ROMANIANS IN SPAIN. PORTRAITS - Catalina Iliescu Gheorghiu thinks to country, works from passion and longing

AGERPRES correspondent Ruxandra Constantinescu reports: Besides building bridges among cultures, translations open gates to civilizations dominated by the force of a given language and to their cultural richness, suddenly making them available to anybody.

For Catalina Iliescu Gheorghiu, Ph.D, an English lecturer at the University of Alicante, Romanian people and customs are worth being, and should be disseminated in Spain — the country with the greatest number of translated Romanian literature works. — and generally to all the worldwide readers who understand Spanish. Long story short, this is how the most recent success, a big bilingual poetry anthology titled 'Miniaturas de tiempos venideros. Poesía rumana contemporánea' (Miniatures of Times to Come. Contemporary Romanian Poetry); it includes a wide selection of Romanian poetry of the last four decades, and it enjoyed success both among the public and the critics.

Iliescu Gheorghiu is a teacher of English philology; a coordinator of the summer school of the University of Alicante; a translator of Romanian poetry; the initiator of the first official Romanian examinations in the world. She is also a tireless organizer and promoter of cultural projects focused on Romanian language and on Romania, the country she left many years ago; she nevertheless found the force and will to preserve a live, constant cultural bond with it. She avowed working out of 'love and longing', and told AGERPRES that — although she does not have much time — she thinks that the excess of energy must be channelled to Romania.

She uses to translate and publish Romanian poetry — previously, 'En la cuerda del tender' (On the Clothesline) by Dinu Flamand, published in Spain in 2012; she has also...