction to “The Legend of the Evening Star”, Prospero Press, 1996:
"To me, these Eminescu translations are a clear winner! Adrian George Sahlean wagered and won a major and exciting bet: first with himself, and then with all scholars and translators who contend that the Romanian national poet’s works are untranslatable.... The classic dilemma of any translation, i.e. belles infideles versus laides fideles was solved here in an original, superior manner. Sahlean’s English translations of Eminescu give us belles fideles!"
View other Eminescu translations by A. G. Sahlean and others @ www.luceafarul.com
