First performance of play in verses by departed Moldovan poet presented at Chisinau-based Mihai Eminescu national theatre

Chisinau, 20 December /MOLDPRES/ - The first performance of a play titled, Și focul aprins l-am ținut (And I Held the Lighted Fire), with lyrics by departed poet Leonida Lari, stage management of Nicolae Jelescu, presented by People’s Artist, actress Ninela Caranfil, took place at the Mihai Eminescu National Theatre on 19 December evening.    

Contacted by MOLDPRES, actress Ninela Caranfil said that she long ago had been willing to make a play with lyrics by Leonida Lari, whose seventh anniversary of death was marked on 11 December. “She was a great poet and an important personality in the movement of national revival and liberation. She was burning as a living flame for our national ideals. She wrote poems of high spiritual value, which are identical with her life. We made this play longing for Leonida Lari and in the context of the Great Union Centenary,” Ninela Caranfil also said.    

For his part, the director general of the Mihai Eminescu National Theatre, Petru Hadarca, said that Ninela Caranfil had been by the side of the leaders of the national liberal and revival movement and was inseparable from the poems by Leonida Lari. “I am happy for this play, which I hope will be very popular with the audience, including young people,” Petru Hadarca stressed.   

A departed Romanian poet, Marin Sorescu, in an essay, wrote that “it happens quite seldom for the poems of an author to be identical with his/her life and the life to become poetry at such a high level as in the case of Leonida Lari. She wrote with her own life, with the fate of a nation which finds in her the instrument of the song and the echo.”    

Leonida Lari was born in the Bursuceni village, northern Sangerei district, on 26 October 1949. In 1971, she graduated from the Philology Faculty of Moldova’s State University. Lari debuted with a book of poems titled, Piaţa Diolei (Square of Diola) (1974). This book was followed by many other volumes. Leonida Lari worked as editor-in-chief of the first Latin-script publication from Moldova, Glasul (The Voice).  She was lawmaker in the Supreme Soviet (parliament) of the USSR and in the parliament of Romania. In 1996, Lari was awarded the Order of the Republic. Leonida Lari died in Chisinau on 11 December 2011.