The Observer Translation Project

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 ...

Fiction | Norman Manea

Sentimental Education

March 27, 2009

Translated by: Jean Harris

It had been raining for some time when the lady accosted me at the Gheorghi Dimitrov intersection. She asked me about a tram stop, Number 17 toward Lacul Tei. When she tilted her immense red umbrella, I saw her: Madam Doctor Alfandari!—the blond of one summer afternoon a millennium ago, when ...

Fiction | Ştefan Agopian

The Geographer’s Tales

March 01, 2009

Translated by: Florin Bican

Back then stripped bare of night (as if for evermore), the days would drag on lengthily, all dust-suffused and glum. From way out somewhere, He, boundlessly watching from amidst His angel hosts, was slowing our pace as He did rest. And our saliva made as if to run dry, akin to fuzzy lint, and all ...

Critics | Ştefan Agopian

Intellectuals in a Ditch: the Phantasmagoria Carry On

March 01, 2009

Translated by: Jean Harris

Ştefan Agopian’s novels and short fiction mark an extreme point in Romanian literature’s emancipation from realism. Two items to note: we are talking here about a literature’s gradual escape from the dogmatic social realism that plagued the 1950’s, of course, but also about Romanian ...