Archive

Compulsory Happiness

March 30, 2009

Manea is a Romanian concentration camp survivor who also experienced some of the absurdities of living under the Ceausescu regime. The four novellas in this collection portray the psychological discomfort of living in a police state. The Interrogation conveys the feelings of a young woman, ...

Synopsis | Norman Manea

On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist

March 30, 2009

Manea, who emigrated to the West in 1986, portrays life under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania as a "sinister carnival," a nightmarish Fellini movie. The country, governed by the dictator and his police "like a penal colony," was nevertheless not totally ...

Synopsis | Norman Manea

The Black Envelope

March 30, 2009

Romanian novelist Manea's fifth book (after Compulsory Happiness) is a dark, enigmatic tale in which a man's investigation of his father's death, 40 years before, is set against the repressions and deceptions of the Ceausescu regime in the 1980s. Having been fired from his teaching post at a ...

Synopsis | Norman Manea

October, Eight O’clock

March 30, 2009

Survivor of a Nazi concentration camp in the Ukraine, Romanian-born Manea… writes with lyrical precision about the unspeakable traumas of the Holocaust and the suffocating postwar reality of life in a totalitarian society. His stories are alternately parables of biblical force, crystalline ...

Synopsis | Ştefan Agopian

Synopsis Of A Guide To Random Events

March 01, 2009

Critic: Florin Bican

Agopian calls his collection of short stories a novel, the way Gogol calls his novel Dead Souls a poem. The events in each story resonate with events throughout the book, making up a consistent whole and a credible albeit unorthodox plot. It’s not only the main characters – Zadic the Armenian ...

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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