Maria Banuș (1914–1999)

Maria Banuș was born to a Jewish family in Bucharest, Romania. Her first poems were published in a literary journal in 1928, when she was 14. She graduated with a degree in law and philology from Bucharest University and contributed poems to numerous journals. She became famous in 1937 with her first collection of poems, Tara fetelor (The Land of Young Girls). She came to be regarded as Romania's outstanding poet on feminine themes. After World War II, although she wrote about Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, she began to focus on Communist social, humanitarian, and pacifist ideals. As she grew older, she returned to writing personal poems. She also wrote two plays and published translations of works by Goethe, Pushkin, Rilke, and Shakespeare, among others. Many of her poems have been translated into English as well as other languages. In 1965, she published an important anthology called Din poezia de dragoste a lumii (Love Poetry in World Literature). In 1978, she published parts of her World War II journal, Sub camuflaj (Under Camouflage).