Pathology of the Transplant

Foster continuedfrom previous page sonant explosion of possibilities half-realized, more like our postmodem present than the scrubbed eighth arrondissement. A hundred years ago, poets from everywhere wanted to be French. That's where modernist poetry had begun after all, but many poets who worked hard and successfully to be read within this new French tradition paid for it dearly. Some years ago, I edited a collection of works by Stuart Merrill, whom Kenneth Rexroth argued was the greatest American poet ofhis generation—and so he was—but since he published almost exclusively in French, he is little known in the US today. American fascination with things French has long since vanished, and except for the collection I edited, Merrill has been out of print in his own country for more than a century. By way of comparison, consider Panait Istrati, who wrote Kyra Kyralina (1923) in French and, in the preface, called himself Romain Rolland's "creation ." At the same time, however, Istrati noted that his principal character (bearing more than a passing resemblance to himself) was in love with "the Orient. He is self-taught and finds his Sorbonne where he can." An Oriental Sorbonne? Istrati knew about that; his father was Greek, after all, and the model for Kyra Kyralina was Arabian Nights, not Jean-Christophe (1910). Unlike Merrill, Istrati clearly had more than France on his mind. It may be that one ofthe great values ofRomanian culture lies precisely in the fact it is not French. From the shores of the Black Sea, it may be easier to question the certainties that the West cultivates until yet another political, financial, military, or cultural disaster occurs. It's then that a new, young writer—his or hergeneration's Tzara, Gellu Naum, or Mircea Cärtärescu—can emerge with the poetic and intellectual tools to dissect the remnants of Western orderliness and perhaps salvage what's left, employing , like Istrati, an Eastern sensuality, shrewdness, and pleasure in the absurd. Today, of course, it is more likely for a young writer to choose New York City and English than Paris and French, but is that an improvement? Last summer, a Romanian writer told me, "When we were young, we thought someday the Americans would come. This was in the sixties. My parents believed that; they kept saying the Americans would come. Ofcourse, they didn't, and so eventually we had to take care of things ourselves." Ed Foster is the editor of the journal Talisman and co-editor, with Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur, of Bom in Utopia: An Anthology of Modem and Contemporary Romanian Poetry (2006). Pathology of the Transplant Marcel Cornis-Pope Born in Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry Edited by Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur, with Edward Foster Introduction by Andrei Codrescu Afterwords by Nicolae Manolescu and Virgil Nemoianu Talisman House Publishers P.O. Box 3157 Jersey City, NJ 07303-3157 355 pages; paper, $27.95 As a character in Harold Pinter's play No Man 's Land (1975) comments, "Translating verse is an extremely difficult task. Only the Romanians remain respectable exponents of the craft." Whether ironic or candid, this comment reminds us that Romanian poetry (like the poetic production of other East European countries) has had to depend on the ability of foreign and native translators to transplant an original poetic experience in a language oflarger circulation. The unfamiliar poetic universe is experienced best in the relatively coherent context ofone poet's opus; and Romanian poetry has benefited from a few notable translations (Andrei Codrescu's rendering ofLucian Blaga; Michael Impey's Tudor Arghezi; Starvros Deligiorgis's equivalences for Nichita Stänescu and Cezar Baltag; Marguerite Dorian and Eliot B. Urdang 's transposition ofIon Caraion; AdamJ. Sorkin's book-length translations of Marin Sorescu, Daniela Cräsnaru, Mircea Cärtärescu, among others). In the absence ofa more systematic approach to translating Romanian poetry, anthologies have had their role in acclimatizing an American audience to a different poetic tradition. But while anthologies of Romanian poetry in English translation have proliferated since the early 1970s, most of them have followed an idiosyncratic principle of selection, often tied to...