Iona

III. The Culture of Jackasses When an ass leaves his village to go live in the city a wonderful change occurs in him: his asininity leaves the body and sets straight into the soul. In donkey parlance this means the respective jackass becomes cultivated. Thus, an educated

excerpts Many were the reasons of marriage in the countryside once, but the most important was the family of the chosen one. If the family – the seedling – was bad, the young people from such families had a hard time getting married, and only exceptional personal merits

The other Monday walking on Victoriei Road I met a friend. It is a well-known fact that today any guy you treat to a glass of wine at Fialkowsky's or who is in the delightful habit of bumming two or three lei from you is called a friend. Last year, this guy borrowed

And let's be serious for a moment, if just as a whimIon Luca Caragiale In L'Art du roman, Milan Kundera remarked, while speaking of Rabelais, that he coined a significant number of neologisms, many of which have entered French, and then other languages. Not all

…The niggler is a staunch patriot, an exclusive nationalist, a Romanian to the marrow! Everyone must know it! Whether his party is in office or, when unfortunately this is not possible, in opposition, the niggler congratulates Rrromania in the first case, bewails it in

When Mark Twain published the elaborate account of his Old World tour, The Innocents Abroad, America was still young, as a nation, and not yet proud of its culture. To avoid any tasteless outcry of admiration, driven by the contact with the vestiges of lost civilizations

The Romanians from Down Under To my Victoria from the South Pacific IslandsKo te mana o tenei matenga whetu aianeE poturi i ro o te rangi e piki mai* In Aotearoa (New Zealand), I met happy Romanians. Their happiness was either blended with sadness, or boosted up by it.

*excerpts THE SOPHISTICATED PEASANTS The Romanians are a social phenomenon. As a nation among nations, they are westerners evolved in the East. They are Latins surrounded by Slavs. They are Romans two thousand years away from Rome. They are contemporaries re-produced on

excerpts Chapter IIIThe Nature of the Being  (…) Anybody who knows this nation will agree that the Romanian is a born opponent. Whatever is proposed to him, his first reaction, the first temptation of his thought is to oppose it. But, strangely, his opposition does not

Starting from the fact that the Romanian intellectual – as any other – speaks a foreign language, and is delighted to give information to traveling strangers, some foreigners jumped to the conclusion that Romanians do not prefer their language, a ridiculous and wholly

Chapter XII. The Current [1907] Psychological Traits of the Romanian PeopleAll foreigners that visited the Romanian countries were unpleasantly struck by the negative traits of our character. They don't care, says Mr. X. Marmier, for the name of their master. What they

Discussing the character of a nation is as complicated as describing a species of insects from prehistoric times. How can one enumerate its features? How can one analyze its morphology? How can one categorize its behavior? Any large-scale analysis will in fact reduce the