'The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta' (Cimitirul Vesel de la Sapanta) - a Purple Martin Press book of the unique Romanian graveyard featuring humorous epitaphs on painted crosses.
The book was designed by renowned Dutch designer Tessa van der Waals, with New York photographer Peter Kayafas, translations by A. G. Sahlean, an introductory essay by Sanda Golopentia (Brown University), and a Translator Note.
The album details a unique graveyard in Maramures, northern Romania that is over a century old with new crosses still being added in that traditional style.
The introductory essay by Sanda Golopentia can be read here. For the Translator Note
click for either English or Romanian.
The album details a unique graveyard in Maramures, northern Romania that is over a century old with new crosses still being added in that traditional style.
The Album is not sold in bookstores.
A short presentation movie with cross details and sample epitaphs narrated on original Maramures music can be viewed following this link to Eakins Press site.
Boston Phoenix review of the event "Grave matters -The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta":
"Entering the small back room at Gallery Kayafas you feel you’ve been transported into the shadowy pages of a small, mysterious book... /The book/...celebrates the riveting and crude carved wooden grave markers in an isolated village in northern Transylvania. It also chronicles the germination and fruition of real folk art. A carver of gates and crosses, Ion Stan Patras (1908–1977) eventually began carving the likenesses of his fellow villagers for their tombs."
"Over time, the likenesses became representations of a central theme in the life of the deceased (a woman who sang in her church choir, a man who loved his oxen) or, more dramatically, a re-enactment of the moment of death. Lightning strikes one ill-fated farmer; a rabid horse spits in the face of another; vehicular accidents abound; a youth meets his end rollerblading in a Paris subway; the shepherd Saulic Ion was shot and beheaded by a Hungarian..."
"But the enchanting power of these colorfully painted scenes is only partly explained by Patras’s carving. Below each portrait or tableau, a poem has been etched into the wood, and thanks to a linguistic device that’s as simple as Patras’s sculptural style, The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta casts a hypnotic spell. Each poem is delivered in the first person, the voice of the dead."
"All are terse, idiosyncratic, and utterly personal — you’re delivered into the frequent sorrows, occasional joys, and continuing passions of a people."...
..."The poems’ translator, Adrian G. Sahlean, has rendered the rhymed trochaic couplets of the Romanian into English that’s earthy, uncomplicated, and direct. The result reads as uncompromised and strange..."
To read the Translator Note click for either English or Romanian.
