Reading: Daniel Banulescu and Ernest Wichner »Was schön ist und dem Daniel gefällt« (What is beautiful and Daniel likes)

Ernest Wichner, who translated Daniel Banulescu’s poems into a German that is sometimes tender, sometimes nearly disturbingly raw, describes the Romanian poet’s work as »simultaneously repulsive and beautiful.« Was schön ist und dem Daniel gefällt is a mélange of the affectionate and erotic, the bawdy and strange. It weaves poetry and narration, mockery and desperation. Daniel Banulescu thus creates a collage-like fictional autobiography filled with self-irony. He has the reader take part in the self-invention of the poetic »I«, which attempts to define an individual space between self-assurance and desperation. How should individuality, how should writing poetry break societal and poetic taboos where they no longer exist? »How does one speak?« asks Wichner in his postscript, »when everything suddenly seems sayable and nobody is listening anymore?« The volume appeared in September 2009 with merz&solitude.

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After having been trained as an engineer in Romania, Daniel Banulescu (*1960 in Bucharest/Romania) works as a freelance author in Bucharest. A member of the Romanian novelist association, he has taken part in numerous international poetry and theater festivals and has won many awards. He was a 2008 fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Ernest Wichner (*1952 in Zăbrani, Banat/Romania) was a founding member of the novelist group Banat Action Group. In 1975, he immigrated to West Germany, where he studied German and political science at Berlin’s Freie Universität. Wichner is a member of the P.E.N.-Zentrum of Germany and lives in Berlin as an author, literary critic, translator and publisher. He has been the director of the Literaturhaus Berlin since 2003.