Mircea Dinescu is the most important representative of the first postmodern generation of Romanian writers, which emerged in the 1970s. Described by the critic Romul Munteanu as the "enfant terrible" of contemporary Romanian poetry, whose "state of grace" is his "condition of permanent revolt," and by Dennis Deletant in his introduction to Dinescu's Exile on a Peppercorn: The Poetry of Mircea Dinescu (1985) as the "moralist of the modern age," Dinescu has combined candid lyrical confession with political satire, questioning relentlessly not only totalitarian modes of thinking but also the Enlightenment heritage of technocratic development and overrationalization. An outspoken critic of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorial communist regime in the 1980s and a rallying figure in the early days of the 1989 revolution, Dinescu helped redeem the nation's trust in its intellectual and creative elite. Since 1989 he has continued to act as the country's critical consciousness through his political editorials and the...