Fragile Bridges: American←→Romanian Poetic Transactions

Mihäilescu continuedfrom previous page ground and fertile soil for the Romanians' traditional right to symbolic autonomy. Yet, in the hands of these pioneers, pious fakes, and fakes galore, came to beleaguer the luminous truth of our confident past. Dor may be genuine for the ailing individual, or for the one taken with local Bovaryism, but when it comes to making it into a national feeling, one shouldn't have an easy time accepting, somewhere in the grounding background, hordes, and generations of melancholy shepherds, marching slowly towards nowhere. A matter oftaste, one would say—dor was placed in a past both ineffably deep and certain. Yet, the frailness of textual evidence was hidden by the ideological thrust of champions like Russo and the others: dor was discovered in the past to cover the indecisive character of the past itself, its lack of textual documentation. The dor case is a loop: the desire for a certain past as firm and legitimizing as a divine law is objectified as the past itself. This loop is a self-grounding figure, whose self-referential content leaves it in mid-air like a Spanish castle. Generations of schoolboys and schoolgirls that were to grow into the makers and unmakers of modern Romania were taught to contribute their moments of unnumbness to the hardening of the national feeling of dor. And so Romanians taught themselves to believe that they were the inhabitants ofa country ofdor (as Eminescu put it in one of his less felicitous lines): a country whose essence was not only untranslatable, but also, and mostly, not to be translated. The ideology of dor is only the best-known secular example of a matriotism whose object of desire — an exorbitant past—dwarfs and breastfeeds its present subject. This subject could not belittle itself further by trading his subjection to the past for a subjection to the chatty vanities of the West. Such self-referential loops are enabled not only by archival shortcomings and ideologies gone awry at a historical moment (or another). More to the point, such loops are structural regularities of the nombrilism typical of modern Roman cultures (including the political, business, and industrial ones). The misguiding missile of nombrilism has these cultures look at themselves when it doesn't matter too much, and glance sideways when they shouldn't. In the case of translation, thisfaux pas de deux is expressed such: what matters can't be translated; thus, translation is a dumping ground for lukewarm approximations. Yet we need translations to enhance the image of our culture abroad, a concession made so that gold, myths, and glory may be admitted into our realm. This symbolic economy of translation is typical of minor cultures, whose missionary, colonial, and imperial drives are found missing or misplaced into the land of funny. It's sentimental and a little moralizing, but I have to say it: a culture overcomes its minor fate only by alienating itself, by misplacing itself to renew, reinvent, and find itself anew—through translation, for instance, through mystical serendipity , ifyou will. It's not hot news that some of the real re-inventors of Romanian culture—the avant-gardists among the most spectacular— left their country. After all, the exile is a radical form of translation. A culture overcomes its minorfate only by alienating itself. One is attracted to sec oneself tenderly in the strange mirrors held by minor languages, as if one were one's own mother. In this self-reflection, one's native tongue shines in too familiar tones not to make one blush (and blushing crops up only in one's native language), for it pinches the diehard nerve of the ridiculous as if it were a serpent in the paradise of taste. For fear ofleaving this fetal space—the infancy ofthe pure mother tongue—the legion and paradigm ofminorcultures' anti-translators will reject the work of translation as anything but a lure for sponsorship coming from abroad: in order to keep dim that light that keeps them in power. When this Utopian language is cuddled and pestered by this "fetal desire," the infantilization drive is deemed to take over whenever the going gets tough. Language will tend...