Archive

Norman Manea: a World Voice, an essay with links

April 01, 2009

Critic: Jean Harris

There’s no way to say what makes one writer a “world voice.” Only some compel us at deeper levels. Of that feat, negotiated with posterity, canonical status is born. Witness, spokesperson, bearer of informed testimony, one who submits experience to the shaping of art, Norman Manea finds ...

Synopsis | Norman Manea

Variations on a Self-Portrait

March 30, 2009

Variations on a Self-Portrait hews together thirty-three pieces of auto- fiction. Written and published in various locations between 1969 and 1996 and appearing together for the first time in Romanian (Iaşi: Polirom, 2008), the prose follows biographic lines. The main character/narrator ...

Synopsis | Norman Manea

The Hooligan’s Return

March 30, 2009

After a harsh childhood in Transnistria, a concentration camp for Romanian Jews, and a frustrated, tedious adulthood as an engineer within the Communist system, Manea finds writing--and controversy--in middle age, and he emigrates to New York. His memoir is the eloquent story of his return to ...

Synopsis | Norman Manea

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 ...

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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