In 1997, when he was 19, Vancu discovered the body of his father, who had died by suicide in the family home. In the difficult years that followed, Vancu turned to literature and self-medication. By 2009, after a decade of what he describes as “Schopenhauer and vodka” and the publication of seven volumes of poetry and essays, Vancu was married, newly sober and expecting his first child.

With these experiences in mind, including bereavement, love, fatherhood and poetry, Vancu began writing Frânghia înflorită, or The Rope in Bloom, a book-length poem of Dantesque ambition and scope. Across 24 cantos interwoven with prose vignettes, Vancu revisits the scene of his father’s death and speaks with his lost father, who guides and advises him.

Each canto begins with the same lines:

Vancu’s verse depicts a nightmare underworld that is at once terrible and banal, containing both rivers of blood and family movie nights. Prose vignettes punctuating the poem turn to the tender, everyday moments of a new family, as Vancu watches cartoons with his son and sees his wife off to work. Together, the cantos and prose trace the tension between the loss of a father and the experience of becoming one.

The Rope in Bloom is the first full-length English translation of Vancu’s work, bringing his poetry to a broader English-language readership. The translation was completed by Paula and Cyrus Console-Soican and published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026.

Vancu is a Romanian poet and public intellectual and the author of 11 volumes of poetry, along with numerous books of prose. He has also translated major works of American poetry into Romanian, including Ezra Pound’s Cantos and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. He is the editor of Poesis International and Transilvania, founder and organizer of the annual international poetry festival “Poets in Transylvania,” and a former president of PEN Romania. He lives in Sibiu, Romania, where he is a University Professor of Arts and Letters at Lucian Blaga University.