This project aims to translate Ana Blandiana’s poetry collection The Hour of Sand into Crimean Tatar, making an important work of Romanian literature accessible to Tatar-speaking readers. Published in 1983 by Eminescu Publishing House, the collection represents Blandiana’s mature lyricism, situated between poetry of inner experience and poetry of civic and artistic consciousness in the context of Romania’s communist dictatorship.

The translation focuses on several of the collection’s central themes and motifs: time and ephemerality, death and nothingness, the metaphor of ruin, resistance through culture, and artistic dissidence. These themes give the volume both an intimate and a historically significant dimension, transforming personal and existential reflections into meditations on freedom, memory, history, and the role of art under political oppression.

Tatar, which belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, is on the UNESCO list of the endangered languages. The translation of these poems facilitates the access of the Tatar community to the Ana Balandiana’s work and helps this community in terms of the survival of the language, because there is no institutionalized framework for promoting the Tatar language in Romania.