Archive

Sophisticated Machinery

September 30, 2008

Translated by: Jean Harris

The sound check is part of the show. Sandu lets the others adjust their instruments. Tov Teşu bugs them to behave themselves: none of that bump and grind--the boys don’t have haircuts--no obscenities! He gives Sandu a verbal agreement to sign. He has been made aware of everything in it so if ...

Synopsis | Stelian Tănase

Synopsis of Corpuri de iluminat / Dark Bodies, a novel by Stelian Tănase

September 30, 2008

Critic: Jean Harris

Corpuri de iluminat[1] means “lighting fixtures.” You see those words on lamp stores in Bucharest where the novel takes place. Only, the Romanian for lighting fixtures translates word for word as bodies to be lit--implicitly “bodies in need of light.” Translated in English as Dark ...

Reviews / Essays | Stelian Tănase

Translating Tănase

September 30, 2008

Critic: Jean Harris

Whenever I translate a Romanian text, I realize I’m translating culture. The same thing happens to everyone. A text in French (Aramaic or Chinese) exists in a cultural medium, and if the alchemy and logistics are right, an air of French-ness somehow percolates into AmerEnglish—or so the ...

Gheorghe Crăciun

Pupa Russa, Ludus et jocus

September 01, 2008

Translated by: Florin Bican

The People’s Republic of Romania is a country where you first learned to write at a high wooden desk, covered with scrawls. Year after year, just before school let out, the comrade teacher would ask you to bring fragments of broken glass and sheets of sandpaper, rags and buckets of lye water ...

Reviews / Essays | Gheorghe Crăciun

A Bertrand Russell with a Wagnerian Twist

September 01, 2008

Critic: Caius Dobrescu

Translated by: Patrick Camiller

Gheorghe Craciun’s(1) novel cannot be the simple tale of one woman’s misfortunes. Its driving impulse must be something other than compassion for the fate of a “victim of society.” Pupa russa is—only superficially—a realist novel that shows how Leontina Guran, a “typical” ...

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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