Oltre i confini della lingua e del corpo. Il testo « danzato » di Gherasim Luca

Author(s): Irma Carannante / Language(s): Italian Issue: 69/2020

Starting from the performative utterance, developed in the theory of linguistic acts by John Langshaw Austin, this article aims to analyze some passages of Gherasim Luca’s Romanian work, The Inventor of Love, which preceded his French poetry. His bilingualism stimulated his search for all that is irreversible, real, and concrete, showing the infinite plastic possibilities of words. His performances of the 60’s and 70’s, together with the shows created by the French choreographers, have opened up a large space for reflection, in which the poetic and dancing subjects have the power to open themselves to incompleteness and diversity. Hence, the ambition of some artists to create a dialogue between the two languages, where one completes the other in the dimension of otherness. Starting from Romanian, Gherasim Luca created another language in French, a language in the language, which gave him the opportunity to express himself otherwise.

„În linişte s-aude cum încolţeşte grâul”. Latenze rigenerative del silenzio in Privelişti di B. Fundoianu

Author(s): Danilo De Salazar / Language(s): Italian Issue: 69/2020

In 1930 B. Fundoianu published a collection of some of his Romanian poems, Priveliști. Despite what its title may suggest, its verses are not descriptive but rather visionary and expressionist. Silence plays a very important role within Priveliști’s poems, and – as I demonstrate in this essay – contributes to the images that evoke the ideas of regeneration and rebirth. In the first part of the study I focus on the relationship between text and image in a symbolic perspective. Then I offer a definition of metaphor in the perspective of contextual analysis. In the second part of the study, I describe the Fondanian images in which silence appears either as an active force of regeneration or as a propitious environment for the germination of matter. I conclude with a description of Fundoianu’s metaphorical images in which silence is associated with the soul.

Seducţia lumilor (im)posibile. Note despre proza lui Urmuz

Author(s): Catrinel Popa / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 66/2017

In the present article, we set to prove that the experimental prose written by Urmuz/Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău (1883-1923) illustrates a particular version of Romanian inter-war æsthetic modernism, similar at a certain extent to the iconoclastic fervour of the avant-garde movement, but in effect dissociating itself from any recognizable contemporary paradigm. In this regard, I analysed the particular modalities in which the writer succeeds in constructing bizarre, (im)possible worlds, that entail various strategies of defamiliarization, including violations of current logic and ontological expectations.

Le renoncement à la liberté dans Monsieur K. libéré (Domnul K. eliberat - 2010) de Matei Vişniec

Author(s): Alain Vuillemin / Language(s): French Issue: 66/2017

« Un beau matin, Kosef J. fut libéré… » (“One morning, Kosef J. has been released..”). This is how Monsieur K. libéré (The Release of Mr. K.) begins. This book by Matei Vişniec tells the story of his hero, « Mister K. » or « Kosef J. », a model prisoner detained in a prison located in a middle of nowhere, in a never named country, who, one day, finds out that he is released and who, from now on, learns how to give up of his freedom. The story is unique. The title, The Release of Mister K., is connected to various literary and pictorial references: the Franz Kafka’s writings, an Austro-Hungarian author: The Process (Der Proceß), from 1925, and The Castle (Das Schloß), from 1926, as well as Victor Brauner’s paintings, a painter of Romanian origin, naturalized as French: The Strange Case of Mister K. (L’étrange cas de Monsieur K.), from 1933, and The M.-K.’s Force of Concentration (Force de concentration de M.K.) and Ubu M.K., from 1934. The last work, Ubu M.K., is also connected to Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu, a French theatre play from 1888, concerning the most grotesque forms of the abuse of power. The word “nausée” (“nausea”), used from the very first pages of the Matei Vişniec’s book, reveals another corresponding net with three major writings belonging to the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre: his novel, Nausea, published in 1938, Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, and Existentialism is a humanism, another essay published in 1945. Nevertheless, the text of The Release of Mr. K. takes an opposite stance to the Sartre’s ideas on liberty, free-will and free-choice. This approach aims at pointing out to which extent the totalitarianism, the total oppression of individuals, deny any form of liberty and humanism. Which is, thus, the light shed on this radical form of totalitarian alienation by this bias, by this inversion of the initial postulates, by the multiplication of the tests that Kosef J. needs to deal with and by the detailed description of their unexpected consequences?

Barocul Ţiganiadei

Author(s): Gabriel Mihăilescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 65/2016

In the present study we set to prove with new arguments that Țiganiada (1812), Ion Budai-Deleanu’s masterpiece, belongs to the European Baroque themes and structures. In this regard I analyzed the structures of duality and multipolarity; those of hypertextuality (in the meaning assigned by G. Gennette), as a triumph of factitious over the nature; those of rhetoric ostentation; the themes of the „world upside down”, of illusion and self-deception. From this point of view, the author’s Enlightenment ideas – which focused so far literary historians’ attention – are nothing but the surface coating of a deeply deluding Baroque work.

Une topographie mythique. La Méditerranée de Lorand Gaspar

Author(s): Gisele Vanhese / Language(s): French Issue: 65/2016

In this essay we analyze the restitution of space–time of the Mediterranean landscape as presented in the poetry of Lorand Gaspar. In the first part, « Le paysage comme épiphanie », we demonstrate how Lorand Gaspar pursues a quest for originary substance, the foundation of the One, guarantor of Being. In the second part, « Une „théologie du souffle et de la soif” », we study the manner in which, in his preferred Mediterranean places, the island reveals a figurative scheme expressing « in the form of spatialized myth, metaphysical thought » (Wunenburger). In the third part, « Errance et parole ulyssienne », we demonstrate that by means of the « Ulyssean » word that Lorand Gaspar expresses the fullness of the Mediterranean experience. In fact, in Gaspar the landscape is always « migrating » through its innumerable images that confer upon his versification an unforgettable ontic vibration.

La poétique du voyage et de l’ailleurs dans l’œuvre de Panaït Istrati

Author(s): Frédérica Zêphir / Language(s): French Issue: 65/2016

Among the many travelling writers – or writing travelers – of the 19th century, pride of place must be given to Panaït Istrati, a French speaking Rumanian writer (18184-1935). Deeply rooted in Rumania with his mother but as deeply yearning for freedom and adventure with his greek father, he who wrote Mes Départs is definitely linked with the idea of departure and movement. He develops a poetry based on stories of travelling and other places, emphasizing the tension between what is at the care of things and what is elsewhere. Indeed, if the tells about the Mediterranean Sea, he also evokes the Haïdoucs, he describes the Baragan, he depicts the cosmopolitan city of Braïla. He deliberately chose to write in French, but so as to be more faithful to his memories as a child or adolescent, in order to depict true-to-life scenes or atmospheres; he also used Rumanian words, genuine and colorful. Thus his writing strongly weaves together and unites two identities – Rumanian and Greek -, two worlds – East and West -, and two language – Rumanian and French. Telling about his travels and wanderings as the oriental storyteller he never ceased to be beneath the French writer he has become, Istrati finally achieved universality.

Aucun lieu, nulle part ? Territoire et sentiment d’appartenance dans les romans de Marthe Bibesco

Author(s): Magdalena Răduţă / Language(s): French Issue: 64/2015

Le sujet de l’article porte sur les enjeux de la représentation spatiale et de ses variations socio-temporelles dans les romans de Marthe Bibesco. Mon hypothèse de travail est que le discours narratif met en lumière une territorialité composée, fluide, dont l’investissement symbolique et l’appartenance raisonnée sont mis en lumière par des personnages qui portent, presque toutes, un masque qui renvoie au visage même de leur auteure.

Un acces alternativ la cunoaştere cu poezia Gildei Vălcan

Author(s): Irma Carannante / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 70/2021

The poetic is the possibility of the language to say what is always apparently vague and that continually needs to be constructed, as an alternative way of accessing knowledge. In this possible "elsewhere", the poems of Gilda Vălcan (Romanian poetess, little known in Italy) challenge the reader, imposing the experience of a new universe that shakes the principles of what is considered firm, safe, ordinary, and trivial. This universe, in itself obscure and original – that is, founded on something that has nothing to do with the known, with the defined and with the representable –, witnesses a dialogue that is always in progress and in conflict with an interlocutor present/absent in the poetess's verses. By naming the surrounding world, Gilda Vălcan enters in its dimension, trying to give a space and a voice to her being in a continuous research of her own identity.

Dintr-un portret de grup cu marele război. Poetul Avram Steuerman-Rodion

Author(s): Corina Croitoru / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 70/2021

This paper is a part of a larger research dedicated to the Romanian poetry of the Two World Wars, which separates different authorial postures, from the writer who becomes combatant to the combatant who becomes a writer. The study aims to recover the war poetry written by Avram Steuerman-Rodion (1872-1918), a Jewish Romanian writer who was recruited in the Word War I as a military doctor and awarded for his bravery, but who will choose to commit suicide after demobilization. The critical interrogation aims to trace the specificity of the poetic formula existing in author’s front sonnets, published posthumously in the volume – a rarity today – Frontul roșu [Red Front] (1920), questioning simultaneously the preference for the order of the sonnet in times of disorder and chaos. Along with this exercise to recover the author and his work, the paper is interested in a tragic biographical paradox – which makes the trauma of readjustment to the rhythm of civil society outweigh that of adapting to the horrors of the front – with echoes in literary creation.

Juisare şi pasiune a sensului în ultimul roman al lui Dumitru Ţepeneag

Author(s): Giovanni Rotiroti / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 70/2021

Starting from Ţepeneag’s latest novel, Bulgarian Truck, published in Romania in 2010, this article intends to investigate Ţepeneag’s “oniric literature” not only from a “structural” and narratological point of view, but also from a rhetorical and textual point of view. Ţepeneag moves in a metaliterary dimension that gives great space to the “mise en abyme” of writing. For Ţepeneag, the novel is not only art, but it is, above all, an instrument of knowledge that allows the reader to implement, in full freedom, all possible combinations and associations, questioning the models that naively rely on any form of realism objectivistic or transparency of the world, also allowing words to speak the truth of desire.

LECȚIA LUI MARIN SORESCU: EVADAREA DIN ORICE SPAȚIU CARCERAL

Author(s): Emina Căpălnășan / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2022

"Where do we seek refuge away from home?" - Marin Sorescu, the poet, imparts this lesson not solely through his written question-book. Our aspiration is to emulate Sorescu's flight from conventional confines, from stereotypical frameworks, and from the manifold confinements of existence.

EGO FICTIONALISATION IN ANA BLANDIANA’S NARRATIVE INTERVIEWS

Author(s): Simona Antofi / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 5/2023

Ana Blandiana's narrative interviews gathered in Cartea cu delfini and approaching such themes as poetry, prose, essays, point out by means of biographem - which help the paper being to emerge in a Barthesian perspective - a special narrative profile - symbolic in its turn for the woman writer' profile which can be grasped in the mirror-text.

A WRITER THROUGH PROLETARIAN BULGARIA

Author(s): Dumitru-Mircea Buda / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 5/2023

The paper focuses on A. E. Bakonski’s “Itinerar bulgar”, a book that offers an insight of the proletkult literary movement in Romanian culture, as well as on the years following the 2nd World War.

Gheorghe Asachi – un scriitor între epoci culturale (I)

Author(s): Bogdan Crețu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2 (38)/2023

Gheorghe Asachi seems like a forgotten writer today. His place in the history of literature should not be minimized. He imposed rigor on poetry, bringing prosodic patterns untried by anyone before him. It is the most important literary contribution. He took on the themes of the era, but in a classicizing manner. He founded culture magazines, built the first forms of the public education system in Romanian, fought important philological battles. Because he placed himself wrongly, against the trend of the times, being an opponent of the revolution of 1848 and the Union of 1859, he was marginalized by the 1848 Generation and for decades his name was covered in oblivion. After Lovinescu and Călinescu, however, literary histories give it its due importance, even if without enthusiasm. Gheorghe Asachi is a founder, a pioneer, a man of the beginnings of the road. He did not create masterpieces, but he initiated several poetic genres and wrote plays, short stories and articles that fixed a profile that cannot be passed over. But above all, he created a literary mythology that made its way, sometimes ridding itself of the name of its author.

Eugen Ionescu. Personajul rizibil

Author(s): Oana Zugravu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2 (38)/2023

Eugen Ionescu – a figure long controversial in both national and universal literature – writes in order to express his astonishment at this world. He senses and experiences perpetual amazement at any thing, from the very existence or presence on this planet to performing seemingly banal actions, such as uttering words or eating. But, even more profoundly, he feels the loss of the mundane miracle, the lack of awareness from his fellow men, their estrangement from the light and sinking into the mire. Hence the specificity of Ionescu's playwriting, which, in his view, goes beyond what has generally been established as the theater of the absurd and is, in its essence, more a theater of wonder, of the uncommon, an inquisitive theater.We consider that the nucleus or engine of this artistic universe – which is therefore a projection of existential anxieties – is the ridiculous character, who is the very subject of our analysis, as announced in the title. This character is created, first and foremost, with the help of humor – a harsh, dark humor, which from the author’s point of view, offers no escape, but actually exacerbates the tragedy of the human being: "humor, being an intuition of the absurd, seems to me more desperate than tragedy. Humor offers no way out". Thus, Eugen Ionescu discovers the comic in the tragic and the tragic in the comic, the ontological emptiness in playing, and vice versa. The ridiculous character corresponds to this vision, because tragicomedy is inherent to his nature. In the Ionescian world, both connotations are to be found: first, in the surface layer of the text, the connotation is that which triggers laughter, illustrated by a puppet or a mechanism; then, in its depth, gradually and unsettlingly revealed, the connotation is worthy of ridicule, laughable at – semantics which shows the true nature of the Ionescian character, illustrating not merely the mechanism but also the man, fated to death and sentenced to life by the terror of history and society, or doomed, burdened with the misfortune to be born and powerless in the face of the oppression of time and the Creator.Thus, beyond the persona, the buffoonish style, the clowning with which Eugen Ionescu shocked his audience in a Baudelairean manner ever since his Romanian times, his entire work reveals the reflection of the self in confrontation with itself, with its anxieties. Through the ridiculous character created, the playwright transitions from the particular to the universal, his goal being to figure the non-figurative, to express the inexpressible. In this dialectic where roles change, paper beings come to life through our projection onto their construction mechanism, and can be identified in our profound social self. Under these circumstances, this type of character represents the only solution, the only weapon or shield for living in this absurd universe. It implies only apparent acceptance or tolerance, because its very construction conveys the cry of despair and the author’s revolt against the opaqueness of the world and his awareness of his condition.Could the ridiculous character be an answer to the playwright's questions? We cannot answer this question with certainty, but undoubtedly, by creating this archetype, Eugen Ionescu responds to a way of creating and living because, beyond the resurrection of the tragic – mentioned throughout our presentation – the playwright creates a new style, in keeping with the complexity of the 20th-century man. The loss of the mundane miracle is thus portrayed through a character that simultaneously embodies ridicule, fragility, and grandeur. Laughter turns into a grimace, the true value of the character being self-awareness, in a Camusian spirit. Beyond linguistic and ethnic barriers, transcending time and space, carrying a part of Romanian spirit and culture within, at the same time accessing universality, Eugen Ionescu promotes the idea that we are all actors in the theatrum mundi. Consequently, laughter remains one of the constants of the character created, a hypostasis of an individual who is not necessarily tragic, but rather skeptical and inquisitive.

Roxelane, figure historique et personnage littéraire

Author(s): Ecaterina Foghel,Angela Coşciug / Language(s): French Issue: 2 (38)/2023

The legal wife of the Turkish Sultan Suleiman II the Magnificent, Roxelana, also known as Hurrem Haseki Sultan or Anastasiya Lisovska, has enjoyed great popularity and recognition over the years. This fact is reflected in numerous literary works. The fictional character Roxelana figures in plays and historical novels by Turkish, French, Italian, English authors, from the 16th century onwards. Ukrainian authors became interested in this heroine relatively late (beginning with the 19th century). The novel 'Roxolana' by Osyp Nazaruk, first published in 1930, achieved the most remarkable success in this sense. An incredible story of the extraordinary destiny of a slave from Ruthenia who became the sultan’s legal wife in the Ottoman Empire, edifyingly reveals all the firmness, ambition and dignity that characterize Ukrainian women, used to facing the scourges of life. It took the author an ex-tensive and in-depth historical research to create a convincing authentic character who be-came the symbol of female power and patriotism.

Alecu Russo și remanențele cenzurii comuniste

Author(s): Radu Pavel Gheo / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 61/2023

During the Communist regime, the works of the classical Romanian authors were issued in new critical editions, edited with modern instruments by prestigious scholars of the time. They were printed in tens of thousands of copies, replacing the previous editions of the classical authors. On the other hand, throughout the entire period, all the printed materials were subjected to censorship. Literary works, if approved for publication, were especially purged of inconvenient ideas, phrases or names, irrespective of the authorʼs name, prestige or relevance. Following the fall of the Communist regime, most of these writings were re-issued in new editions. However, it is doubtful whether they reproduce the authors’ original text or the cleansed editions from the Communist period. This study attempts to investigate the issue, focusing on one exemplary case: the 19th century author Alecu Russo. It compares the mildly censored editions of his writings, published throughout the four decades of Communist regime, with the most recent editions, released after 1989. It also confronts the censored editions published in Romania (before and after 1989) with similar editions, in Romanian language, published in Moldavian Soviet Republic and (since 1991) Republic of Moldova, evaluating the various degrees of censorship in the two Communist states and their subsequent effects. The result of the analysis partially confirms our hypothesis: many of the post-1989 editions of Russoʼs works fail to restore the original text, often reproducing the censored versions of the Communist period. Further investigations on other major Romanians authors will probably corroborate our initial assertion: the lack of academic rigor and/or of editorial awareness has allowed the survival of censored and mutilated literary creations long after the disappearance of the regime that created them. Moreover, it shows a systemic failure in restoring the original creation of the major figures in the Romanian literature, while perpetuating their distorted versions.

Recenzie la Maria Pașcalău, Scriitori evrei în literatura română: identități moderne în context (trans)național, Timișoara, Editura Universității de Vest, 2023, 408 p.

Author(s): Dumitru Tucan / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 61/2023

Review of Maria Pașcalău, Scriitori evrei în literatura română: identități moderne în context (trans)național, Timișoara, Editura Universității de Vest, 2023, 408 p.

Ránk fonódik az ugatás

Author(s): Péter Demény / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 01/2024