Roma

excerpts 1. Now, as for the figments of the German imagination - why turn to them at all? They're nothing but fads. (the respectable Jupîn Dumitrache)You love me too, leave off pretending and put all fads aside. (Rică)Come off it and put all fads aside, Ghiţă.

Act One A wretched land, Sir! The country of ill-granted favours! was telling me at the height of our discussion, Mr Ibrişim an elector to the first collegium, bitterly criticizing our various administrations. Only now and then interrupting himself in order to drain a

There is an old Romanian saying – Romanians are born poets. Judging by the amount of poetry produced in Romania in the past two centuries, there may be more to it than mere preconception. But although one may discover a fair number of gems upon reading it, and critics

Modernism has brought to paroxysm the need of personal mythologies, immanent to Western civilization. No wonder that some of the heroes and saints of the avant-garde came from those peripheral European territories still uncharted from a spiritual point of view. By the beginning

Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things. Simplicity is at bottom complexity and one must be nourished on its essence to understand its significance. Catalog of Brâncuşi exhibition, Brummer

UNDER THE QUESTION MARK: MAN If you were asked to portray yourself as you did in your books, diaries, or in Present Past, Past Present, how would you introduce yourself? Eugène IONESCO: It is very complicated. I don't know. I don't know who I am. I don't

The founder of the Theater of the Absurd (with The Bald Soprano, staged in 1950 by Nicolas Bataille at the Theatre des Noctambules in Paris, a play he had begun in the 40s while still in Romania under the title English without a Teacher), a member of the French Academy from

Not thinking about anything. Only thinking of petty little things. Not thinking about the Whole. Thinking about everything and nothing. Thinking about petty little nothings. And, if I can, I think that God thinks me, thinking under God's protection. Is God there? Does

It has been said – for good reason – that the Romanian word dor [aprox. yearning] is untranslatable, which made all foreign lexicographers leave it in its original form in most literary texts. But in music there is also a dor enescian [Enescian yearning], which someone

Alfredo Casella: Enescu is delicate and sensitive, communicative too, like all Latins. Despite his spontaneous and amazingly rich inventiveness, his creation illustrates a process of will, which no artist can overlook. I have seen such a perfect accord between intention

The history of world music has witnessed many spectacular overturns in the hierarchy of values, when names of purely local interest whose death was not even announced in an obituary (Johann Sebastian Bach) became world famous personalities a century later. Quite often, internationally

excerpts We want to see Brâncuşi. Do you know him? asked Florica. We're old friends. But he is ill, it's not easy to get an appointment. Anyway, let's try. On the same day, October the 13th, 1956, we met Colomba again at 'Les deux magots', among