Mihail Soare
INDEPENDENT WRITER
When some machine that sees through flesh and bone discovers an illness inside you, sitting there quietly like a thief ready to assume the identity of its host, you try to grow accustomed to it and to coexist with the unexpected tenant before becoming the illness
yourself. Sometimes you succeed, and then an authentic camaraderie is born, one that lies beyond the common understanding of normality; and if, by some miracle or by the hand of who knows what disagreeable quack posing as a physician, you should awaken healed, you
will realize that the very affliction you escaped had completed you. The same happened to me with writing when I discovered it hidden within an interior that did not seem especially spacious, sprawling there like a pasha over the years swarming with experiences, piled up like soft cushions yearning for the phantoms of concubines. An illness turned vice, only to end as obsession — that, in a Hemingwayesque interpretation embraced by yours truly as well, is what writing appears to be. A singular obsession without cure, I know it well.
EN PASSANT
“Mihail Soare is a first-rate poet, solitary and bohemian, a fanciful and ironic neo-symbolist, a revelation — at least to me — within today’s Romanian lyric poetry, dominated as it is by a skeptical and wingless minimalism.”
— Eugen Simion, former President of the Romanian Academy
“I merely urge you to seek out something written by Mihail Soare. You can even find him on Facebook, at Eikon Publishing House, elsewhere too — you will find him somehow if you truly wish to. If you must, pirate his PDFs, steal his books from wherever you can get them.
But read him, because it would be a shame not to come face to face with a great poet and an equally great prose writer.”
— Valentin Ajder, editor
“Mihail Soare is the only Romanian writer critics ought to buy drinks for, and not the other way around.”
— Victor Atanasiu, literary critic
“I keep reading some of this author’s poems and asking myself what the hell language he wrote them in. To say it is Romanian would be correct, in a way. More precisely, it is also Romanian. Otherwise, it feels like a language invented by him alone. And only a handful of Romanian writers — the true titans of this literary tongue — have dared reinvent the Romanian language. Mihail Soare is among them. (…) Which is why any reckoning of contemporary poets must begin with him (and perhaps two others), just as no canon could exist without Eminescu, for instance. Mihail Soare is the poet of the opening century, writing
with devastating force, one for whom recognition arriving out of the wilderness would likely seem, knowing him well, a bad joke.”
— Șerban Codrin, poet
FROM MY BOOKS
LIVRESCU
“I say this plainly: it is the best book by a Romanian author I have read in a very long time.
Livrescu is one of those rare books that annoys me when they end. Because they end. And because you know, with that feeling belonging to a reader who has entered the book up to the hilt, that this is all there is. That afterward there can be no second part, nothing else. Or rather, perhaps there could be. But it would be a pity. For I allow myself, with my innate
arrogance, to claim that it would be impossible to recreate that atmosphere once the final page has been turned. And how many books in a lifetime can we truly say that about?”
Cristian China Birta, blogger
SCRIPTURALIA
“Scripturalia is, without question, the finest author anthology published in Romania in quite a number of years, and I cannot imagine what literary competition — provided the results were
not predetermined — it would fail to win. (…) Yet its author possesses an almost irritating modesty, I would say, and I am convinced he would remain exactly the same even if, through some miracle, he were awarded the Nobel Prize.”
Valentin Ajder, editor
“Mihail Soare is a virtuoso of language such as very few others in Romanian literature today could be called.”
Vianu Mureșan, philosopher and writer
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