Lucian Blaga, one of the foremost twentieth-century Romanian writers, produced an impressive body of work consisting of more than fifty volumes of poetry, philosophical writings, plays, aphoristic and memorial texts. Born on 9 May 1895 in the village of Lancram in the Sebes region of central Transylvania, Lucian Blaga was the ninth and youngest son of Ana (née Moga) and Isidor Blaga, a Romanian Orthodox priest. The poet's life began under the sign of "a fabulous absence of the word"--Blaga was completely silent until the age of four, "mute like a swan," as he writes in his poem "Autoportret" (translated as "Self-Portrait," 1985). Blaga's poetry is permeated with the mysterious silence under which his life began and under which it ended as secular history, in the form of Communist censorship, was closing down on him.

His childhood memories were generally happy, as he indicated in metaphorical form in...