The Observer Translation Project

Ştefan Bǎnulescu stands among the most distinguished Romanian writers of the post-war period. No writer of his generation has managed to stand the test of time so well. His concentrated, enigmatic work rises in a seemingly inexhaustible architecture of story-telling. To attempt a perspective, Bǎnulescu’s fabulous, relativist, and speculative tendencies combine with meta-fictional elements that he inserts with secret irony, and they align him, more-or-less, with Borges and Ernst Junger.

Bănulescu lived most of his life under communism. He was the eighth child of a peasant family from Fǎcǎieni, a village of the plain in Ialomiţa County. Quite a few sources report him to have been born in 1929 although Bǎnulescu maintained a certain mystery about the date. At any rate, he was born in a democratic state whose economy was on the rise while the United States’ was collapsing into depression. Having graduated from the Romanian-Latin section of a high-school in Cǎlǎraşi, Bǎnulescu attended classes, first at the Law Faculty in the 1940s then at the Faculty of Letters, just as the Soviet-inspired Communist dictatorship consolidated its power.

Although he had published before¹, Bănulescu is generally considered to have made his real literary debut in 1965 with Iarna bǎrbaţilor (literally “The Winter of the Men,” but better in English as Men in Winter). Later translated (with more or less success) into English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Czech and Hungarian, the book contained pieces that had appeared in Gazeta literarǎ (Literary Gazette) and Luceafǎrul (Lucifer) between 1963 and 1964. These would undergo a series of authorial revisions before appearing in the definitive edition of 1979. The collection earned Bănulescu the Writers’ Union Prize for Fiction, and he was immediately enthroned as a leading literary exponent during the post-Stalinist thaw. After a series of scholarships at foreign universities (Urbino, Iowa, and later, Berlin) that allowed him to travel abroad, Bănulescu became the vice-president of the Writers’ Union and, for a brief period (1968-1971), the chief editor of Luceafǎrul, a span that coincided with the most open period in the history of Romanian communism. Following the appearance of Cartea de la Metopolis / Book of the Metropolis, the first and only volume of a projected four volume series collectively title Cartea Milionarului / Book of the Millionaire (or The Millionaire’s Book), Banulescu, came down with a serious eye disease – like Borges – and entered a period of decline. He did, however, manage to publish short stories, memoirs and fragments of Cartea Dicomesiei, the second volume of the Cartea Milionarului series.A made-up place name,Dicomesiei is about as translatable as Yoknapatawpha County—but more about Yoknapatawpha later. Elegii la sfîrşit de secol (Elegies at the End of the Century), which appeared in 1997, mixes fiction with autobiographical essay along the lines inaugurated in Drum în cîmpie / The Road through the Plain and continued in Scrisori din provincia de Sud-Est / Letters from the South-East Province.

Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Men in Winter carries on the then-current archaizing, mytho-fantastic tendency established by Mihail Sadoveanu, Mircea Eliade and Vasile Voiculescu. Bănulescu elevates the speculative, frustrated or picturesque prose of Romanian plains writers—Panait Istrati, Zaharia Stancu sau Fǎnuş Neagu—to the level of speculative thought. Filtering folkloric traditions in a literary way, Bǎnulescu goes beyond the erudite “archaeological” reveries of 19^th century master Alexandru Odobescu. His ironic characterizations tie in with the epistolary literature of Costache Negruzzi and his distant, ceremonious aestheticism with the prose of Mateiu Caragiale.

Other ingredients of Banulescu’s originality: criticism has been right to mention Bǎnulescu’s expressionist styling of folklore from the Romanian plains and, by extension, the entire imaginary universe of Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Men in Winter. Most of the stories are set in the Danube marshes and on the Bǎrǎgan steppe, which characterize “Mistreţii erau blînzi ” / “The Boars were Mild,” “Dropia” / “The Bustard,” “Satul de lut” / “The Clay Village,” “ Varǎ şi viscol” / “ Summer and Storm” and “Masa cu oglinzi” / “The Table of Mirrors.”

“Gaudeamus,” though, opens a window on old Bucharest devastated by war. Armies, refugees, the menace of History, and the businessman, Bazacopol all invade the quasi-archaic ahistoric regions of the Danube with their drought scorched summers, their harsh, wild winters and dull, nothing-ever-happens towns, which suddenly open to the intellectual life of the City. Images of the Capital pervade Gaudeamus and the short stories introduced in the 1971 edition, together with of memories of war and desertion—“the return home”—recalled or recovered from Bănulescu’s younger, pre-university days.

As a whole, Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Men in Winter offers a specifically local variety of magic realism, discovered in Romania in the 1960s through the intermediation of the South Americans—a trend at once oriental, Balkan and southern: fabulatory in the extreme. The essence of this “magic” is dislocation. In fact, the majority of the short stories unroll in a hollow place between two worlds—the end of the Second World War and the imposition of communism. A traumatic experience for the children and adolescents of the time, the war feeds a good part of the prose of the 60’s—(see the work of D.R. Popesc and Fǎnuş Neagu)—through its images, traces left in the consciousness of a generation of writers. It should be mentioned here that Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Men in Winter itself appeared at a crucial passage between two phases of the Communist system, on the boarder between Stalinism and the post-Stalinist thaw, and it manages to swerve skillfully between the omnipresent pitfalls of ideological concessions. The few that make their presence felt appear insignificantly as ‘optimistic’ nods in the direction of the ‘new world’ (present in “Varǎ şi viscol” / “ Summer and Storm,” “Masa cu oglinzi” / “Table of Mirrors” and “ Gaudeamus” )—later revised by the author, not coincidentally. What’s essential is that war and historic changes destabilize identities, dislocate the traditions of the village of the plains, a village until then existing somehow far from the tumultuous world, fixed in its archaic rhythms. Consider “Vieţi provizorii” / “Provisional Lives” with its enlargement in the direction of the uncanny countryside mythology explored in Cartea Milionarului / The Book of the Millionaire. Not only does the old world of the plain disintegrate but so does the old world of the City, and the disintegration applies to the provincial city as much as to Bucharest itself. A dislocation of time takes place as well. Call it a dislocation of temporal perception. It is clearly visible in “Casa cu ecouri tîrzii” / “The House of Late Echoes,” an extremely short story in which revenants of Mircea Eliade assume an air out of Borges. Here, having entered the very old clock and calendar-less house of an elderly relative – the former actress, Cuna Bogomileanu – the protagonist ends up living outside time, in a sort of ‘future of the past.’ The dislocation has the revitalization of event memory as its immediate result. This magic of dissolution is the hallmark of Bănulescu’s prose.

Living under the regime of uncertainties and the propagation of contradictory information, unstable and fractured, reality is soon invaded by legends and mystification. The illusory, the mythic and imaginary take revenge. Their vendetta enacts itself discreetly in Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Men in Winter (particularly in stories with a more urban character), amplifies in Scrisori Provinciale / Provincial Letters (1976) and reaches its climax in Cartea de la Metopolis / Book of the Metropolis (1977). Under threat of modernization, the ancien régime of the Bǎrǎgan steppe experiences a ‘twilight of the gods’ through the disappearance (or possible hiding) of the last vestiges of Byzantium. Everything doubles. A mysterious, subterranean dimension lies beneath the visible. Everything is evanescent; nothing has substance.

The short stories in Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Men in Winter intercommunicate. An interconnecting cast of fabulous characters is “mythed” into the setting where the actors express the genius of the place. This is the terrain of the Millionaire (master of storytelling), Andrei the Dead (the bandit-with-many-lives from the Danube marshes), Vica, his presumptive daughter (who twists the minds of all men), Constantine I, the Lost (the mad king of the plain), the last being a gangly, illiterate teenager, spontaneously capable of the most complicated mathematical calculations. Links express themselves through the descendents of some old families of the area (Lǎscǎreanu, Bogomileanu) or through newer figures (Bazacopol the industrialist, for instance, and the bizarre driver Polider) and through the folkloric, magic-incantatory verses chanted ritualistically by the peasants (in the so-called ‘country songs’). These will form the genetic elements‚ of Cartea Milionarului.

According to Bănulescu, moreover, Cîntecele de cîmpie / The Songs of the Plain are “lyrical documents of the characters’ spirituality.” Organically raised from the representation of his native space, Ştefan Bǎnulescu’s fictional world establishes itself as an independent, fabulous universe with its own geography, history and mythology, and in this sense it is an imaginary province in the style of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Marquez’s Macondo. This is a post-Byzantine “South-Eastern province,” standing physically and psychologically at a crossroads between civilizations. In a period when all private property was frowned upon, literary property included, Bǎnulescu managed to be one of the few Romanian writers who succeeded, though various evasive strategies, in colonizing and administering his own unmistakable, private fictional territory.

 

The connecting vessels that link Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Winter of the Men to Scrisori provinciale / Letters from the South-East Province and Scrisori provinciale to Cartea Milionarului are of the same kind as those that link the stories inside Iarna bǎrbaţilor, some rural with a pagan substrate, others urban and dominated by the grim reality of war.

Elegiile la sfîrşit de secol / Elegies at the end of the Century illuminates some of these pieces in a retrospective way. The most significant works included in the epistolary collection of 1976 such as “Inefabilul”/ “The Ineffable,” Un viscol de altǎdatǎ /”A Blizzard of Yore” or “Un alt colonel Chabert”/ “Another Colonel Chabert” continue the manner established in “Vieţi provizorii”/ “Provisional Lives” and “Casa cu ecouri tîrzii”/ “House of Late Echoes.” In essence, the texts of this author organize themselves into the puzzle of an “imaginary realm” as a fascinating network of meanings that can never be wholly elucidated.

Although he sets out from a point that might be called “the heart of the real” and although he doesn’t avoid a reportorial tone, or a diarist’s or memoirists either, Bǎnulescu is not a realist, nor is he (to the end) a writer of the fantastic. His prose nevertheless contains a dose of the self-referentially ineffable. Call it mystery. One might say that Bǎnulescu desires to emphasize the unsaid. His characters speak allusively, talk in circles full of pregnant silences. They have natural access to the secret aspects of things, to cosmic natures, to a ‘beyond’ belonging to or handed down from ancient experience. The style is austere, ceremonious pared to the essential, with a slight air of having fallen into desuetude. The composition is discreetly modern. It features the occasional sudden change of perspective, and it is tightly packed with meanings that seem to slip through our fingers. Here, the atmosphere is not born of aesthetic opulence, but, to the contrary, of sober description. A classic detachment of voice in which melancholy and irony are contained and a repressed affectivity preside over the writing.

In this writer, everything is spiritual and ambiguous. The inexplicable, the enigmatic assures the functioning principle of the fictional world in which ritual practices of a magical, folkloric nature coexist with cultivated wisdom, carefully staged.

For example, the bustard, the endangered bird featured in the short story of the same name, may be seen as chimera, as a mirage seen by two strangers who are traveling along the plain searching for more “peoples” by night. On the other hand, it may also be seen as an erotic phantasm: Paminode Dǎnilǎ’s wife whom no one has seen, lost sometime in the past and constantly sought by one of the travelers. In general, Bǎnulescu’s stories have to do with quests for vague, nebulous objects. Throughout his stories, newcomers in the ancient world of the plains discover communities and destinies through the stories and legends that have been spread about them. The author switches skillfully between narration in the third person and the first person, cultivating an impression of Byzantine wisdom and ambivalence and giving the impression that he knows less than his characters. One of his preferred techniques—pioneered by Mateiu Caragiale in the interwar period and practiced by Alice Botez and Mircea Ciobanu to Ştefan Agopian in the 60s, 70s and 80s—involves leaving large informational gaps, historical and biographical chasms that fill up rapidly with fabulation, fabrication and myth. As with the great eastern masters, illusion holds sway over the real. In any case, one must not forget that the plains – arid, languishing under the punishing rays of the sun, deserted, endless – are the quintessential land of the mirage. A metaphor and mise en abime of this condition is offered by “Masa cu oglinzi” a long, fragmented narrative. In this story, a down-at-heel everyman (Ion Popescu) sets up a table with mirrors arranged on it in the park of an unseen city of the plain so as to alter the perceptions of passers-by. Bǎnulescu’s narratives are often focused on characters with artistic aspirations, individuals whose perceptions have been twisted by drought and who have been cast out alone in the vast plains being encroached by the advancing Soviet armies. In “Satul de lut”/ “The Clay Village,” a traveler, searching for some trace of a postman who has gone missing on the front lines, picks through the ruins of a devastated world. Believing her husband dead, his wife remarries a shriveled-up old man (“the teacher’s brother”) and is killed in a bombing raid. The narrator’s guide—a former priest-turned-composer who plans to write a symphony called ‘The Clay Village—loses his own life in the raid. However, in a final twist that proves the irony of destiny, the narrator discovers in a newspaper, many years later, a photograph of the missing man. It turns out, surprisingly, that he has survived. In “Vieţi provizorii” /“Provisional Lives”(one of the best texts of the volume, along with “Mistreţii erau blînzi”/“The Boars were Mild”), relations between myth, history, biography and false identity are discussed in a seemingly-obsolete prose-narrative, populated with odd, sublimely ridiculous characters whose lives were broken during the dreadful 1950s.

The flagship story that opens Iarna bǎrbaţilor / Men in Winter with a bang, “Mistreţii erau blînzi” / “The Boars were Mild” may be read as an apocalyptic metaphor of the all-destroying flood or as an optimistic metaphor of liberation and political thaw. In terms of geographical setting and narrative formula, the writing deviates from the rest of the book. The story takes place during the last winter of the Second World War—it’s mentioned in passing somewhere that “Rommel is still in Africa”—and we find ourselves neither on the Bǎrǎgan plain nor in the marshes of Borca and Ialomiţa, but in a fishing village in the Danube Delta, at the far-end of Banulescu’s province. In contrast to the other short stories in Iarna/Winter, this is a traditional, flowing, dynamic epic tale. Fleeing from rising waters that have flooded everything in their path, a Lipovan couple – Condrat and Fenia – criss-cross the Delta in a boat. They are looking for solid ground, in the form of sand dunes, in which to bury their dead child. The sandy ground is continually washed away, however, so that “whatever Condrat dug was soon filled in again.” The unfortunate fisherman is accompanied by a deacon named Ichim, a man who presents himself as “a high spirit” and as “misunderstood,” an outcast cast out into the isolated village, lost among villagers like Ovid in Tomis. Flirtatious Vica comes on the scene, temptress to all men in the area. The source of many legends (some with a charming Balkan air), chased away from society like a wild beast and desirous of returning to “the fold,” she faces Fenia’s jealousy by lending the little group a hand. Threatened by floating chunks of ice (having broken free, due to a sudden spell of warm weather), Condrat, Fenia, the deacon, Vica and the two gypsy musicians hired to sing festive songs at the funeral, take refuge in the village school, where the child is buried with his ABCs and notebooks on his chest. At this point a herd of “tame” or mild boars led by an “emperor” named Vasile, makes its way through the blocks of floating ice. Their sudden appearance causes and outburst of healthy, optimistic, liberating laughter among the men of the village. Their collective solidarity contrasts sharply with Fenia’s “egotism,” her distrust directed at elemental-vital Vica. The story ends, therefore, as a triumph of collective “elementarity.” Perhaps. Only the volume closes on an enigmatic note of isolation and twilight. The prose of Ştefan Bǎnulescu oscillates between these poles.