The Conductor
The Romanian realm has given great creating spirits to the world, in all fields of activity: philosophers, historians, sociologists, scientists that made epoch-making discoveries, inventors, writers (poets, prose writers, and dramatists), brilliant musicians, painters, and
I May Count Myself As Having Been Born Under A Lucky Star
As early as my years of instruction, while at The Academy of Music in Bucharest – as part of the group of the grand and incomparable professional singer and mentor Constantin Stroescu (Enrico Caruso's partner in Boston, 1915, in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci) – destiny
Echoes
Aida, March 17, 1920. I waited for it. With the justifiable, feverish impatience you feel before an ideal dream comes true!, wrote the Rampa magazine on March 18, 1920, hailing the opening of the first lyrical season. People liked the cheap, but very beautiful stage design,
Echoes
On 20 November 1921 an enthusiastic letter written by the poet Cincinat Pavelescu is published in Rampa, a letter which we see fit to transcribe in full: Dear Mr. Editor in Chief, My life's absorbing activities of incessant work at the head of a newspaper without any
P.S. With Victor Brauner (This Is How I Would Like To Write)
With immense delicacy and great scrupulousness he [Gellu Naum] would each time talk about Victor Brauner – the friend from his youth years he had met on the occasion of an exhibition opened at Mozart Hall in Bucharest. It was 1935. The twenty-year old youth, Gellu Naum,
The Passage
1. You open one door and there appears another, then another, and another, up to the last one – which does not even exist – and thus you find yourself at the first door – which does not even exist – and you make a round, once more, unto familiar places, as what you
The Nightmarish Dreaming Of Max Blecher
The reverie aims to take hold of imaginary territories when the real ones are missing. Max BLECHER In his novels and especially in Occurrences in Current Unreality this process of dreaming turns into an account of an immediate unreality. I-mediated to be more accurate,
The Lightened Burrow
excerpts When I call up one of these memories with my eyes closed and it is reborn with the intensity of its previous reality; when at other times, with the same intensity and in the same convincing light, settings and events which never happened pass through my mind; when
Occurrences In Current Unreality
excerpts I could find antiques and old objects evoking sad memories on still another deserted floor in my grandfather's house. There the walls were covered by strange pictures having thick, gilded, wooden frames, or thinner frames of red plush. There were also several
Old-Court Philanderers
excerpts Que voulez-vous, nous sommes ici aux portes de l'Orient, où tout est pris à la légère. Raymond Poincaré*Welcoming the Philanderers…au tapis-franc nous étions réunis. L. Protat**Although no further than the night before I had promised myself under
Europe Has The Shape Of My Brain
*More than a century ago Europe was not yet known as a cultural construction, an intellectual day-dream, a heap of broken images, a copy in a world without originals. Artists tried to escape the big fortress ensconced in coal smog and torn by wars, social conflicts, and
Cotadi And Dragomir
Cotadi is short and thickset, with bulging muscles, his legs articulated twice outwards and once inwards; he is always unshaven. His raven black hair is covered with dandruff, sparklers and precious tortoise-shell combs. Cotadi cannot stand upright because of an armor-like