Mircea Cărtărescu

Translation: Julian Semilian
Penguin Modern Classics, 2021, 352 pp

A dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the dark world of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child messiah works his magic in the tenements, a young man explores gender boundaries, a woman relives her youth and an architect becomes obsessed with the sound of his new car horn - with unexpected consequences. Blending reality and symbolism, time and myth, this is a cult masterwork from Romania's most celebrated writer.

“Cărtărescu is one of the great literary voices of Central Europe. He daringly questions our usual way of looking at the world, suggesting that rationalism is merely an attempt to create order. In fact, the world is made up of the nuances of our fantasies.” Olga Tokarczuk Tony’s Reading List review.

Kirkus review (for the New Directions 2005 translation).

Julian Semilian is a poet, translator, novelist and filmmaker. He was born in Romania and currently teaches film editing at the North Carolina School of the Arts, after a twenty-four-year career as a film editor in Hollywood. He translated Paul Celan's Romanian Poems (Green Integer) and Gherasim Luca’s Inventor of Love and Other Writings (Black Widow Press).

Max Blecher

Translation: Henry Howard
Old Street, 2008, 227 pp

Scarred Hearts is the the story of Romanian-Jewish writer confronting disease, love, and Fascism in a Romanian sanitarium. A 20th century classic of European literature translated for the first time, Scarred Hearts is set in Berck-sur-Mer, on the edge of the sea, where a young man named Emanuel has come to a sanitorium to undergo a cure that is almost as dreadful as his illness. Encased in a plaster cast to immobilize his bones, he must rest indefinitely and hope for the return of his health. In despair Emanuel lies on his back and listens to the waves on the shore outside. Little by little, though, as he becomes accustomed to the strangeness of his new world, he discovers that life within the sanitorium is as vibrant and chaotic as the one he left in Paris. Emanuel's days are soon filled with eccentric friendships and unexpected passions. Blecher conjures a world that vibrates with life despite the constant threat of anguish and disintegration; an existence that demands both commitment and renunciation. Psychologically astute and heartbreaking, full of pathos and humour, Scarred Hearts is a quiet marvel of luminous storytelling.

The film based on Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts was reviewed by The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Max Blecher (September, 8 1909 – May, 31 1938) was a Romanian writer. While studying medicine in Paris, Blecher was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, a disease which kept him confined to hospitals and sanatoria for the remaining decade of his life. In spite of this, he produced a considerable amount of literature—including the novels Adventures in Immediate Unreality, Scarred Hearts, and the posthumously published The Lighted Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal—as well as keeping up correspodence with figures like André Breton, Mihail Sebastian, Ilarie Voronca, and Martin Heidegger.

Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu

Translation: Gabi Reigh
Center for Romanian Studies, 2022, 232 pp

One of the first successful novels written by a female author in Romania, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's A Bach Concert remains a classic work of Romanian literature. The main plot revolves around a Bach concert organized by Elena Hallipa-Drăgănescu for the elite society of Bucharest. It is a captivating tale of high society intrigue, family tragedy, and urban life and culture in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Published for the first time in English, A Bach Concert will delight readers with stories of society in interwar Romania.

Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu was born in 1876 in Galati, Romania. She started publishing stories in literary magazines and, in 1919, she published her first novel. A Bach Concert is considered her greatest work. The translator, Gabi Reigh, won a PEN Translation Award for her previous work.

Mircea Cărtărescu

Translation: Sean Cotter
Deep Vellum, 2022, 672 pp

“A beguiling novel that plunges deep into subterranean conspiracy theories while questioning the nature of reality.

“You can’t sow the world with dreams, because the world itself was a dream.” The 27-year-old protagonist of Romanian novelist Cărtărescu’s waking-dream book is a teacher who has a decidedly Dostoyevskian discontentment with the world: He wanted to be a writer, but one particularly sharp-tongued critic, calling a poem of his “a pointless whirlpool of words,” stopped his literary career in its tracks. Now, at the beginning of the novel, he finds himself battling the lice that are epidemic among his students. Parasites are much on his mind throughout this sprawling narrative. So, too, is death a constant preoccupation: Why should he, why should anyone, accumulate knowledge and experience only, in the end, to be annihilated? When not pondering the eternal void, the young man is suspended in a kind of nightly dream state courtesy of the titular solenoid that the previous owner of his house, a protégé of Nikola Tesla’s who spent a long career inventing very strange things, not least of them this particular electromagnetic contraption, left behind, thanks to which, our narrator says, “I always slept aloft, floating between the bed and ceiling, occasionally turning over like a swimmer in a lazy, glittering light.” It’s not the only solenoid hidden away in the back alleys and tunnels of Bucharest, and one day the city itself will float away. Before then, however, our teacher and his girlfriend, a physics teacher smitten by theosophy, are drawn into the occult world of a group called the Picketists, condemned by the regime but capable of all kinds of mischief, whose members include a surprising number of people who figure in what passes for our teacher’s ordinary life. Cărtărescu writes poetically and philosophically (“What visceral and metaphysical mechanism converts the objective into the subjective?”), and while the story doesn’t always add up, it’s full of arresting images and eldritch twists that would do Umberto Eco proud. A masterwork of Kafkaesque strangeness, brilliantly conceived and written.”

Kirkus starred review.

Magda Carneci

Translation: Sean Cotter
Deep Vellum, 2021, 232 pp

Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize 2022

The lyrical, feminist novel that exploded onto the Romanian literary scene: a 21st-century Scheherazade recounts her life to a man she might leave behind forever.

In this modern classic of global feminist literature, the only novel by one of Romania's most heralded poets, a woman meanders through a cosmic retelling of her life from childhood to adulthood with visionary language and visceral detail. Styled as a long letter addressed to the man she is ready to leave, she spins captivating tales that create space in the cosmos for the female experience. Her stories invite the reader through a dreamlike thread of strange images and passing characters, from the small incidents of their lives together to the intimate narrative of her relationship to womanhood, crescendoing in a fantastical vision of love, loss, and femininity.

"Profound, mysterious, emotional and gripping, FEM is a luminous and inspiring work of literature by one of the world’s most valuable authors." — Deborah Levy, author of The Man Who Saw Everything, Hot Milk, and Swimming Home

Lit Hub review.
LARB review.
Chicago Review of Books review.

Mihail Sebastian

Translation: Gabi Reigh
AuroraMetro Books, 2020, 224 pp

On a cold bright day, fifteen year old Adriana Dunea wakes up to find that her world has transformed overnight. Her parents irritate her, school is a bore and her body is changing in ways she does not understand. As the seasons turn, she grows into a beautiful young woman, forges new friendships and falls in and out of love. Yet her days spent dreaming of romance and listening to the latest gramophone records in her provincial town swiftly come to an end when the sudden opportunity arises to move to Bucharest. Seduced by the charms of the ‘Little Paris of the East’, a chance encounter with the hot-headed composer Cello Viorin tests her attachment to her longstanding sweetheart, Gelu. In this witty, lyrical coming-of-age novel, Mihail Sebastian sensitively charts his heroine’s journey of self-awakening as she discovers the limits of her freedom and strives to shape her identity as a woman.

“Sebastian gives a remarkably sensitive, candid portrayal of the coming of age of a girl seen through the eyes of a suitor. The author’s sensitivity to the emotions of his heroine Adriana is captured vividly in this translation in such passages as “every kiss was a wound, in which their lips, their breath, their teeth, the tips of their tongues drowned, warm and wet, and parted slowly, with a final hesitation, leaving on each mouth a blurred, faded smile.” – Dennis Deletant, Ion Ratiu Visiting Professor of Romanian Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC

“Reigh handily preserves Sebastian’s supple, languid syntax, shaping each sentence to accentuate his exquisite lyricism, as when the couple remains unable to yield entirely to their desire “to be held in such a way that it obliterated everything apart from the ecstasy of the flesh. An endearingly wistful story of young love.” Kirkus Reviews

Mihail Sebastian was the pen-name of the Romanian writer Iosif Hechter. Born in the Danube port of Braila, he died in a road accident in 1945. During the period between the wars he was well-known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays. His novel For Two Thousand Years is a Penguin Modern Classic.

Gabi Reigh’s translations and fiction have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today and The Fortnightly Review. She has won the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation and was shortlisted for the Tom-Gallon Society of Authors short story award. She is currently engaged in a translation project called Interbellum Series focusing on works from the Romanian interwar period, including the poetry of Lucian Blaga.

Lucian Dan Teodorovici

Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
Dalkey Archive, 2018, 356 pp

The year is 1959, one of the darkest periods of Romania’s communist regime. Political prisoner Bruno Matei, a puppeteer of Italian ancestry, has been released from jail a broken man, suffering from amnesia. An uneasy relationship forms between ‘Matei Brunul’ and Bojin, the secret policeman who keeps him under constant surveillance. Gradually, the secret police will try to remold Matei’s mind by rewriting his past, turning the puppeteer into a puppet of the new totalitarian order. In parallel, a harrowing second narrative reveals Matei’s prison experiences: the story of an innocent man physically and mentally crushed by the totalitarian system, which explodes the manipulative fictions of the secret police one by one. Matei Brunul was the first Romanian novel to explore the carceral world of the former regime, but it is also a subtle meditation on Heinrich von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre and the ways in which a totalitarian state and ultimately fiction itself create and manipulate puppets.

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2020.

Lucian Dan Teodorovici is a novelist, author of short fiction, and screenwriter. His novel Our Circus Presents was published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press in 2009. Matei Brunul (2011) has earned widespread critical acclaim in Romania and won a number of major international awards including the Augustin Fratila literary prize.

Alistair Ian Blyth has translated numerous works of fiction and philosophy from the Romanian, most recently the novels The Bulgarian Truck by Dumitru Tsepeneag and The Encounter by Gabriela Adamesteanu for Dalkey Archive Press.

Bogdan Suceavă

Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
Northwestern University Press, 2011, 222 pp

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked, in one famous formulation, the "end of history." In his apocalyptic novel Coming from an Off-Key Time, Bogdan Suceavă satirizes the events in his native Romania since the violent end of the Ceauşescu regime that fateful year. Suceavă uses three interrelated narratives to illustrate the destructive power of Romanian society’s most powerful mythologies. He depicts madness of all kinds but especially religious beliefs and their perversion by all manner of outrageous sects. Here horror and humor reside impossibly in the same time and place, and readers experience the vertiginous feeling of living in the middle of a violent historical upheaval. Even as Coming from an Off-Key Time suggests the influence of such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov, the fantastic satirist of the early Soviet Union, Suceavă engages the complexities of a quickly changing country in search of its bearings and suspicious of its past.

Bogdan Suceavă is an associate professor of mathematics at California State University, Fullerton. One of Romanian literature’s most promising and original young writers, he is the author of four novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of poems.

Alistair Ian Blyth’s previous translations include Filip Florian, Little Fingers (2009); Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Our Circus Presents (2009); and Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (2009).

LARB review of Bogdan Suceava. LARB contributor page.

Mihail Sebastian

Translation: Philip O Ceallaigh
Other Press, 2017, 256 pp

Mihail Sebastian’s classic 1934 novel delves into the mind of a Jewish student in Romania during the fraught years preceding World War II.

This literary masterpiece revives the ideological debates of the interwar period through the journal of a Romanian Jewish student caught between anti-Semitism and Zionism. Although he endures persistent threats just to attend lectures, he feels disconnected from his Jewish peers and questions whether their activism will be worth the cost. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and conversing with revolutionaries, zealots, and libertines, he remains isolated, even from the women he loves. From Bucharest to Paris, he strives to make peace with himself in an increasingly hostile world.

For Two Thousand Years echoes Mihail Sebastian’s struggles as the rise of fascism ended his career and turned his friends and colleagues against him. Born of the violence of relentless anti-Semitism, his searching, self-derisive work captures a defining moment in history and lights the way for generations to come—a prescient, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, resistance and acceptance.

Financial Times review.

“For Two Thousand Years is mordant, meditative, knotty, provocative. It scores high on psychological verisimilitude and low on larks — though there is some room for humour and even the odd bedroom escapade. More than a fascinating historical document, it is a coherent and persuasive novel, atoning in setting and character development for what it lacks in narrative pace…In the end Sebastian survived the war unscathed, but there is a tragic footnote to his story that owes nothing to his Jewishness (if plenty to modernity): in late May 1945, some three weeks after VE Day, he was fatally run over by a truck while crossing the road. He was, it is reported, on his way to deliver his first university lecture.”

The New York Times review.

“Sebastian, born Iosif Hechter in 1907, was a writer deeply immersed in the fervent intellectual life of Romania in the interwar decades. “For Two Thousand Years” carries his introspective, often distressed, sometimes optimistic protagonist through this era up to 1934, as his country teetered on the brink between liberty and authoritarianism. Sebastian’s later diary, first published in English in 2000 as “Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years,” reports on which way the country fell.”

LARB review.

“In the days following the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthew Heimbach, one of the most prominent neo-Nazis in the United States, came out to the local courthouse to support James Alex Fields Jr. He wore a T-shirt with a portrait of Corneliu Codreanu, founder of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard. Most Americans will not be familiar with Codreanu or even the Iron Guard. In Mihail Sebastian’s subtle novel For Two Thousand Years, first published in Romania in 1934, Sebastian chronicles the rise of Codreanu’s movement and presents us with a nuanced view of the individual caught in a time of radicalization and rising xenophobia. Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s fluid translation of the novel comes to us at the right moment.”

Norman Manea

Translation: Jean Harris
New Directions, 2014, 288 pp

Norman Manea left Romania in 1986, spent a year in West Berlin, and arrived in the United States in 1988. His literary work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has received, among other awards, Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships in the United States, the Nonino International Literary Prize in Italy, the Nelly Sachs Prize in Germany, and the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. He is a member of the Berlin Academy of Art, has been honored by the French government with the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of highest rank, and was inducted to the British Royal Society of Literature. His books in English include a memoir, The Hooligan's Return; a novel, The Black Envelope; the novellas collected in Compulsory Happiness; the short fiction collection October Eight O'Clock; and a collection of essays, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist. Manea lives in New York City and is Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture at Bard College.

Jean Harris’s research interests include political socialization and engagement, federalism and intergovernmental relations, and the gendered nature and effects of U.S. politics. Jean has taught introductory courses in local, state, and national government and upper-level courses in public administration, public policy, and judicial politics for the Political Science Department at the University of Scranton for 33 years. She is also a founding mother and former director of the Women's & Gender Studies Program at the university. Since 2012, Jean has coordinated the university's Ready to Run Northeastern Pennsylvania program, which educates women about why it's important to have more women in government and how to run for office. In her academic career and her community service, Jean seeks to cultivate a high sense of political efficacy in everyone she encounters, empowering and inspiring them to engage in community, state, national, and/or international politics. Jean earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. In 1994, the University of Scranton named her its CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) professor of the year. She was an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow during the 2007-2008 academic year. Jean lives in Nicholson, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Michael. She enjoys reading on her deck overlooking the Endless Mountains of Northeast Pennsylvania and the benefits of Michael's gardens.

Mr. Manea's voice is radically new, and we are blessedly awakened and alerted by the demand his fiction makes on our understanding.--Lore Segal

A superb writer who gives an extraordinary testimony of a rich and dramatic life under one of the most grotesque and ferocious dictatorships.--Mario Vargas Llosa

This world of ours, in his view, is a place where the ridiculous reigns supreme over all human life and tortures everyone without respite, and therefore it cannot be ignored because it's not about to ignore any of us. If that is so, fools are also martyrs. Words caused them to suffer and words are their salvation. Manea's strength as a writer comes from his deep solidarity with such people. He has in mind all those, including himself, who were left to play the fool in one of history's many traveling circuses.--Charles Simic

With his talent and creativity, Manea belongs to the great men of Romania.--Orhan Pamuk

World Without Borders review.
LARB review.
The New York Times shortlist.

Manea has been well translated for several decades, earning acclaim far beyond his native Romania as an innovative prose stylist and chronicler of the Holocaust and postwar Communism. “Captives” is his first novel, originally published in Romania in 1970 and written in three sections with different narrative techniques. In a preface, Manea tells us he delayed for 20 years the English translation of this “sometimes overwhelmingly puzzling text,” whose complex account of lives at the edges of midcentury Romanian society seemed unlikely to go over well abroad.

He’s right that the first two sections are tough. “She” told in the third person shifts between perspectives, and jumps in time or into delusion without warning, while “You,” which introduces the second person, is only slightly more navigable. It’s in the third section, “I” — which makes up the book’s latter half — that “Captives” finally reveals its shape. The more lucid first-person account of “I” opens the story up for the reader; but also, unexpectedly, the repeated lines and overlapping plot points of “I” open the previous sections in retrospect. You realize you’ve been reading a sort of cubist psychological novel about a man whose fate was shaped in equal parts by his own ego and the shifting politics of his time, and of two women — “She” and “You” — who have fallen victim to his frustrations. This coherence is satisfying, as is Harris’s elegant translation, but finally the cultural circumstances that once gave this novel its immediacy remain distant.” Martin Riker, The New York Times

Dan Lungu

Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
Dalkey Archive, 2017

Emilia, a pensioner in northern Romania, is forced to confront the nostalgic illusions she nurtures as a reaction to the grim post-communist present when her daughter, now living in Canada, telephones urging her not to vote for the former communists in upcoming elections. Determined to discover in her own mind why ‘things were better back then,’ she explores her memories of growing up in an impoverished village and of her life as a factory worker in the town. But ironic tension grows as the reader glimpses between the lines how nothing was what it seemed in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Interspersed among Emilia’s memories are fantastical, hilarious anecdotes about the dictator, told by a factory foreman who will turn out to have been a secret police informer. I’m an Old Commie! is a subtle and humane novel about self-deception, but also about the ways in which a totalitarian state twisted ordinary lives.

Edinburgh University Press review. Adapted for film (I’m an Old Communist Hag, 2013).

Dan Lungu is one of the most important Romanian novelists to have emerged in the post-communist period. His award-winning novels, which include Hens’ Heaven, How to Forget a Woman, In Hell All the Light Bulbs are Burnt Out, and The Little Girl Who Played at Being God, have been translated into almost every European language, as well as having been made into feature films and adapted for the stage.

Alistair Ian Blyth is a translator with more than 15 years' experience of translating from Romanian into his native English. His many translations from Romanian include: Little Fingers by Filip Florian; Our Circus Presents by Lucian Dan Teodorovici; Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality by Max Blecher; Coming from an Off-Key Time by Bogdan Suceava; and Life Begins on Friday by Ioana Parvulescu. In 2019, he was the recipient of a Modern Languages Association of America award for his work.

Filip Florian

Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, 208 pp

A strange story of war, death, alienation, politics and bizarre miracles told in brilliant prose. During the construction of a church, a mass grave filled with skeletal remains is discovered in a small Romanian town. The local police chief hopes to rise to fame by proclaiming the piles of bones evidence of a brutal genocide committed by the secret police of the former regime. Petrus, an eager young archeologist, has come to town to excavate the grave site, which is near an ancient Roman fort, but Major Maxim refuses to allow him near the bones. Add to this the priest Onufrie, who believes the mysterious bones are a sign from the Virgin Mary (and whose head sprouts a weird black tuft of hair that wilts “like frost-nipped flowers”). Many characters and overlapping stories can cause confusion but never boredom as everyone awaits the arrival of a group of forensic anthropologists from Argentina (a country of mass graves) to settle the dispute over how the victims ended up dumped indiscriminately together.

Filip Florian was born in 1968 in Bucharest, where he still lives today. Following his studies in Geology and Geophysics he worked as a journalist for the journal Cuvintul, and later for Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle.

Alistair Ian Blyth is a translator with more than 15 years' experience of translating from Romanian into his native English. His many translations from Romanian include: Little Fingers by Filip Florian; Our Circus Presents by Lucian Dan Teodorovici; Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality by Max Blecher; Coming from an Off-Key Time by Bogdan Suceava; and Life Begins on Friday by Ioana Parvulescu. In 2019, he was the recipient of a Modern Languages Association of America award for his work.

Mircea Cărtărescu

Translation: Sean Cotter
Archipelago Books, 2013, 464 pp

“Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist’s childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a traveling circus, Secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilots, the underground jazz scene of New Orleans, and the installation of the communist regime. This kaleidoscopic world is both eerily familiar and profoundly new. Readers of Blinding will emerge from this strange pilgrimage shaken, and entirely transformed.”

The Paris Review review.
The Kenyon Review review.
Los Angeles Review of Books review.

“If George Lucas were a poet, this is how he would write.” New York Sun

“Cărtărescu’s phantasmagorical world is similar to Dalí’s dreamscapes.” Kirkus Reviews

“[Cărtărescu is] a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few.” Andrei Codrescu

“His novel is nothing less than a cathedral of imagination and erudition … This masterwork of mannerism is guaranteed to catapult Mircea Cartarescu to the highest echelons of European literature.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian poet, novelist, essayist and a professor at the University of Bucharest.

Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language And Literature, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher, and then he worked at the Writers Union and as an editor at the Caiete Critice magazine. In 1991 he became a lecturer at the Chair of Romanian Literary History, part of the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters. As of 2010, he is an associate professor. Between 1994-1995 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. Among his writings: "Nostalgia" (a full edition of the earlier published "Visul"), 1993, "Travesti" 1994, "Orbitor" 2001, "Enciclopedia zmeilor" ("The Encyclopedia of Dragons") 2002, "Pururi tânãr, înfãsurat în pixeli" ("Forever young, convolved in pixels") 2002, "De ce iubim femeile" bestseller ("Why do we love women") 2004.

Max Blecher

Translation: Michael Henry Heim
New Directions, 2015, 112 pages

Adventures in Immediate Irreality, wherein he would glimpse future events. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novel sketches the tremulous, frightening, and exhilarating awakenings of a very young man.

The Paris Review feature.

“Sleekly liquid work, the poetry of seething matter itself.” Dustin Illingworth, 3:AM

“A book deserving of new readers, by a writer whose remaining body of work I can only hope will finally appear in its entirety in this country.” The Nation

“When you read his books it’s hard to believe your eyes. The author of this masterpiece was a twenty-five-year-old already weakened by disease, but Blecher’s words don’t merely describe the objects—they dig their talons into the things and hoist them high.” Herta Müller

“Blecher has often been compared to Kafka (and not without reason), but the strongest connection, however, is with Salvador Dali. Like Dali’s ‘soft clocks,’ everything here is about to melt. It is as though Blecher’s world is always on the verge of ontological collapse; from behind the veil of things, nothingness stares out at him.” The Times Literary Supplement

Nora Iuga

Translation: Adam J. Sorkin & Diana Manole
Bitter Oleander Press, 2016, 117 pp

Longlisted by the American Literary Translators Association for the 2017 National Translation Award in Poetry.

”The Hunchbacks’ Bus marks the first published collection of Nora Iuga’s poetry in English, a reminder that too many prominent Romanian authors remain underrepresented in translation.

"i'm sam," begins the first poem of Nora Iuga's The Hunchbacks Bus (Autobuzul cu cocoșați). The book is a sort of family chronicle centered on the imaginary character sam and his life, much of which is in his head, his not very faithful wife minodora, his brother istovitu (the name means exhausted, worn-out). It's comic, though not often in a laugh-out-loud kind of way; surreal or fantastic at not a few moments, at others ribald, eccentric; perhaps even a little hard to cozy up to, since Iuga keeps everything at an ironic distance. Her style is rarely lyrical in a traditional sense. The syntax is direct but the imagery teases and surprises; the poetic voice is energetic, even audacious, with a delightful quirkiness.

In the first of five authorial interludes, short monologues in prose, Iuga addresses the reader, you might find it hard to believe, but sam actually exists (notwithstanding the fact that he s sometimes presented as a dog); and Iuga notes otherwise in sam is an angel:

I’m still determined to find out who
sam is and what he does with his little stick...
I’m the most helpless text
in this city

Iuga’s world may at times be one of loss, worry, proverbially a dog s life, but it spins away with exhilarating dreamlike absurdity.” Martin Woodside, World Literature Today

Nora Iuga was born in Bucharest in 1931. She comes from an artist family and grew up in several countries, including Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, where her parents went on tour for two years, as well as in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu and in the Romanian capital. After completing her studies in German language and literature, she worked as a German teacher, bibliographer in the National Library, editorial journalist for the German language newspaper Neuer Weg (New Way) and the magazine Volk und Kultur (Nation and Culture), editor at the national academic and encyclopedic publishing house. After she published The Captivity of the Circle (Captivitatea Cercului, 1970) Iuga was banned by the communist censors from publishing fiction and poetry because the book promoted a "morbid eroticism" that had a dangerous influence on the younger generation. Her books were withdrawn from public libraries and bookstores. This interdiction lasted until 1978, a forced eight-year hiatus that almost ended an important literary career which has now flourished for nearly five decades. Iuga has translated 33 books mainly of German-language authors, among them E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Elfriede Jelinek, Günter Grass, Paul Celan, Michael Ende and Herta Müller. In addition to the "lifetime translation achievement award" granted by the Romanian Writers' Union, Iuga earned in 2007 the Friedrich-Gundolf prize of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, for exceptional contributions in the dissemination of the German culture worldwide, and in 2015, The Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Adam J. Sorkin is a translator of contemporary Romanian literature whose work has been recognized by a number of awards, among them the Poetry Society (U.K.) Prize for European Poetry Translation, the Kenneth Rexroth Memorial Translation Prize, the Poesis Prize for Translation, the Ioan Flora Prize for Poetry Translation, and other prizes in Romania and Moldova, including the Moldovan Writers’ Union Prize. He has been granted Fulbright, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council of England, New York State Arts Council, Academy of American Poets, Soros Foundation, Romanian Cultural Institute, and U.S. National Endowment for the Arts support for his literary activity. He has published more than thirty-five books of translation and has placed the work of Romanian writers in over 350 periodicals and reviews.

Diana Manole is an award-wining English/Romanian literary translator, writer, and scholar. She holds a Master’s in journalism from Carleton University and PhD in Theatre from the University of Toronto. She has published ten collections of poems and plays and 14 peer-reviewed articles and/or book chapters and co-edited a collection of essays on postcommunist theatre (University of Iowa Press 2020).

Matei Călinescu

Translation: Breonn Mitchell
New York Review Books, 2018

A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei Călinescu.

Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist. This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.

Matei Călinescu was a Romanian literary critic and professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. He emigrated from Romania to the United States in 1973. Emeritus Professor at Indiana University. He lived with his wife in Bloomington, Indiana.

Breon Mitchell is a retired American professor of Germanic Studies and translator. He was a Professor of Germanic Studies, chair of the Comparative Literature Department, and Director of the Lilly Library of Indiana University. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, he has translated works by Franz Kafka, Günter Grass, Martin Grzimek, and Sten Nadolny, among others.

Gheorghe Săsărman

Translation; Martín Rodríguez; Ursula K. LeGuin
Aqueduct Press, 2013, 144p

“These trippy, cutting 24 stories, chosen by SF/F grande dame Le Guin from a collection of 36 originally published in Romanian in 1975, inevitably draw comparisons to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Both explore society and human psyche through architectural descriptions of imaginary cities, but S s rman’s masterfully crafted prose poems feel more immediate, serving as spellbinding descriptions of architectural impossibilities as well as slyly subversive social commentary. The equality of all citizens is an enshrining principle of the ziggurat Vavylon, with steep ramps oiled every day to prevent ascent, though descent is very rapid. The elite of Musaeum create immortal artworks that remain unknown, for they are too busy with their own works to look at one another’s. The intrepid explorers of Selenia vainly hunt for a building site uncontaminated by the psychic refuse of Earth’s poets, lovers, and dreamers, which litters most of the lunar surface. Perhaps the only area where S s rman falls short is in his rare, dismissive portrayals of women (Le Guin’s introduction implies some of the untranslated stories are worse in this respect), all the more startling when contrasted with the extraordinary, timeless nature of his prose.”

Publishers Weekly review.

“A year or two ago I was sent a handsome little book titled La Quadratura del Círcolo. It was inscribed to me in English and a language that I thought was Rumanian. With it was a charming letter from Mariano Martín Rodríguez, explaining that the book was his translation from the Rumanian original by Gheorghe Sasarman, and that both he and the authorhoped I would find it interesting and might have some idea how to go about finding someone to translate it into English.

The book was a set of brief stories, each about a different city—like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of which I’m very fond. That similarity was interesting, and the first couple of stories seemed promising, but I was busy, and my Spanish is slow. So after thanking the sender and author I did nothing about the book for quite a while. But it kept on lying around in one place or another in my study. Maybe just because I liked the cover (a splendid Tower of Babel by an anonymous Fleming), or maybe because it was exerting the effect.

Some books, unread books, exert the effect. It’s not rational, not easy to explain. They don’t glow or vibrate, though that’s what they’d do in an animated movie. They just are in view, they’re there. There’s this book, on the shelf in a book store or the library or like this one in a pile on my desk, and it is visible, silently saying read me. And even if I have no idea what it is and what it’s about, I have to read it.” Ursula K. LeGuin (quoted on Aqueduct Press blog).

Full review on Aqueduct Press blog.

Gheorghe Săsărman made his debut as a writer in 1962, when he won the first prize at a SF short-story contest organized for seven East-European countries. His first book, The Oracle (1969) grouped texts previously published in periodicals. His best-known work, Squaring the Circle (1975), clashed with the communist censorship, which cut out one quarter of its contents. Politically constrained to abandon his activity as a media writer, he left Ceauşescu’s Romania in 1983 and settled in Munich, Germany, where he worked as a computer programmer and analyst.

T.O. Bobe

Translation: Sean Cotter
Wakefield Press, 2019, 72 pp

From Mircea Cartarescu’s translator, a mix of poetry and prose, presented in short chapters/pieces, featuring a barber, Mr.Gică. Mr. Gica is the world’s greatest barber. He holds the world record for sculptural hairstyling and has won three Olympic golds in neck massage. But his specialty is the shave. Mr. Gica’s shop has six mirrors on the walls, six sinks, six barber chairs and no employees. Always crowded, its chairs always occupied, the barbershop forms an off-kilter microcosm: a world of melancholic kitsch that includes opera singers, football players, gladiators, the secret police, four lost hippies and other ludic figures―including our superhuman protagonist’s ever-lurking antagonist in perpetual disguise, Dorel Vasilescu. Trying on a variety of voices and modes like so many work coats, Curl scissor-snips love poems, mock-critical commentaries with footnotes, dreams, diary entries, streams of words without punctuation, cultural references and a number of rebellious hairs off a number of necks to sculpt a patchwork portrait of universal loneliness. This is the first translation of T.O. Bobe into English.

“Curl presents the man, his accomplishments—Olympic medals, an impressive clientele—, and some of his dreams (to own a car -- "But not to drive"), or how he wants to be preserved after death). He has a nemesis—Dorel Vasilescu—who features in a variety of the vignettes, while real-world figures feature as well, as customers or, for example, annual visitors on World Mental Health Day (when Einstein, Napoleon, and Yuri Gagarin, among others, drop by). Most of the pieces are short prose vignettes, in some way presenting Mr.Gică, but there are also numerous (more-obviously-)poems; some pieces build or even directly comment on others (for example, the prose-and-poem 'Barbershop Nights: An Eyewitness Account' is followed by 'What the Pagodas Dreamed in the Poem "Barbershop Nights"').” M.A.Orthofer The Complete Review

T.O. Bobe (born 1969) is a Romanian poet, novelist and screenwriter living in Bucharest. Two of his books have been finalists for prestigious Romanian ASPRO prizes.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of 11 books, including T.O. Bobe’s Curl and Nichita Stănescu’s Wheel with a Single Spoke and Other Poems, which was awarded the Best Translated Book Award for Poetry.

Liliana Corobca

Translation: Monica Sure
Seven Stories Press, 2022, 496 pp

Winner of the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

A fascinating narrative of life in communist Romania, and a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of literature and censorship.

A Censor’s Notebook is a window into the intimate workings of censorship under communism, steeped in mystery and secrets and lies, confirming the power of literature to capture personal and political truths. The novel begins with a seemingly non-fiction frame story—an exchange of letters between the author and Emilia Codrescu, the female chief of the Secret Documents Office in Romania’s feared State Directorate of Media and Printing, the government branch responsible for censorship. Codrescu had been responsible for the burning and shredding of the censors’ notebooks and the state secrets in them, but prior to fleeing the country in 1974 she had stolen one of these notebooks. Now, forty years later, she makes the notebook available to Liliana, the character of the author, for the newly instituted Museum of Communism. The work of a censor—a job about which it is forbidden to talk—is revealed in this notebook, which discloses the structures of this mysterious institution and describes how these professional readers and ideological error hunters are burdened with hundreds of manuscripts, strict deadlines, and threatening penalties. The censors lose their identity, and are often frazzled by neuroses and other illnesses.

Liliana Corobca was born in the Republic of Moldova. She made her debut with the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for debut awarded by the România literară magazine; the Prize for Prose Debut of the Republic of Moldova Writers’ Union and The Character in Inter‑war Romanian Novels (2003, translated into Italian and German). She is also the author of the novels A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013, translated into German and Slovenian), which was a bestseller of Cartea Românească Publishing House at the Bookfest Book Fair 2013, a recipient of the Prize for Prose awarded by Radio România Cultural, and winner of the Crystal Prize at the International Festival in Vilenica, Slovenia, in 2014; and The Old Maids’ Empire (2015). She has also written a three-act monologue, Censorship for Beginners, published in 2014 in Austria. She has received grants and artists’residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland.

“The fictional censor of The Censor's Notebook creates a masterpiece of repression—both the sinister governmental kind and the welcome capacity to repress trauma. The tension that results will have you questioning your own successes as triumphs of self-censorship. A profound and playful novel.”

– Nell Zink

Ilarie Voronca

Translation: Christina Tudor-Sideri
Sublunary Editions, 2021, 168 pp

Ilarie Voronca stands as the preeminent Romanian avant-garde poet of the 20th century, a writer whose texts treat images like a particle accelerator treats hydrogen atoms without ever losing clarity. The Centaur Tree is a selection from Voronca's Romanian prose poems and essays, drawing from the poet's formative years in which latent symbolism had not yet fully succumbed to the roiling undercurrents of modernism that would carry Voronca to France.

Ilarie Voronca was the pen name of Eduard Marcus (1903-1946), a Romanian-Jewish avant-garde poet. He settled in Paris as an adult, where he took part in the French Resistance. Voronca stands as the preeminent Romanian avant-garde poet of the 20th century, a writer whose texts treat images like a particle accelerator treats hydrogen atoms without ever losing clarity.

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novel Disembodied, and the forthcoming collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Her translations include works by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.

The New York Times on a show about the Romanian Avant-Garde (mentioning Voronca).

Max Blecher

Translation: Christina Tudor-Sideri
Sublunary Editions, 2022, 202 pp.

From the author of Adventures in Immediate Irreality translated by Michael Henry Heim whose endowment is funding the PEN/HEIM Translations grant. Written in 1938, first published in 1971 (posthumously).

“The Lighted Burrow is Max Blecher's final, only posthumously published, novel. Subtitled A Sanatorium Journal, the first-person narrative is again very autobiographical, Blecher presenting his experiences in various sanatoria during the 1930s. Suffering from spinal tuberculosis, he spent much of his time supine—wheeled around on flat carts when he went for outings in the local village or traveled greater distances. Even as he does move some outside the sanatoria, the narrator lives in a bubble-world of sorts, and though he occasionally manages to move at least to its edges, where real world and sanatorium overlap, it is a strange place of routines and attempts to live a normal life in an atmosphere saturated with death (as many of the fellow patients are—like Blecher—terminal).” The Complete Review

Max Blecher (September, 8 1909 – May, 31 1938) was a Romanian writer. While studying medicine in Paris, Blecher was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, a disease which kept him confined to hospitals and sanatoria for the remaining decade of his life. In spite of this, he produced a considerable amount of literature—including the novels Adventures in Immediate Unreality, Scarred Hearts, and the posthumously published The Lighted Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal—as well as keeping up correspodence with figures like André Breton, Mihail Sebastian, Ilarie Voronca, and Martin Heidegger.

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novel Disembodied, and the forthcoming collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Her translations include works by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.

Gabriela Adamesteanu

Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
Dalkey Archive, 2016, 248 pp

Can horrific psychic wounds from wartime ever really heal? Can one merely will oneself to forget? These are the major themes explored in this newly translated novel by Gabriela Adameșteanu. We become acquainted with Traian Manu, a Romanian scientist who defects to Italy after suffering heavy losses in the Second World War. Considered a deserter by the Ceaușescu regime, he is forbidden to return until a sudden invite in 1986 by a former peer (and now, unbeknownst to Manu, Communist Party informant) to give a lecture in Bucharest.

Housed in the infamously bugged Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, Manu reverts to depressing wartime memories, which only renew his animosity toward his homeland. Manu’s German wife, Crista, grew up under the Hitler regime and suffered even more tragedies in the war and struggles to overcome nightmares and flashbacks.

The Irish Times review.
Asymptote Journal review.

Gabriela Adameșteanu is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and translator. She is the author of the acclaimed novels The Equal Way of Every Day and Wasted Morning, and is the editor of Revista 22. Unlike Herta Müller and Norman Manea, other major authors of her generation, Adameşteanu never left Romania; she stayed and worked at Group for Social Dialogue, an influential dissident NGO.

Panait Istrati

Translation: Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno
Talisman House, 2010, 138 pp

Kyra Kyralina, upon publication early in the nineteen twenties, immediately established its author as a leading writer in the Modernist pantheon. The first volume in a series of volumes indebted to Oriental modes of storytelling, such as found in The Thousand and One Nights, A book of great charm and profound insight into the human condition. Deeply influenced by life in the Middle East and its distinctive narrative traditions, he set Kyra Kyralina in the 1850s, the waning years of the reign of Sultan Abdulaziz I, when the empire still retained much of its tradition. Istrati was born only six years after the end of the Ottoman Empire’s rule in Romania. Ottoman culture continued to permeate the newly established nation throughout the author's boyhood.

Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was born in Brăila, the son of a laundress and a Greek tobacco trader from Kefalonia. His first attempts at writing date from around 1907 when he started sending pieces to the socialist periodicals in Romania, debuting with the article, Hotel Regina in România Muncitoare. In 1910, he was involved in organizing a strike action in Brăila. Istrati lived in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople, which would play a central role in his novel Kyra Kyralina. Istrati attempted suicide in 1921 on his way to Nice, but his life was rescued in time. Shortly before the attempt, he had written to Romain Rolland, the French writer he admired most and with whom he had long tried to get in touch. Of Istrati, Rolland would write “In early January 1921 a letter arrived for me from a hospital in Nice. It had been found on the body of a desperate young man who had slit his throat. There was little hope that he would make a recovery. I read it and was seized by the tumult of genius, like a wind burning on the plain. It was the confession of a new Gorki from the Balkans. They managed to save him. I wanted to get to know him. We began corresponding. We became friends.”

Nichita Stanescu

Translation: Sean Cotter
Archipelago, 2012, 200 pp

Winner of Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award 2013

This dazzling collection of poems—the most extensive collection of Stanescu’s work to date – reveals a world in which heavenly and mysterious forces converse with the everyday and earthbound, where love and a quest for truth are central, and urgent questions flow.

“Stănescu has a gift for creating active, startling images. . . In Wheel With a Single Spoke … Stănescu is at his best; he examines the nature of time, space and geometry, and in the friction between science and lyric impulse, produces some of his most beautiful lines. We’re lucky that, nearly thirty years after his death, his voice still comes through, clearer than ever.”

—Words Without Borders

“For a poet who is thought of as one of the defining Romanian voices of the mid-20th century, Stănescu is poorly represented in English … Archipelago’s fuller treatment is long overdue. Stănescu is one of the poets who broke through the socialist-realism sound barrier and propelled Romanian poetry into new spheres. He has been revered for decades in Romania as a great voice and it is our considerable good fortune that Cotter has helped us to see why.”

—The Arts Fuse

Nichita Stănescu was one of Romania’s most celebrated contemporary poets. Winner of the Herder Prize, he His startling images stretch the boundaries of thought. His poems, at once surreal and corporeal, lead us into new metaphysical and linguistic terrain.

Sean Cotter is a translator and professor of literature and translation at the University of Texas at Dallas. A previous National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Cotter is the translator of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Prize 2023) and Blinding, Magda Carneci’s FEM (PEN finalist 2022) and T.O. Bobe’s Curl.