Bill Martin, who runs Bacacay (http://bacacay.wordpress.com) the Polish Cultural Institute’s dashing and highly informative weblog in
New York City writes:
Lo! Just look at this website: http://translations.observatorcultural.ro. It’s enough to make a literary programmer for some other former Eastern Bloc cultural institution green with envy…
Oddly enough, a half hour after [hearing from Jean Harris who wrote about the translations into Polish in OTP], I was on the phone with Ms. Robinson at Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, who mentioned that they’re publishing a book by the Romanian writer Filip Florian this summer and even bought the world rights to it. It’s called LITTLE FINGERS and appears to be a mystery around the discovery of a mass grave. The only thing I’ve read from
Romania recently is Mircea Cărtărescu’s amazing Nostalgia, which New Directions published a few years ago. But judging from this forthcoming book by Florian, the Dan Sociu poems in the latest issue of Calque, Dalkey Archive’s three books by Dumitru Tsepeneag, the fanciful excerpt by Ştefan Agopian in the OTP’s March issue… and last but not least the remarkable films coming out of that country in recent years, it seems Romania is experiencing some kind of cultural renaissance.
