We'll Always Have Bucharest

REVRW Firan continuedfrom previous page translated well and at the right moment? Because they emigrated and started writing in a widely known language? Or because they belonged to a modem and innovative literary movement and fused with a cultural spirit that animated Europe at a given historical moment? On the other hand, when we tum to fiction, why should the Russian peasant be endowed with universality over time while ours is forever marginal and resistant to a foreign reader's perception? Is this aconspiracy orthe whim ofthe greatercultures? Our own inability to select authors and works that deserve to be known abroad? An unprofitable promotion and translation strategy? Such questions are likely to be around for a long time, with additional nuances and toned-down shrillness, but the obsession oftranslations that ought to strike big in the greater cultures will still haunt authors, translators, publishers, and cultural managers alike. Even the most modest ofattempts that may look like no more than tiny drops in the ocean are still to be preferred to laments and complexes, myths, and prejudices. This is the choice ofthe editors ofBorn in Utopia: An Anthology ofModern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry (2006), which brings together 66 poets and 100 years ofpoetry from Romania, hurling them in the vastAmerican territory with the hope that some day, someone may find a few original voices, emotions wearing no mascara, depth and playfulness, non-conformism and modernity, a fresh air and the courage to synthesize and surpass the spirit ofa small country where, during the 50 years of dictatorship, poetry was the best politics and economy. The sister of this book, Naming the Nameless /Locul nimanui (2006), a parallel anthology of 36 American poets, came out in Romania to be enjoyed by the many readers eager to sample the poets of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the gnostics and the unwilling to be enrolled in schools and trends, individual voices across forty years ofwriting against the grain of mainstreamAmerican poetry. The selection is Leonard Schwartz's and Ed Foster's, the latter of whom is also the director ofTalisman House which published Born in Utopia. But the significant link between the two books that came out in unequal mirrors, each with its brilliance and particular reflections, is the presence in both volumes ofAndrei Codrescu, a Romanian and an American poetratherthan a Romanian-American one, since there is distinction in his destiny within each of the cultures and each proclaim him as the spearhead oftheirpoetic idiom. While, hitherto,Transylvaniahas mostly been known as the land ofDracula, Romanian poetry has every chance to draw attention to itselfby virtue of Codrescu's well-established, authoritative, unique, and inimitable voice. He features in Born in Utopia as one ofthe anthologized poets, author ofthe preface, and translator of Blaga, a Transylvanian poet listed as a Nobel Prize candidate in the 50s. The originality and, possibly, the success of the two volumes is that many of the poets are translated (whether in English or Romanian) by other poets who preserved the flowing transposition of the magic. Acoustic associations inside a word are just as important as logical explanations. Children learn to speak by associating words with objects or persons they can see or touch. With real-life references missing , imagination will build descriptive images, a short film where the meaning of a word is gathered in the unfolding of the "story" of that word. Many writers who emigrate in a different culture feel their identity has been altered. A foreign language is learned in the same way. Before it can infiltrate the mental structures and have the words come out naturally, unaware, without having first been "translated in the mind" by us, a foreign language operates with the images of the word that is transposed in the mother tongue. The film of the translated word precedes its utterance. A foreign word is acquired when its images in the mother and the foreign tongue overlap. It is only then that we may claim to "think" in a foreign language. Or, more poetically, dream in it. Sometimes, expressions that are rich and meaningful in the mother tongue may end up as dull, placid shipwrecks on a...