Found in Translation: The Two Lives of E. M. Cioran; or How Can One Be a Comparatist?

"Comment peut-on être persan?" asks a startled Parisian in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes when confronted with the spectacle of two Persian visitors in the City of Light. "How can one be a Persian?" The question is echoed, but poignantly reversed, by E. M. Cioran in his La tentation d'exister [The temptation to exist] of 1956. "Comment peut-on être roumain?" [How can one be a Romanian?] he asks, frustrated in his struggles to make his way in that same capital of world culture.

Montesquieu's question is a challenge to perceived marginality from a position of self-assured identity and cultural centrality. In Cioran's question, marginality challenges itself, but only from the center, without any assurance of its own cultural identity. To it I would add, as a student of Cioran, my own question: "How can one be a comparatist?" By asking it, I mean to challenge some of the career "norms" in the practice of comparative literature in American academia today. For I find I cannot focus exclusively ("objectively") on my object of study—Cioran and his two lives—without including the facts of my own life as a Romanian living in the United States. The experiences of the researching subject (myself) are an integral part of my quest for that object. In translating Cioran's process of translating himself from Romanian into French, I realized I had opened up not simply a new biographical project, but discovered a new autobiographical self as well, bringing the Romanian Cioran into English as I was brought from Romania to America.

But who exactly is E. M. Cioran? On one level, the answer is easy. He is the Romanian-born French philosopher Emil Cioran, author of Précis de décomposition (1949; Handbook of decomposition), La tentation d'exister (1956), De L'inconvenient d'être né (1973; On the Inconvenience of being born), La chute dans le temps (1964; Falling in time), Histoire et Utopie (1960; History and Utopia), and Syllogismes de l'armertume (1952; Syllogisms of bitterness), among several other books. He was a good friend of Henri Michaux, as well as of Samuel Beckett, Benjamin Fondane, Paul Celan, and Eugene Ionesco. He has been variously acclaimed as "the greatest French writer to honor our language since the death of Paul Valéry" (St. John Perse), a "modern Socrates" (Marc Fumaroli, professor at the College de France, member of the Académie française), and the "most distinguished figure in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein" (Susan Sontag). When he died in Paris in 1995, his death triggered an avalanche of articles in major French newspapers (Le Figaro, Le Monde, Paris Match, Le Nouvel Observateur, Magazine Littéraire) as well as special radio and television shows and interviews reflecting a renewed interest in his life and work.

But on other levels, answers to questions about his identity are by no means clear. For example, the initials in E. M. Cioran do not stand for Emil(e) Michel, as the Library of Congress mistakenly lists him, but simply for "E. M.," as in E. M. Forster. Cioran deliberately turned the first two letters of his first name into initials to allude to that well-known English author. By thus modifying his given name into a pen name, Cioran revealed both his ambitions as an author and his biographical ambiguities. He had in fact two lives, two identities, two authorial voices: the Romanian Cioran, a mystical revolutionary imbued with the ideals of political romanticism, and the French Cioran, who in 1937 left Romania, willing himself into exile in Paris. On the eve of his first publication in France in 1949, the young Cioran, an unknown author, a barbarian (as he felt) from the margins of Europe, found inside his Romanian name the elements to prefigure his wider fame at the epicenter of European culture—two ordinary letters raised to the status of famous initials. There are no other connections between Cioran and E. M. Forster. Embedded in the new name was Cioran's sense of...