Romanian Literature in the Context of the Rroma Integration Decade: Ioan Budai-Deleanu’s Ţiganiada – Cantos I and II –
Romanian Literature in the Context of the Rroma Integration Decade: Ioan Budai-Deleanu’s Ţiganiada – Cantos I and II –

Summary/Abstract: A comic-heroic poem, Ţiganiada (The Gypsiad) was written by Transylvanian Ioan Budai-Deleanu first in 1800, then in 1812, but published only in 1875. Quite a complex work, it was interpreted in many different ways, from the standardized version of Gypsy caricature to a mixture of Greek and Roman literature, Italian and Spanish Renaissance (Romanian Don Quijote), Deism, comedy of literary works, harsh satire of all world vices, to didactic literature, Romanian folklore, and Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality. The present study will see the poem as allegory and as a parody of war and will try to define ‘literary blackness’ or ‘literary Gypsyness’ as opposed to ‘literary whiteness’ or ‘literary Romanianness’ in the first two Cantos of the poem, by applying the theories of Toni Morrison (1992), Louise Anne Keating (1995) and Martin Favor (1999). The two Cantos will also be compared with some famous American movies/TV series: M*A*S*H, Love and Death and Forest Gump. My thesis is that Ioan Budai-Deleanu does not moke Gypsies as such, he rather sees them as funny human beings, and uses them to laugh at Romanians and, mostly, I would argue, at those people fond of making war.

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