Liviu Deleanu was born in Iași, the capital of the Romanian province of Moldavia, in a house on strada Veche in 1911. His father, Semi Kligman, was a poet in Yiddish and Hebrew, who supported his earliest poetic efforts. Deleanu hated his childhood, recalling the privations faced by him and his mother after his father was conscripted during the First World War. His mother, who was not well educated, instilled in him a love of language and folk imagination. However, it was his aunt, famous in the family for her verses, from whom he inherited his poetic gift. Deleanu studied at a cheder and at a Romanian gymnasium. At age 11, he began an apprenticeship as a lithographer and a proofreader, and quickly entered the literary life. He joined the magazine Vitrina Literarǎ as a staff-member at the age of 16, where he wrote under the pseudonyms Cliglon and C.L. Deleanu. The same year, under the name Liviu Deleanu, he published his first collection of poetry Oglinzi fermecate. In 1928, along with the poet Virgil Gheorghiu, Deleanu founded his own journal Prospect, which was recognised by George Călinescu in his authoritative Istoria literaturii române as one of the first modernist periodicals published in Romania. In the first three issues, edited by Deleanu himself, appeared poems by him and Virgil Gheorghiu; from the fourth issue onwards, other names appeared as well: Mihail Bicleanu, Sașa Pană, Aurel Zaremba and others.
In 1928, Deleanu continued his literary career in Bucharest. During his sojourn in the Romanian capital, he wrote theatre reviews, reportage, articles on art, advertising, printed translation from the Yiddish, and published fragments of his novel in such journals as Adam, Ediţie specialǎ, Bilete de papagal and Cuvîntul liber. His second collection of poetry Ceasul de veghe was released by Santier publishing house in 1937 to favourable reviews from Bucharest's critics such as George Călinescu, Izabella Sadoveanu, and Enrica Furtuna. Deleanu's third collection Glod alb was published by Cultura Poporului in 1940. In it was included a long poetic cycle on the Spanish Civil War that was originally written in 1937, Sabii peste Spania, along with well-known poems such as Serenade pe baricade, Don Quijote, Guernica, A doua moarte. In the prewar years, some of Deleanu's poems became popular songs, including Sanie cu zurgălăi, which was for a long time considered the national song.
In Moldavia
After the absorption of Bessarabia into the USSR, Deleanu moved to Chișinău and immediately joined the literary life of the city. Along with Bogdan Istru, he translated the National Anthem of the Soviet Union into Moldovan. During the Second World War, he lived in Moscow, translating Russian poetry into Moldovan. Some of the poets he translated were Ivan Krylov, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Sergei Yesenin, Sergey Mikhalkov, Korney Chukovsky, Aleksandr Tvardovsky as well as Agniya Barto. He wrote Balada lui Kotovschii, Ballada urii and several other works. From 1943, he also worked as literary editor of the ensemble Doina. Returning to Chișinău in 1944, Deleanu received news of the death of his parents during the Iași pogrom of 1941, in which during a week, more than 14,000 Jews of the town were murdered. Deleanu wrote the anguished poem Coşmar. The same year, he met his soon-to-be wife, Baka Rivilis, at Soroca, where she was working at the provincial archives. For the rest of his life, she remained a faithful and energetic promoter of Deleanu's oeuvre while maintaining a busy schedule of her own translation work. In the post-war years, he wrote Elegy to victory and his great poem Krasnodon, which was influenced by A. A. Fadeyev's Young Guard. In 1951, he wrote the dramatic poemBuzduganul fermeca, based on a Moldovan folk-tale; it remains very popular in the Moldovan theatre to this day. His wartime poems were published in the 1952 collection Vremuri noi. In subsequent years, he published numerous other collections of poetry: Mi-i drag să meşteresc, Poezii şi poeme, Cǎnturi de ieri şi de azi, Stihuri alese, Freamăt, Ieşire din legendǎ, Dragostea noastrǎ cea de toatǎ zilele, Versuri. He also wrote books for children: Poezii pentru copii, Nepoţica o învaţă pe bunica, Licurici: stihuri pentru mici, Triluri vesele. After his premature death, Deleanu's oeuvre went into several editions, including the collections Scrieri, De la mic la mare, Cartea dorului, Destăinuire, Strigăt din inimă, Cu cântări şi flori pe plai, Şi de n-ar fi cuvântul iubire, Chem cântecul, Ala-bala portocala, Ciocârlii pentru copii, Poezii, Zǎpǎcilǎ. Selected poems began to appear in collections in Romania: Răscolite tăceri and Prutele, tǎcutele! in Timișoara, and Vremi în alte vremi topite in Iași. The publisher Causa Mundi released Deleanu's translations of Pushkin's The Fisherman and the Golden Fish. Many of his children's poems gained prominence in Russian translation. Some of Deleanu's works were set to music: Poem on Haia Lifşiţ by the composer Solomon Lobel for mixed choir, a cappella and solo. During the last months of his life, Deleanu finished The Book of Wishes, having written a poem a day. He died in hospital on 12 May 1967. During his literary career in Moldova, Deleanu never received any literary prizes. Posthumously, however, he was awarded the Boris Glavan Komsomol Prize in 1967 for his poem Tinereţe fǎrǎ moarte. These days, his poems are included in the curricula of Moldovan schools. In Romania, Deleanu's works remain practically unknown, and only recently have they started appearing in disparate books and magazines, despite the fact that his Romanian sojourn had been one of the most fruitful of his life. The reasons for this obscurity can be found in the realities of pre-war Romania and the political circumstances that forced him to emigrate to Soviet Moldavia. For the same reasons, Deleanu's artistic oeuvre accomplished while in Romania remained practically unknown in Soviet Moldavia as well.
Style
Deleanu's poetry evolved from the modernism of his early days to a more traditional style of classical poetry in his later years. Its motives, concepts and expressive works of the period between the first and second world wars, are modern, fitting perfectly in the direction of Romanian poetry of those years. He used modernist techniques and stylistic devices of poetry including free verse. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, Deleanu's literary profile took a new and different form. In his poetry collections, which included literary works of absolute maturity, he cleaved to the traditional in his classic expression. The world of his creations of the postwar period is based on a certain themes: love, nature, the process of creation, the fate of the creator, and age over time - the motives which in the context of the Bessarabian poetry of the postwar period, clearly depict the image of a lyric poet of genuine sensitivity. His poetry indicates a special interest in formal and expressive perfection.
