Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of Pain is a Foreign Country: An Anthology of Recent Romanian Poetry, edited by Paul Doru Mugur and Claudiu Komartin. The book is published by the Center for Romanian Studies, an independent academic research institute, based in the United States, whose mission is to promote knowledge and understanding of Romanian history and culture worldwide. Titles from the Center for Romanian Studies are published exclusively by Histria Books.
Pain is a Foreign Country is an anthology that gathers fifty young Romanian poets to map the exact distance between human vulnerability and our increasingly mechanized lives. This anthology of modern Eastern European verse reads less like a formal collection and more like the shared diary of a generation navigating life online and off.
What makes this release so sharp is its refusal to look away from digital alienation. These writers sit at a specific cultural intersection, caught between post-communist memory and an artificially intelligent future. Yet they ground massive anxieties in quiet, physical moments, like making coffee for one or waiting for a tram in the winter. The voices are sardonic, tender, and startlingly raw. At a time when readers are exhausted by artificial gloss, this book offers something vital. It proves the most radical thing you can do right now is admit exactly where it hurts.
Paul Doru Mugur is a Romanian writer, translator, and editor whose work connects international literary communities. He founded the widely acclaimed multilingual cultural magazine Respiro in 2000 and has co-edited four extensive poetry anthologies, including Born in Utopia and The Vanishing Point That Whistles. A prolific translator of legendary voices ranging from Octavio Paz to Mihai Eminescu, Mugur is also the author of two original poetry collections, a book of aphorisms, and a volume of short stories.
