comeback of communism. Stoica then left the capital city and settled in Jimbolia, where the mayor offered him a house that had been nationalized under communism but not reclaimed by the previous owners. There, he established a Romanian-German cultural foundation and a press museum that had as its core his collection of newspapers. He also ensured that busts of Romanian and German poets were placed in the town. Toward the end of his life, Stoica developed lung cancer and gradually went blind. Work Stoica's published debut took place in 1956, simultaneously in two magazines: Steaua and Tânărul scriitor. His first book, Poeme, appeared in 1957; as literature, it has been called his weakest effort. Publications that ran his work include Steaua, Viața Românească, România Literară, Tribuna, and Secolul 20. Through the books Pietre kilometrice (1963), Miracole (1966), Arheologie blândă (1968) and Melancolii inocente (1969), Stoica established himself as an original poet whose lyricism, according to critic Mihail Petroveanu, draws upon "a studied, naive view of daily life, called to reveal unsuspected miracles, and upon a sentimental pathos concealed beneath a smile complicit in forgotten destinies, creatures and objects eaten by 'the golden worm of time.'" In a similar vein, Alex Ștefănescu notes that Stoica's poems "pretend to be a chronicle of daily life. In reality, through an ingenious technique of decoupling and through brief commentaries made in good taste, the poet compels routine existence to reveal its lyrical resources." Notably, during the three decades he published under communism, he refused to join in the regime's triumphalist rhetoric about itself, entering a voluntary aesthetic exile and confining his verses to insignificant or obsolete matters. He did not refer to the cult of personality or the grinding poverty of the Nicolae Ceaușescu era. However, by completely ignoring the communist system, he sought to prove that a complete representation of existence was possible without it, and to restore a normal, older way of life. His later books, Sufletul obiectelor (1972), Iepuri și anotimpuri (1976), Un potop de simpatii (1978), Copleșit de glorie (1980), Prognoză meteorologică (1981), Caligrafie și culori (1984), Suvenir (1986), Tango și alte dansuri (1989) and Uitat printre lucruri uitate (1997), include verses in which irony and a playful spirit blur a conscience that is lucid and attentive to shifts in contemporary sensibilities. Meanwhile, Stoica proved an accomplished translator, rendering into Romanian the works of Georg Trakl, Yvan Goll, and Johannes