Born in Cluj, his parents were Aurel, a civil servant, and his wife Călina (née Humița).
His articles appeared in the magazines România Literară, Manuscriptum, Viața Românească, and Revista de filosofie.
[1] He gained a reputation through his translations from Plato (Symposium, Phaedo, Meno and, in collaboration, Hippias Minor and Euthyphro), Plutarch, Longus, Ovid (Metamorphoses, in collaboration), Appian, Dante Alighieri (De vulgari eloquentia, Epistulae, Eclogues), Francesco Colonna, as well as modern authors: Emilio Cecchi, Massimo Bontempelli, Adriano Tilgher (Life and Immortality in the Greek Vision), Marguerite Yourcenar (Oriental Tales, 1993 – Writers' Union Prize; Alexis and The Dark Brain of Piranesi), Imre Toth (Palimpsest), François Bluche, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, John Wain, Emil Cioran (An Anthology of Portraits).
He was awarded the Romanian Academy’s Timotei Cipariu Prize for volume VII of Eminescu's works.
The prize was awarded annually from 2006 to 2010 to researchers, literary critics and historians, and translators from Romania and the diaspora.