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I saw an ad in newspapers about a trip to the mountains and I got in without knowing anybody. About 30 of us crowded in a big race vehicle, so boys and girls, parcels, cigarette smoke, and jokes mixed up together at random. A certain Biţă was speaking in my ear untiringly.

The blue bird, the blessed birdWas making its nest in my heart. Little by little were slainBoth my heart and the blue bird.  Who is the cruel hunterWho did this to you, my heart?Who put you in the tombWith the blessed bird? by Elena Văcărescu (1866-1947)

from Requiem for Fools and Beasts That day, Estera did not come to the stadium, but the following two evenings she was there again; however, I did not pluck up enough courage to speak to her, and after overtaking me several times, she kept running about three hundred meters

The flood resumed and I was on a boat with himhe took along seven pairs of each animaland sailed at willtoward another promised landbut I knew he was not Noah. A nauseating smell of dead animals engulfed him constantlyand more fearful than a sparrowfacing a catI prayed

excerpts First of all I have to recall that moment of my life which was the origin of the incidents that I will evoke in these confessions. It was the instant – so dramatic to me – when I first saw Alba. But right in that moment, which twisted so many years that were

Without loving you, I still love your voice,Without tearing me apart, your look touches me. My heart is more alive when I behold you,I dream of the flaws of your beautiful mouth.   My books, I wrote them for you, young men, And I left therein Like children biting into

My illness is a silk flag I'm wrapping around their necks strangling them measuredly but which is the illness, which is the passion, and which is the madness?Neither do I know them too well only a violent gesture made one evening in winter, a shiver of my body when

The bibliography of my works I threw into the pyre included a 125-pages psychoanalytical study about Iulia Hasdeu. I had discovered her diaristic notes at the State Archives. They were then, and still are, a novelty, and perhaps a sensational thing; I'm talking about

I strove to follow, as much as I could, the form and language of the national Chronicles that have been the rightful pride of the Land of Moldavia; to collect traditions and names and words of old, in order to lend color to these episodes inspired from the old chronicles.

excerpts IThe Tomb The Royal Church bells of the townlet of Bucharest were pealing rhythmically in a mournful voice, whilst, from the hillock in sight, the small-rounded belfry of Bucur's little church was echoing back the toll in a wailing-remote fashion. It was

The first woman characters of the modern Romanian literature were anything but womanly. The Romanian romantic theatre and the historical romances of the nineteenth century abound in strong-willed, ambitious princesses, exasperated by the lack of guts in their male partners.

“Between little Adela and her ‘maestro’, the fortyish Emil Codrescu, was born more than the ordinary love between a child and a full-grown man. The seeds of subjugating passion and resigned worship are sowed, above parental love, and last until Adela’s teens, when