Romanian Literature

[Bubba]

Magris Danube's talks about a Romanian writer named Panait Istrati. I have heard his name in some essays too but that's the only information I have about him.
And of course we can't stop mentioning a great nihilist philosopher, Emile Cioran.

I know next to nothing about Romanian literature, but I have read and enjoyed all of Panait Istrati--he wrote in French, and, in his day, at least in France, he was apparently the only serious rival to Jack London. He was translated into Spanish, and I have seen articles about the reception of his work in, say, Peru. Some of his work was also translated into English, probably in the 1930s.

At some time or other, Istrati, then a communist, traveled to the Soviet Union with the Greek writer Kazantzakis. In the Soviet Union, the scales fell from Istrati's eyes. When he protested some injustice, a Soviet official brought up that canard about not being able to make an omelet without breaking eggs. Istrati's retort? "I see the broken eggs, but where's this omelet of yours?"

As it happens, I was reading what I could by and about Istrati, so I checked Magris's Danube out of the library, because I had read somewhere he had written about Istrati. What a disappointment Danube was! It read like a collection of solemn and pedantic Wikipedia articles. Not even the paragraph on Istrati was of any real interest. It was hard to tell if Magris had ever even read any Istrati.

Some of Istrati's books are better than others, but, as I said, I enjoyed them all. Kyra Kyralina might be the easiest one to find in English, and it's a good one. La Maison Th?ringer, narrated by a young Romanian manservant in a German household in the Danube port town of Braila, Romania, is also very good.

I think a US or UK publisher should undertake to publish translations of all Istrati's work. It's in the public domain, and both France and Romania fund translations of works from their national literatures. In other words, these translations would cost a publisher almost nothing.

Maybe I'll do the translations myself!

 

[Daniel del Real]

As it happens, I was reading what I could by and about Istrati, so I checked Magris's Danube out of the library, because I had read somewhere he had written about Istrati. What a disappointment Danube was! It read like a collection of solemn and pedantic Wikipedia articles. Not even the paragraph on Istrati was of any real interest. It was hard to tell if Magris had ever even read any Istrati.

Totally agree. It is a very heavy and unpleasant book to read. It was a milestone for me to finish it.

 

[nnyhav]

I haven't mentioned being a bit disappointed by Tsepeneag's Pigeon Post. (Somebody over at TLS thought it better than Vain Art of the Fugue, I think it's the other way round.)

Nor did I mention being blown away by Eliade's The Old Man and the Bureaucrats. Wow.

 

[gumbowriters]

I love
Eug?ne Ionesco

 

[PGD]

While reading about Tristan Tzara, the famous dada, another Romanian writer, Urmuz, pen name of Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău (1883-1923), caught my attention. His prose is provocatively absurd, full of wordplay and double-entendres, and he seems to have lived a strange life: wanting to become a composer, working as a judge, pulling pranks and ultimately committing suicide. According to Ionesco, "we could say that Urmuz and his friends were surrealist avant la lettre, or that the oldest surrealism was Romanian surrealism". A mysterious literary figure I wish I knew more about, but apart from this little book of french translations by Benjamin Dolingher, I find nada.

 

[gumbowriters]

Thanks for the poetry reference but I love this list of eminent Romanian writers:

• Max Blecher
• Paul Celan
• Mircea Eliade
• Gellu Naum
• Oskar Pastior
• Liliana Ursu

 

[Bubba]

To learn about Istrati follow this link to "The Renegade Istratii" at archipelago:
Stelian Tanase - The Renegade Istrati
The author is much respected writer, Stelian Tanase. The translator is Alistair Ian Blyth. Stelian Tanase is a Romanian novelist, historian and scenarist.

To read more by Tanase in English online go to Exquisite Corpse - Journal of Letters and Life - Home and translations.observatorcultural.ro.

I just read the book excerpt linked to by the long-absent publisher Gina, and though it is long it struck me as very interesting (of course, I am interested in Panait Istrati, and the excerpt is about his break with communism and the isolation he suffered as a result).

Tanase quotes from pamphlets by Istrati's enemies on the right and on the left in both France and Romania. Here are some choice morsels:

?A new crusade by the ?advocates of humanity? is venting its fury in our native Romanian lands. The communist INTERNATIONAL, hand in hand with occult freemasonry, the author of all the infernal plots to destroy Christianity, royalty and constructive nationalism, has this year sent the most odious scoundrel, the abortion who answers to the name PANAIT ISTRATI. In Jassy, the pederast cur was embraced with the utmost warmth by his brothers in Judas [?] The miscreant who abroad made the most injurious slurs on our dear monarchy, our church and Romanianism in general, the scoundrel who, in collusion with all the internationals in the world, has caused the country the greatest evil is now coming to Jassy, sent here by occult Judaeo-Masonry, under the disguise of literature, to apologize for destructive communism [?] he thinks that in Yiddified and Masonized Jassy there is no longer a Romanian consciousness to nail him to the post of infamy [?] We shall give the miscreant a lesson.?

If I'm not mistaken, Jassy is also known as Iasi (with a little squiggle under the s that I can't seem to reproduce); if you've read Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt you might remember Jassy as the setting of an astonishing chapter describing the massacre of the local Jews; little wonder, I'd say! Kaputt, published in Rome before the end of the war, was probably the first published novel to depict the persecution of the Jews in Axis territory.

Here is a bit of criticism from Henri Barbusse, at the other end of the political spectrum:

?Behold the writer, behold the man!?, exclaims Barbusse, overcome. Istrati ?presents himself as an apostle and even as a martyr, when in fact he is the lackey of the reaction of the hangmen, the holders of secret funds, and the Police torture chambers. Panait Istrati, rabid dog of the pack that hunts down revolutionaries. Panait Istrati, bought by the enemy to betray his former brothers in poverty and his former comrades in the struggle, to betray his own cause. Panait Istrati, handsome ornament of Panurge?s flock of mangy sheep.?

Tanase goes on to note:

As he was writing these lines, Barbusse was negotiating the royalties and expenses for his work on Stalin. And he was paid handsomely. Barbusse had a sumptuous villa on the C?te d?Azur, and practically unlimited sums from Soviet sources. The ?venal Istrati? remained poor. The accusations had no relation to reality. The attack was strictly a propaganda product, intended to destroy the adversary.

One more thing: in Paris and the cities around it are squares, streets, and avenues named after Henri Barbusse.

As I read this book excerpt and the pamphlets it quoted, I couldn't help but feel sad for Istrati, but I also felt that something of the art of invective has been lost, that our Jon Stewarts and Rush Limbaughs and Stephen Colberts have nothing whatsoever on the anonymous Cuzist pamphleteers of Jassy, Romania, in the early nineteen-thirties ("the abortion who answers to the name PANAIT ISTRATI" is particularly exquisite) or even on well-set-up French Stalinists like Barbusse. So I have resolved to do my part, however small, to contribute to the revival of this lost art, though not, of course, in the service of one political tendency or another.

 

[liehtzu]

Totally agree. It is a very heavy and unpleasant book to read. It was a milestone for me to finish it.

Man, I loved Danube! The strange thing is that it's ordinarily the kind of thing I wouldn't like - and in the hands of a lesser talent would have sounded like a series of "solemn and pedantic Wikipedia articles." I had no idea what it was when I went into it - purchased it on a whim in Vietnam, and then spent the next few weeks in a Czech-style brewpub-restaurant (the Czechs and Vietnamese had relations during the Soviet era that fortunately for beer drinkers linger today) in Da Nang with a half-liter glass of dark beer reading the thing. Perhaps it does help to be a touch intoxicated while reading Danube, as Magris's humor is so low-key it's possible to read the whole book without realizing it's there. Hardly a bore, for me it was more of a treasure trove of forgotten lore related to that river, an admiration of the kinds of obscure characters who, buried in their huts on the river's banks, spend twenty years writing massive tomes about mid-19th century river trade routes. The New York Times review goes over some of the obscure subjects the book touches on in an unfavorable review:


The book is chock-full of literary allusions, intellectual fancies, recondite information. It passes from the Black Forest's cuckoo clocks (born, apparently, in the early 18th century), to a discussion of the river's gender, to Heidegger's home at Messkirch, to Louis-Ferdinand Celine and his cat Bebert being nasty at Sigmaringen when the Vichy government was quartered there as World War II drew to a close, to Gunzburg where Josef Mengele (of Auschwitz infamy) was born, to Neuburg where 300 years earlier Descartes found a comfortably heated room in winter and where (with fine discrimination) the junior school is now named after him. We are told that Adolf Eichmann spent a week's retreat in the Bavarian monastery of Windberg in 1934. Passing from West Germany into Austria, we stop at Linz, less for the sake of its most notorious son, Adolf Hitler, than for the elusive writer Adalbert Stifter, who in 1868 slashed his wrists close to the river in which his daughter had committed suicide. The choir at Stifter's funeral was conducted by Anton Bruckner, then organist of Linz cathedral.

We also stop at Artstetten, closer to Vienna, to gaze on the tombs of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie Chotek, whose double murder at Sarajevo changed the world. A curious chap, like all the Hapsburgs, Francis Ferdinand repels by his maniacal hunting - 6,000 stags in a lifetime, 2,763 seagulls in a single day - but charms by his love of Sophie. Sophie, meanwhile, fends off the commercial advances of the well-known pastry-cook, Oskar Pischinger, who wants her to endorse his newly invented torte...


The review ends:

One should not write ill-naturedly about a good-natured book. This one offers easygoing reading, humor, fantasy, complicated simplicities, nutshell philosophies, leisurely detours to places and figures we never heard of (one can see why), brief encounters with intriguing and less intriguing characters, above all a superabundance of words and great self-indulgence. Told around a cafe table, Mr. Magris's anecdotlets would enhance the hour. Piled on top of one another, like Pelion on Ossa, they begin to pall. Neither travelogue nor history, fish nor fowl (nor good red herring), Mr. Magris's Mitteleuropa through which an imperial river winds is a realm where sense and nonsense flourish side by side.

....................................................

Anyway, I can see how the book would not be everyone's cup of tea. A matter of taste, I suppose. And I can even see that under different circumstances I would have disliked it as well. The "anecdotlets" might indeed pall - but chapters are short (sometimes only a few paragraphs) and loosely-connected. It's not the sort of book to read in one go.

 

[liehtzu]

Per Romanian literature: Petru Dumitriu's Incognito, if you can find it.

 

[gina]

And For Those Looking For New Translations

You can get hold of eleven Romanian writers in English translation + an introduction to contemporary Romanian literature in Absinthe 13: Spotlight on Romania (April, 2010), guest edited by Jean Harris. Absinthe is a bi-anual translation review (for more go to Absinthe: New European Writing, www.absinthenew.com). The current edition features Dumitru Tsepeneag, Adriana Bittel, Mircea Cartarescu, Dan Lungu, Bogdan Suceava, Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Nora Iuga, Stefan Agopian, Stefan Banulescu, Stelian Tanase and Gheorghe Craciun. Not to be missed: this number includes wonderful paintings by Mircea Suciu.

 

[gina]

And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

Absinthe 13: Spotlight on Romania (April, 2010, guest edited by Jean Harris ) includes translations from eleven Romanian writers and an introduction to contemporary Romanian fiction. This issue of the bi-annual translation review (available from Absinthe: New European Writing) contains short fiction and selections from Dumitu Tsepeneag, Adriana Bittel, Mircea Cartarescu, Dan Lungu, Bogdan Suceava, Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Nora Iuga, Stefan Agopian, Stefan Banulescu, Stelian Tanase and Gheorge Craciun. The editors are grateful for the support of the PUBLISHING ROMANIA program of the Romanian Cultural Institute. For more, go to Absinthe: New European Writing

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

There aren't so many translations from Romanian writers to Spanish so it called my atention this new title that Acantilado will publishing this month. The book's title is Little Fingers and the author is Filip Florian, born in Bucarest in 1968. According to the publishers it was declared as the best first novel of 2006 by the Union of Romanian Writers, as well as book of the year.
So Mercury, could you tell me more about this author? do you know him? impressions? etc

 

[miercuri]

Re: And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

Well, I know of him but I've never read anything by him. It was really well received at the time of its publishing and I know it got translated to English and (possibly) German as well. I wish I would make a habit out of reading (contemporary) Romanian literature, I've pretty much abandoned it ever since finishing highschool and it's a shame.

 

[bretonalfie]

Re: And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

I heard a lot about Filip Florian and his writings.It will be good if the book is translated in all European languages.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

It sure sounds interesting, I'll try to get a copy of this book as Cartarescu's are totally out of reach for me.

 

[nightwood]

Re: And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

I wish I would make a habit out of reading (contemporary) Romanian literature, I've pretty much abandoned it ever since finishing highschool and it's a shame.

Then you are probably not the one I should ask but I do it anyway

While browsing the Dalkey Archive website again I stumbled upon

Dumitru Tsepeneag - Pigeon Post http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100373070 and
Lucian Dan Teodorovici - Our Circus Presents http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100012400

Any comments on this two writers? I am pretty much inclined to order these two books, they seem interessting enough, so any thoughts about them (the books or the authors in general if anyone happend to read them) is appreciated as I do not know them...

Thank you in advance

 

[JTolle]

Re: And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

Romanian literature suddenly seems so rich to me, probably because of my interest, now, in two close friends: Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade.

I've been reading Cioran for a little while now and I'm in love with everything he wrote, especially anything he wrote in Tears and Saints (1937) (trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston). For example:

"When I think of the loneliness of nights, and the agony of this loneliness, I long to wander on roads unknown to saints. Where to, where to? There are abysses even outside the soul."

And nowadays, my interest in religion has me reading Mircea Eliade (the founder of the field of study known as "Comparative Religions") pretty devotedly. I look forward especially to reading his novels, which I know he wished people had taken more seriously back when he was alive. For some reason, having both of these prodigiously gifted writers and thinkers on my hands, so often, these days, has really made me appreciate the quality of Romanian literature as a whole, and I look forward to mining the plays of Cioran and Eliade's good friend, Eugene Ionseco.

 

[nightwood]

Re: And For Those Looking For Printed Translations

Cristian Popescu (1959-95) published only three books during his short life. Almost entirely prose poetry, Popescu's oeuvre was groundbreaking in Romanian literary tradition through its creation of a model of transforming individual life, and it remains highly influential to this day. Before the December 1989 revolution that overthrew the communist regime, Popescu published two books: the chapbook The Popescu Family (1987) and Foreword (1988), a collection much diminished by the regime's censorship. After 1990, a single book, The Popescu Art (1994), appeared the year before his death. In 1999, the National Romanian Literature Museum in Bucharest published a commemorative album of manuscript reproductions as issues 1-4 of its new review, Manuscriptum, which also displayed Popescu's whimsical drawings and doodles to accompany his text. Fragments of his journal were published in 2003 as Notebook of Reading and Calligraphy, and additional volumes are planned. Many of his poems develop a kind of family romance of the Popescus, a quirky, surreal biographical myth rendered in a comic, mocking, and self-mocking vernacular voice. Popescu suffered from schizophrenia, and he died a few months shy of thirty-six from a heart attack induced by the lethal combination of his medications for schizophrenia and depression with vodka.

http://www.twistedspoon.com/popescu.html

Poetry by Cristian Popescu​

The earliest literary efforts of the poet Popescu date from the tender age of seven. He used to carve them with a little penknife on the bathroom door of his family´s home. Only a naïve lack of sensibility could explain the fact that his parents would repaint the door twice a week. Nevertheless, even today those very lines are in circulation on the doors of all the public toilets of our capital city. Anyone can still read them.

Popescu used to stick flower and butterfly decals on the shiny white tiles, he used to glue on playing cards with kings. Daily, within these walls, renewed the monastic seclusion of his childhood. Our common anchorite´s cell of the quotidian. Once in a while, from the silvering behind the mirror glass, his pure face again laughs, the face of a saint transported with the ecstasy of inspiration, the face of Popescu in his early childhood.

But most of the time he´d write and weep there, in solitude. From the continual outpouring of so many tears, just as some people develop kidney stones, he developed diamonds at the corners of his eyes. He´d weep and write. They had to install a miniature urinal to collect the precious stones.

Throughout his career, as a memorial to the all-pervading silence of that period, lest his published volumes be soundlessly eaten away from within their own lines and ideas, Popescu would administer electric shocks to them every four years.

In the poet´s honor, at every street corner, flushing kiosks are going to be erected. A one-leu coin for a minute of solitude. Constantly crowded, constantly besieged by inspired citizens. And upon every commemoration, in all the public places, the bars, the hotels, in the North Station and the central Roman square, urinals will spout high like fountains. Ah, it will be spring. The sun will shine.

Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Bogdan Stefanescu

Iustin Panta (1964-2001) was born and educated in Bucharest, graduating from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in 1989. He lived and worked as an engineer in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. The December 1989 revolution in Romania made it possible for him to pursue literature, and he served as editor in chief of the cultural journal Euphorion, which he made into one of the nation's most lively and free-spirited contemporary periodicals. During the next decade Panta produced five collections of largely prose poetry, earning him a reputation as one of the most important writers of the 1990s. His debut volume, Blownup Objects (1991), won a Romanian Writers' Union prize and his 1995 volume, The Family and the Indifferent Equilibrium received a number of major awards. He also co-authored a poetic narrative with Mircea Ivanescu: The Limits of Power or the Bribing the Witnesses, a Russian Novel (1994). A book of essays, Handbook of Thoughts That Console / Handbook of Thoughts That Disturb (2000) turned out to be his last. Panta died in a car crash at the end of September 2001.

http://www.twistedspoon.com/panta.html

Additional Sins by Iustin Panta​

Things have their birth in my name-
otherwise the world would be colorless, without any

blue, green, red, gray.​

Maybe here, maybe there, a spot of orange or yellow,

of khaki-​

and people who drink ersatz coffee, decked out in

clothes of imitation leather.​

It´s an unpardonable sin to fast during the days of

Christmas or easter-​

Following right behind her, I picked up all the clothes, she let them fall one by one, the first in the park, on the bench where we´d be sitting, another on the grassy promenade that made our way so short, then on the sidewalk, on the stairway in the house, in the hall, and the last in the room where the pot of catnip grows; I gathered them all, I couldn´t possibly embrace her unless she were fully dressed, no matter how many invitations to love she made to me in that room with the plant whose name sounds like the present tense of a sensual verb. After we part, in a few days, you´re going to put the bracelets you were given as gifts on the arms of the armchair and forget them there. And at my departure, timidly withdrawn into a corner, the rocking chair will glance sidelong at me – while you remain completely motionless.

I reach out to you with this plate of raw mutton.
Even so, if the bracelets remain on the arms of the

armchair,​

her frail wrists and the upholstered wood are one and

the same to me;​

the armchair and the rockingchair are one

and the same;​

as empty as the throne after the old god has

withdrawn himself,​

to go and punish his subjects,
and he won´t forgive any of them no matter whether

they´ve been bad or good.​

Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Mircea Ivanescu

Born in Iasi on June 9, 1962, Radu Andriescu has authored six books of poetry. His first collection, Mirror Against the Wall (1992), won the Poesis Prize for a debut volume. It was followed by The Back Door (1994) and The End of the Road, the Beginning of the Journey (1998), which was awarded the poetry prize of the Iasi Writers Association. The collections Some Friends and Me (2000) and The Stalinskaya Bridges (2004) both featured illustrations by his close friend, Dan Ursachi. The Metallurgical Forest was published in 2008. With Adam J. Sorkin, he has co-edited and co-translated the 2001 anthology of young poets from Iasi, Club 8 - Poetry.

In English he has published a chapbook, The Catalan Within (Longleaf Press, 2007), and his poetry has been included in the following anthologies: City of Dreams and Whispers (1998); Speaking the Silence: Prose Poets of Contemporary Romania (2001); The Poetry of Men's Lives: An International Anthology (University of Georgia Press, 2004); New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008).

Andriescu teaches American literature at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi, where his study of contemporary Romanian poetry, Parallelisms and Cultural Influences in Contemporary Romanian Poetry (2005), was published. He has been awarded two research stays at Freiburg University, a summer Fulbright American Studies Institute fellowship to the United States, and grants to France, Austria, and the UK.

http://www.twistedspoon.com/andriescu.html

Postscript to Mururoa by Radu Andriescu​

I wrote about things around here, in my life, as if they were far distant, and beautiful. I played, I disguised things. I was told I´m morose. It´s the truth. Then why the hell do I put myself out, wearing myself to a frazzle, merely to make the others smile? Georgeta told me that I show off because fundamentally I´m shy. This must be true. Doubtless I swell a Mister Popularity: sullen and shy. Others tell me that I´m a Gemini, and that´s why I´m mopey one minute, then buoyant the next. Sometimes I venture hundreds of miles a week, without even stirring. Journeys are like booze, you take a drink or take a trip intending to change something, but everything remains the same. Institutions, the hottest cars, fancy threads, it´s all the same difference to me. Files of old personal documents are an adequate hell, my rusted Dacia is good-enough wheels for me to creep uselessly from on place to another, and my T-shirts, when they´re not threadbare from too much wearing, grow a paunch on their own. My hair - I´d shave it most gladly, if I could find the courage to do it. My ring, my wristwratch bring me to brink of claustrophopia. And the road, when I can´t see its end, propels me in the opposite direction, to the edge of despair. A couple of years ago, I stopped writing, persuaded that my grim pantomime had no purpose. That, in general, nothing made sense. Quite an end to the road, I´d say! Merely the thought of it overwhelms you with enthusiasm. I look around: pot-bellied cats; metal barrels that, no matter what I do, will always remind me of the army; stunted, anemic fir trees, given no choice but to live their lives in a hell of heat. My neighbours, who are getting old, losing their teeth, their hair, their plaster, their minds. Yellow pipes. Dingy gray pigeons. Things could be worse, I´ve got to admit it, but my stupid thoughts go wandering far away, putting me in a tizzy about the morphology of life, or the syntax of death, and they just keep at it: I love you, Mururoa!

Translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu

A review by Daniela Hurezanu about Memory Glyphs can be found at the Three Percent website:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2007

 

[Ben Jackson]

Romanian writers to read:

More of Herta Muller
Norman Manea
Cartarescu
Mircea Eliade
Email Cioran
Tsupeneag
Ana Blandiana
Marina Sorescu
More of Ionesco
Andrei Condrescu
Eminescu
Nichita Stanescu
Oskar Pastior
Filipp Florian
plays of Tristan Tzara
Matei Calinescu

 

[Benny Profane]

I could add Matei Vișniec.