Archive

About Gabriela Adameşteanu’s Wasted Morning

February 01, 2009

Translated by: Jean Harris

…The novel has two planes. It begins and ends on the plane of the present in which Madam [Vica] Delcă goes on her visiting tour, beginning in the morning at her sister-in-law’s…and carrying on through a visit to Ivona Scarlat, wife of a lawyer, himself the descendant of au upper bourgeois ...

Invitation to Gabriela Adameşteanu | Gabriela Adameşteanu

The Encounter: Pathological Memory and the Nostalgia of the Return

February 01, 2009

Critic: Carmen Muşat

Translated by: Jean Harris

“In those twenty years while Odysseus was away, the people of Ithaca maintained memories enough of him, but they didn’t cause them any longing. When Odysseus suffered longing, however, he remembered almost nothing.”[1] We are in a novel by Gabriela ...

Gabriela Adameşteanu

The Encounter: Synopsis

February 01, 2009

Critic: Jean Harris

Pushed around by unarmed border guards and ticket takers who demand his ticket in several languages, a middle aged man goes through a nightmare of hiding and getting away until he manages to cross a frontier guarded by soldiers and dogs. He’s made it back to his native village. There he finds ...

Fiction | Radu Cosaşu

An Olive Branch

January 08, 2009

Translated by: Florin Bican

Tinibalda had suggested going for a hike in the Piatra Craiului mountains, to forget about everybody and everything. I was in love with her back then. Her hips were way too broad. It didn’t bother her, though. Nothing would ever bother her. She used to wear tight-fitting dresses much to her ...

Reviews / Essays | Radu Cosaşu

Radu Cosaşu and the Circus of Words

January 08, 2009

Critic: Filip Florian

Translated by: Florin Bican, Jean Harris

When Radu Cosaşu writes a sentence, the words have a ball, no less, and what else could they do? Nuance tone and whimsy get together in a textual paradise. Personally, I have never run into such verbal dressage—words: new with old, exclamations with doubts, limpid things with metaphors, ...

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About this issue

This July, The Observer Translation Project leaves its usual format to present a special CRISIS ISSUE. Things are tough all over. Hard Times suddenly feels like the book of the moment. The global economic crisis impacts life as we know it, and viewed from Bucharest the effects reverberate in domains that include geo-politics and publishing in Romania and abroad, with the crisis at The Observer Translation Project as an instance of a universal phenomenon. read more...

Translator's Choice

Author: Stelian Tănase
Translated by: Jean Harris

From Maestro: A Melodrama. Episode 7

Emiluţa has an unfortunate thought. She’ll throw herself off the top of the building. Why? What the fuck? Let’s say for the cause of PeaceonEarth, for the slumdogs, Europe, for the lonely. Which is to say she doesn’t have a ghost of a reason. Viva Walachia! The way things stand, if ...

Translator’s Note
Translator’s Note: a synopsis

Author: Ştefan Agopian
Translated by: Ileana Orlich

How I Learned to Read (from Tache de Catifea / The Velvet Man)

The bearded man was the owner of an apothecary shop where he worked with two apprentices. Nobody paid me any mind, so I spent all day in what was supposed to be the shop. I say this because it was a large, dark room full of odors—a mix of smells from everywhere. The room hadn’t been cleaned ...

Translator’s Note
Re: Learning to Read, from Tache de catifea / The Velvet Man

Author: Gabriela Adameşteanu
Translated by: Patrick Camiller

Wasted Morning - Napoleon in Bucharest

“What you’ve got here is heaven on earth,” Vica says as she drops onto the kitchen chair. “But where’s your mother?” “At work,” Gelu lazily replies, leaning sideways against the door. “She’s doing mornings this week, didn’t you know?” He is tall and thin, with unset ...

Author: Petre Ispirescu
Translated by: Jean Harris

Youth Without Age and Life Without Death

It happened once as never before-y, ‘cause if it couldn’t be true, it wouldn’t make a story about the time when the poplar tree made berries and the willow tree broke out in cherries, when bears began to brawl with their tails, and wolf and lamb, unfurling their sails, threw arms around each ...

Translator’s Note
On Petre Ispirescu