Two Poems from “Other Than That, Life Is Beautiful”

Diana Iepure is a Moldovan Romanian poet and translator born in 1970, in Chișinău. She has published three volumes of poetry, most recently Other Than That, Life Is Beautiful (2021), which was nominated for the Sofia Nădejde Award in poetry. She has translated several Russian-language writers into Romanian, including Nicolae Velmirovici, Boris Akunin, Alexei Salnikov, and Sergej Timofejev. Iepure lives in Bucharest and works at Paralela 45 publishing house.

Monica Cure is a Romanian American poet, translator, and dialogue specialist. Her translation of Moldovan-born Romanian writer Liliana Corobca’s novel The Censor’s Notebook was published in 2022 by Seven Stories Press, and her poetry translations have appeared in Plume, Asymptote, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her own poems have appeared in Plume, Roanoke Review, Rust + Moth, Little Stone Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently based in Bucharest.