The Observer Translation Project

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 resembles the author from many points of view without ever being identical with the author himself. The pieces many be read together as parts of a hypothetical Bildungsroman. Each fragment is a “variation,” and the variants create a fictive self-portrait that develops through a play of mirrors. This play reflects and enacts the coming into being of a possible double who borrows, imagines and transfigures the residues of an individual memory, inevitably populated by members of the writers’ generation, partners and interlocutors—in short, the formation and deformation of a sensibility from childhood to maturity in hostile to adverse socio-political conditions.