Nina Cassian - Poet, New York, an 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."
Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu - University of Western Ontario, an 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 reading, 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…”
Maurice Edwards - Writer, Performer, Former Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. (2006) "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.”
Dumitru Radu Popa - writer, New York, an 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 result is nothing short of amazing… Sahlean’s translations reveal a profound unity of composition, consistent with Eminescu’s own conception and obvious on reading (and even more so on re-reading)… Sahlean renders ‘the ease and natural flow of the original composition' with the skill and talent of a virtuoso. For his dream about an Eminescu sound in English did come true in this book: we can and should read his translations aloud, with no fear that the splendor of the original has been lost or diminished… 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!'"