Romanian Literature

[tiganeasca]

Likewise, only two books were translated here: Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety. In the short preface of the book I read that he died on April 13, 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Given that the translations are recent, I hope they won't stop at these two.

They are two of his best books. It would, of course, be a pity to have only those and I hope they translate more...but if you have to have only two, those are terrific ones to have.
This is, very sadly, not the case with some significant Romanian authors: Mihai Eminescu and Ion Creangă. There are several volumes of Eminescu's poetry and that's about it. The translations of Eminescu's prose that I bought in București are so atrocious that I gave up in disgust. Not only was the English bad but the sentences often didn't even make sense. I think it is appalling that there are no modern, quality translations of either author into English. (I even checked online to see whether Humanitas carried anything and the situation hasn't changed in the last few decades, so far as I can tell.)

 

[Rodica]

They are two of his best books. It would, of course, be a pity to have only those and I hope they translate more...but if you have to have only two, those are terrific ones to have.
This is, very sadly, not the case with some significant Romanian authors: Mihai Eminescu and Ion Creangă. There are several volumes of Eminescu's poetry and that's about it. The translations of Eminescu's prose that I bought in București are so atrocious that I gave up in disgust. Not only was the English bad but the sentences often didn't even make sense. I think it is appalling that there are no modern, quality translations of either author into English. (I even checked online to see whether Humanitas carried anything and the situation hasn't changed in the last few decades, so far as I can tell.)

I'm curious if it's the translation made by Adrian Sahlean or Ioana Lupusoru, I haven't looked through them, I only note that they were thin. I don't have books from these publishers, from what I noticed now both published in 2021.

 

[tiganeasca]

They are two of his best books. It would, of course, be a pity to have only those and I hope they translate more...but if you have to have only two, those are terrific ones to have.
This is, very sadly, not the case with some significant Romanian authors: Mihai Eminescu and Ion Creangă. There are several volumes of Eminescu's poetry and that's about it. The translations of Eminescu's prose that I bought in București are so atrocious that I gave up in disgust. Not only was the English bad but the sentences often didn't even make sense. I think it is appalling that there are no modern, quality translations of either author into English. (I even checked online to see whether Humanitas carried anything and the situation hasn't changed in the last few decades, so far as I can tell.)

Actually, the Complete Prose Writings of Mihai Eminescu (a paperback of 200 pages) was published by the Center for Romanian Studies in Iași in 1995 and was translated by Ioan Giurgea. I also got the Selected Works of Creanga and Eminescu (307 pages) which was a volume in the East European Monographs series published by Columbia University in New York (though my volume was printed in Romania) including work by a variety of different translators. I'd be very curious about more recent translations (and find it odd that Humanitas doesn't stock them).

 

[Rodica]

Actually, the Complete Prose Writings of Mihai Eminescu (a paperback of 200 pages) was published by the Center for Romanian Studies in Iași in 1995 and was translated by Ioan Giurgea. I also got the Selected Works of Creanga and Eminescu (307 pages) which was a volume in the East European Monographs series published by Columbia University in New York (though my volume was printed in Romania) including work by a variety of different translators. I'd be very curious about more recent translations (and find it odd that Humanitas doesn't stock them).

The 11 volumes with a total of 12672 pages of the Complete Works of Eminescu were published by the National publishing house, a new edition appeared last year, originally printed in 2011. In 1972, at the initiative of Alexandru Oprea, director of the Museum of Romanian Literature, the research and editing of the Complete works of Eminescu was resumed. For four decades, the literary historian Dimitrie Vatamaniuc coordinated the painstaking work of selecting, collecting, and copying thousands of press articles from the dailies and periodicals to which Eminescu wrote. For me, the National publishing house was the one that published school textbooks and road legislation, honestly I don't know if they published other books related to literature except these. I first heard of the academician Dimitrie Vatamaniuc reading Sexuality and Society. History, religion and literature written by the Romanian historian of religions Andrei Oișteanu (one of my favorite writers) in which I read fragments of the poems written by Eminescu that were banned from publication. Oișteanu’s book was published in 2016. I am not trying to suggest that the big publishing houses in Romania do not publish Eminescu, in 2022 Humanitas published a new edition in Romanian with Eminescu's prose (approximately 500 pages). Indeed there are few books published in English by them, almost non-existent.

I read some very interesting articles written by Adrian George Sahlean in Observatorul cultural, one of the translators I mentioned yesterday.
I hope that's okay, I translated some excerpts from one of his articles:

“I write this article with a heavy heart, knowing that there will be many who will interpret it as an attack on other Eminescian translators. But I understand only now, after more than three decades living in America, why the English translations praised over time in Romania had no international impact and why Eminescu is practically unknown in the English-speaking world.”
“He must be translated into their language and on their language, and if in the last hundred years Eminescu has not produced a single spark in the Anglophone universe, this cannot be attributed to his poetry, but to the translations that did not present Eminescu as we know him we. Translations do not present Eminescu - any interpretation made by the translator represents the... translator.”
“But the difference between linguistic competence and poetic performance is equally valid in the case of translations made by Englishmen! The natives who translated from the Eminescu poems mostly belonged to academic circles, but they were neither poets in their own language, nor even connoisseurs of the Romanian language, using intermediaries …and dictionaries!”
https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/hainele imparatului i/

I didn't find much about Ioana Lupusoru, I don't know if it is the same person mentioned in the link
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/an-anthology-of-romanian-women-poets/9780880332941

I'll try to find these translations, from what I've seen, they don't appear in stock here.

 

[tiganeasca]

The 11 volumes with a total of 12672 pages of the Complete Works of Eminescu were published by the National publishing house, a new edition appeared last year, originally printed in 2011. In 1972, at the initiative of Alexandru Oprea, director of the Museum of Romanian Literature, the research and editing of the Complete works of Eminescu was resumed. For four decades, the literary historian Dimitrie Vatamaniuc coordinated the painstaking work of selecting, collecting, and copying thousands of press articles from the dailies and periodicals to which Eminescu wrote. For me, the National publishing house was the one that published school textbooks and road legislation, honestly I don't know if they published other books related to literature except these. I first heard of the academician Dimitrie Vatamaniuc reading Sexuality and Society. History, religion and literature written by the Romanian historian of religions Andrei Oișteanu (one of my favorite writers) in which I read fragments of the poems written by Eminescu that were banned from publication. Oișteanu’s book was published in 2016. I am not trying to suggest that the big publishing houses in Romania do not publish Eminescu, in 2022 Humanitas published a new edition in Romanian with Eminescu's prose (approximately 500 pages). Indeed there are few books published in English by them, almost non-existent.

I read some very interesting articles written by Adrian George Sahlean in Observatorul cultural, one of the translators I mentioned yesterday.
I hope that's okay, I translated some excerpts from one of his articles:

“I write this article with a heavy heart, knowing that there will be many who will interpret it as an attack on other Eminescian translators. But I understand only now, after more than three decades living in America, why the English translations praised over time in Romania had no international impact and why Eminescu is practically unknown in the English-speaking world.”
“He must be translated into their language and on their language, and if in the last hundred years Eminescu has not produced a single spark in the Anglophone universe, this cannot be attributed to his poetry, but to the translations that did not present Eminescu as we know him we. Translations do not present Eminescu - any interpretation made by the translator represents the... translator.”
“But the difference between linguistic competence and poetic performance is equally valid in the case of translations made by Englishmen! The natives who translated from the Eminescu poems mostly belonged to academic circles, but they were neither poets in their own language, nor even connoisseurs of the Romanian language, using intermediaries …and dictionaries!”
https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/hainele imparatului i/

I didn't find much about Ioana Lupusoru, I don't know if it is the same person mentioned in the link
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/an-anthology-of-romanian-women-poets/9780880332941

I'll try to find these translations, from what I've seen, they don't appear in stock here.

Mulţumesc foarte mult! Very interesting. I didn't mean to suggest that Humanitas was the publisher...only that Humanitas might sell copies of translations into English. I also find it fascinating that Eminescu's prose works are about 500 pages in Romanian and yet I have the "complete" prose works in English in 100!
What is even more surprising is that "lesser" authors (like, for example, Stancu, Rebreanu, Teodoreanu) have works translated into English and yet Eminescu has virtually nothing. That said, as I noted above, his poems do appear in a number of translations...so that's something.

 

[Rodica]

Mulţumesc foarte mult! Very interesting. I didn't mean to suggest that Humanitas was the publisher...only that Humanitas might sell copies of translations into English. I also find it fascinating that Eminescu's prose works are about 500 pages in Romanian and yet I have the "complete" prose works in English in 100!
What is even more surprising is that "lesser" authors (like, for example, Stancu, Rebreanu, Teodoreanu) have works translated into English and yet Eminescu has virtually nothing. That said, as I noted above, his poems do appear in a number of translations...so that's something.

Cu drag. I know it's a terrible thing what I'm writing, but we discover authors like Zaharia Stancu, instead Eminescu falls into the category of those we had to learn and we started early. I'm not going to go into too much detail about how most of the kids in my generation learned Eminescu, but the result was a kind of pride but not love. I remember a review of Streuvels books where the reader felt compassion for the students. In my case, due to the fact that I do not have the ability to memorize, I can only reproduce with my words what I understood or felt, I had to compensate for the fact that I did not memorize his poems or comments dictated by teachers. That's how I met many authors from the school curriculum by reading about them and I discovered them in my own way and they became dear and human to me. I remember how impressed I was when I read in the History of Romanian Literature by George Călinescu talking about the chaos of Eminescu's projects that condensed into little definitive work and how much effort I made not to say anything in class. My Romanian teacher, after asking me to comment on a text, regardless of the author who wrote it, before giving me the grade, asked me to recite a stanza from the older poems. She didn't want me to tell her my opinion of that stanza. ? I am not saying that there are no people who love Eminescu, but I think it takes passion, work and a favorable context so that Eminescu is discovered by outside readers and us (because Eminescu, Creangă are not just what we learned at school, God forbid that we spoil with their “naughty”works the pride created. I'm sure we'll come to know them and maybe love them more).

 

[tiganeasca]

Cu drag. I know it's a terrible thing what I'm writing, but we discover authors like Zaharia Stancu, instead Eminescu falls into the category of those we had to learn and we started early. I'm not going to go into too much detail about how most of the kids in my generation learned Eminescu, but the result was a kind of pride but not love. I remember a review of Streuvels books where the reader felt compassion for the students. In my case, due to the fact that I do not have the ability to memorize, I can only reproduce with my words what I understood or felt, I had to compensate for the fact that I did not memorize his poems or comments dictated by teachers. That's how I met many authors from the school curriculum by reading about them and I discovered them in my own way and they became dear and human to me. I remember how impressed I was when I read in the History of Romanian Literature by George Călinescu talking about the chaos of Eminescu's projects that condensed into little definitive work and how much effort I made not to say anything in class. My Romanian teacher, after asking me to comment on a text, regardless of the author who wrote it, before giving me the grade, asked me to recite a stanza from the older poems. She didn't want me to tell her my opinion of that stanza. ? I am not saying that there are no people who love Eminescu, but I think it takes passion, work and a favorable context so that Eminescu is discovered by outside readers and us (because Eminescu, Creangă are not just what we learned at school, God forbid that we spoil with their “naughty”works the pride created. I'm sure we'll come to know them and maybe love them more).

What you say is true, of course. I think most students--regardless of country--are exposed to writers (often great writers) in school. And because of the way they are exposed to those writers, they may not like them for a long time, if ever. I remember reading "Julius Caesar" and A Tale of Two Cities in high school and refusing to read any Shakespeare or Dickens for decades. My introduction to those two great writers caused me to avoid them for a long, long time. It takes a very rare teacher who knows how to bring great works and great writers to life so that the students love and appreciate them. And we all know how rare such teachers are.
It's not that Stancu is a bad writer. It's that we don't learn to appreciate Eminescu that is the pity.

 

[tiganeasca]

Rodica,
I am curious to know if you are familiar with the author Bogdan Suceavă. I just discovered him this past year and read Miruna. I was impressed by the book and wonder how well he is known and what his reputation is (if any) in Romania (he teaches mathematics in the U.S. now, but has several books to his credit.

 

[Rodica]

Rodica,
I am curious to know if you are familiar with the author Bogdan Suceavă. I just discovered him this past year and read Miruna. I was impressed by the book and wonder how well he is known and what his reputation is (if any) in Romania (he teaches mathematics in the U.S. now, but has several books to his credit.

I only have Avalon, which I haven't read yet, he has about 10 books published here, most of them by Polirom. Avalon was recommended to me by a friend, I only know that it is an autobiographical novel, most of his books have positive reviews.

 

[tiganeasca]

I only have Avalon, which I haven't read yet, he has about 10 books published here, most of them by Polirom. Avalon was recommended to me by a friend, I only know that it is an autobiographical novel, most of his books have positive reviews.

I'll be curious to know what you think. Coming From an Off-Key Time (Venea din timpul diez) is the only other work that has been translated into English, I think. Avalon is not translated yet and neither are the rest of his books.

 

[Rodica]

I'll be curious to know what you think. Coming From an Off-Key Time (Venea din timpul diez) is the only other work that has been translated into English, I think. Avalon is not translated yet and neither are the rest of his books.

Of course, I'll let you know after I read it.