Romanian – findingtimetowrite

Berlinale Film Festival

These past two weeks I’ve attended several films at the Berlinale – well, you have to, when a major film festival is on your doorstep (pretty much all of the venues were less than 30 minutes away from my door by public transport). That is, if you can get hold of tickets, despite the often huge venues where the films are screened. For most of the films you can only book online three days beforehand, so there I was with my fingers poised to click at 10 a.m. every morning, but things would sell out in less than a minute, and I was only successful on three days. Worse than rock and pop concerts! It amuses me to hear that people take days off work or travel all the way from Spain to attend the full ten days, but it also warms the cockles of my heart to see that a documentary from Ethiopia or a film from Ghana shown at 11 am on a weekday (for example) were sold out. Then again, what else can you do on a miserable February day in Berlin?

Most of the films were sad, thought-provoking and political (with a capital or a small P), which made all the questions about politics that journalists kept asking jury members, actors and directors seem rather unnecessary. I can completely understand the anger about the hypocrisy and silence surrounding Gaza (particularly in Germany), but let the art speak for itself and stop expecting actors to make valuable contributions to political discourse (if they choose to do so, that’s fine, but most of them won’t have anything very valuable to add to those topics). However, I got to attend Q&As with the directors and some of the actors at three of the events (another bonus of the Berlinale) and the questions were all about the films and the characters, so that was quite nice.

I did not get to watch any of the major prize winners, but here is a list:

GOLDEN BEAR FOR BEST FILM Gelbe Briefe (Yellow Letters)
by İlker Çatak (Turkish/French/German co-production)
SILVER BEAR GRAND JURY PRIZE Kurtuluş (Salvation)
by Emin Alper (Turkish)
SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE Queen at Sea
by Lance Hammer (UK/US)

But here are the films that I did see and I thought all of them were quite good. Since most of these films are not out on general release yet, I’ll also make comparisons to other films that are similar in tone.

The Rose: Come Back to Me

Not strictly speaking part of the Berlinale, but released on 14th February as a love letter to the Black Roses (the name of the band’s fan base), this is a film about a K rock band who did not get on with the K pop trainee system and did things their own way, and managed to survive despite lack of promotion in South Korea, having to sue their management company, people trying to create distrust between the band members, military service, depression and a marijuana scandal. I discovered this band last year and attended their concert in London, so this was a great way to get to know them better, but also an inspirational story about the power of music and of being true to yourself. Comparisons: Sing Street, The Commitments.

Enjoy Your Stay – A Swiss-Filipino co-production, about Filipina cleaners working in a luxury Swiss resorts like Verbier. Some of them are abused, but all of them appear invisible to the wealthy people holidaying in the resort. The script follows the ‘found stories’ approach, so presents many real-life, but slightly fictionalised cases. The main protagonist Luz tries to help others but is faced with some tough choices and therefore cannot afford to be an angel herself. Strong ensemble cast and three-dimensional main characters, never entirely evil, just trying to survive in a ruthless global capitalist machine. Comparisons: A Better Life, Dirty Pretty Things, My Name Is Loh Kiwan, A Season in France, Eastern Boys.

De Capul Nostru (On Our Own) – Romanian film about teenagers whose parents have gone abroad for work and they are left to fend for themselves (sometimes with elderly, ineffectual grandparents in the background, or older siblings who are busy with their own lives). I did feel angry with the parents who kept promising to return home, but I also realised they genuinely thought they were working hard to offer a better life for their kids. A film that blends painful dialogue with teenage fun, deep social and personal problems with a dream-like atmosphere (and beautiful moments of a found-family dynamic). Filmed near where my parents live. Amazing acting and improv work by a very young cast in their first roles. Possibly my favourite film of the Berlinale. Reminded me of: Shoplifters, Kids, Happyend. This film did win a prize in one of the many categories: CICAE Art Cinema Award.

Videograms of a Revolution – documentary (based on footage created at the time) about the 1989 Romanian uprising. I knew this would bring back memories and it did: not so much the euphoria I felt at the time, as anger, sadness and shame at the chaos, confusion and power-grabbing going on behind the scenes. An amazing piece of history. Another plus of the Berlinale was that I got to explore various venues that are not normally cinemas, such as the German Cinematheque Museum, which is where this screening took place.

Wo Men Bu Shi Mo Sheng Ren – We Are All Strangers – the underbelly of Singapore’s wealthy society, via the story of a patchwork family. Scenes of everyday life, small joys but also painful dramas, all handled in a fairly matter-of-fact way, as part of life, with a great deal of humour as well as pathos. Particularly poignant juxtaposition of the older generation going on a date just travelling around on a city bus, while the younger generation frolic in the swimming pool of a luxury hotel. But both of them have to deal with the consequences, although I’d have liked to see more of the point of view of the young girl – I felt that was missing. Comparisons: Taipei Story, Comrades: Almost a Love Story.

Shibire (Numb) – a young Japanese director’s partly autobiographical story of a boy growing up in Niigata with neglectful and violent parents, who becomes mute as a result of this. There was a great deal of silence therefore in the film, as we watch the boy at four different stages in his life: from youngster dropping out of school to look after the household while his mother goes off to drink and spend time with men to drug-dealing yakuza. Hard to watch at times, but I rather liked the small details that get shown and the silence. The eyes do the talking. The profile shots of the boy at various life stages got a bit repetitive though and I’m not sure why the only character who attempts to befriend the boy, Ivan, had to be Russian. Comparisons: Moonlight, This Boy’s Life.

A New Dawn – animated film from Japan about three young people fighting a losing battle to turn back time and revive respect and admiration for old crafts such as fireworks. Fighting against inevitable development and ‘progress’ – their house will be demolished, the bay will be drained and built up with solar panels. They are fighting a losing battle but manage to create one last glorious display. Although the story tried too hard to be interesting in structure and bring in flashbacks, it left me with a sense of sadness that is probably exactly what the director intended (he was also art director on Your Name) and shows the abandonment and decay of rural communities (not just in Japan). Pretty pastel visuals and some hilarious stop-motion animation too. I left singing the catchy title song by Imase. Comparisons: Your Name, Princess Mononoke.

En Route To – a touching story of solidarity and friendship among teenage girls. After the disappearance of the married homeroom teacher she’d been having an affair with, Yunji buys illegal pills off the internet to induce an abortion. She ‘borrows’ the money from her roommate, Kyung-sun, who is furious initially but then decides to help her rather clueless classmate. Lots of subtext there, especially for South Korean society that does not really want to know about sex with minors or teenage pregnancies or abortions, but interspersed with lighter moments, especially from the wise-cracking Kyung-sun. A much more positive spin on this kind of story than my comparison film: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood.

Reading Summary October 2023

You can tell that I was on holiday this month, because I got so much reading done. Not while I was actually with my parents and family, but I had a lot of hours to kill on planes, trains, at airports and train stations, quite a few of them books that had been on my Kindle. And, of course, now that I am officially an empty-nester, I have more time to read at home too.

18 books, of which 5 were in my so-called ‘theme of the month’, i.e. Iberian and Beyond literature. However, of those five, I’ve only reviewed the Javier Cercas and Javier Marias books, and The Delivery by Margarita Garcia Robayo. I would love to review Machado de Assis and his surprisingly modern, ambiguous, witty 19th century stories, although I doubt I will have the time this coming week. I was unable to finish Guillermo Arriaga’s The Untameable, partly because it was incredibly bleak and violent (and I just cannot deal with any cruelty towards humans and animals at this moment in time), but also because of formatting issues on Kindle. It is a story with two very different storylines – one set in a barrio in Mexico, one set in the icy Canadian tundra, with lots of random research facts thrown in as well, and it became virtually impossible to keep track of it all when you are not sure where one chapter begins and another ends.

Unusually for me, this month I also instantly plunged into four acquisitions I made at ChilternKills Festival: four highly entertaining crime novels, two historical ones (Death of a Lesser God by Vaseem Khan and The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson) and two contemporary ones (A Killer in the Family by Gytha Lodge and Into the Dark by Fiona Cummins, both dealing with relationships between mothers and teenagers, so perhaps that theme exerted a little pull over me, since it carried on into another book I read this month). I also read two cosy crime novels set in the feline world of Mandy Morton, which were a bit silly, but quite good fun – and the feline detecting duo reminded me of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for some reason – and this theme also carried on, as you will see shortly).

Books that had been on my Kindle for a while included Other Women by Emma Flint – we are currently reading her first book Little Deaths for our Virtual Crime Book Club, which I remember really admiring when it first came out, so I thought it high time I read another one by her. It was once again a reimagining of a notorious true crime case, this time set in London after the First World War, but I didn’t like this one as much as the first. I have now tried three or four books by Peter Swanson and I think I have to admit defeat: he simply is not the writer for me, I find his twists heavy-handed and his psychological insights into women’s minds wafer-thin. Thirty Days of Darkness by Jenny Lund Madsen had a promising premise: a snobbish literary writer who bets she can write a crime novel in just 30 days and then stumbles on a real crime in Iceland. I was not that impressed with the execution of the premise though, it had the potential to be either funnier or more sinister, and it was neither. Paul Auster used to be a must-read writer for me when I was in my teens, but he’s dropped off my radar a bit in the last decade or two, so I was hoping for a return to form with his latest novel Baumgartner. It is the story of a widower, learning to cope with loss and grief, and finally moving on. It was ok, but I can’t rate it more highly than Hilma Wolitzer’s book on the same subject An Available Man.

I read two very moving books about mother-son relationships by Romanian-language writers: Alina Nelega’s Cloud in the Shape of a Camel is a contemporary retelling of Hamlet from the POV of Gertrude, while Tatiana Tibuleac’s The Summer When Mum Had Green Eyes is a very short but complicated story of family rift and reconciliation in the face of terminal illness. These are two of the many books that I brought back from Romania, and that I hope to pitch to publishers soon.

The final book is by a favourite crime author of mine Nicola Upson, whose Josephine Tey murder mysteries I greatly enjoy. This time she is giving a fictionalised account of the life and complex loves of Stanley Spencer. Since I live close to Stanley Spencer’s house and art gallery in Cookham, I know his work quite well, but I had no idea he was such a gullible and selfish artist. A rather sad story all round, but the art remains, I suppose.

I know quite a few of the books I read this month were light entertainment rather than seriously literary. Nevertheless, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that of the 18 books, the best by far were by foreign authors: Javier Marias, Margarita Garcia Robayo, Machado de Assis (especially his slightly surreal novella The Alienist), Tatiana Tibuleac and Alina Nelega. If the English readers are not reading translated fiction, they are seriously missing out on some good, good stuff!

Heavy Weather: Overthinking Translation

This post is probably going to annoy a lot of translators, academics, publishers and critics – so it’s just as well that not many of them read my blog. I’ve recently read two books which made me wonder if some people consider learning a new language or translating literary fiction to be an opportunity to show off.

Maybe I am not the right person to be criticising this approach, since I was fortunate enough to grow up trilingual and therefore never had to work hard at languages or think of them as something to boast about. I hasten to add that I will always, always admire people who make themselves vulnerable by learning a new language, and that I am endlessly grateful to translators for making so much wonderful work available to us readers. I can also spend hours or even days debating punctuation marks or a particular word when translating a text – a pleasure-challenge-despair that only other translators will understand, while normal people will say ‘Get over yourselves!’ However, at times, it feels like a performance sport: who can be most opaque, most complicated, most scholarly – and thus most ‘valuable’ as a language expert and translator? Under the guise of being most ‘congruent with the original’, I find tortuous language patterns and syntax in the English translations which occasionally might give me a small flavour of the original, but usually end up putting me off that particular author.

I am by no means a proponent of smoothing things so much for readers that they feel they are reading an English book (someone commented recently on my blog that they translated Reichsmark currency in Emil and the Detectives as pounds in a recent edition!!!). Yet overcomplicating things simply to show off your erudition also feels like a disservice to readers – and ultimately to the authors themselves. This tends to happen less with the major languages (French, German, Spanish), where you have professional translators who are extremely good at capturing the right tone. But publishers of translations from ‘small’ languages tend to prefer academics to do the translation – probably as a quality assurance tool – and the result can be deplorable.

Take for example Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu. It is one of his best and most accessible ‘novels’ if we can call it that (it is a loosely-linked set of novellas), but the translation by Julian Semilian feels heavy-handed and verbose. I am not saying that the author is not verbose in the original, but he is limber and lithe, playful with language, skipping through metaphors, slippery yet hypnotic – everything that Javier Marias is, but which is rendered so elegantly and easily into English by Margaret Jull Costa.

Meanwhile, Nostalgia is anything but effortless. Whole paragraphs seem lumbersome and clumsy, but there are certain phrases which simply sound wrong in English.

Suddenly the animation of the ‘stockholders’ – as I was to find out was the name given to those who bet on this game – abated.
I claim no merit for knowing him or that I can write about him.
For better than ten years’ time…
While I wrote these lines, my room, my tomb, has whirled so quickly through the black fog outside that I got sick.

Of course, there is an additional element to that confusion and I’ve ranted about it before. When you only get a few translated titles from Eastern Europe every year, publishers tend to prefer those that fit in with their preconceptions of what that should look like (and what they think readers expect): difficult, worthy, filled with trauma, mainly about the disaster of Communism (if you aim to sell more than a few copies) or post-modernistically dense (if you wish to appeal to a niche audience and get reviewed in academic journals). And yet Ottilie Mulzet’s translation of László Krasznahorkai (who is all of the above) seems capable of conveying the endless sentences and breathless narrator voice without making them too impenetrable and off-putting.

I look forward to reading Sean Cotter’s translation of Solenoid when it comes out and seeing what he makes of Cărtărescu’s later style (although I think it is a weaker work in the original). I would certainly recommend Cotter’s translation of Vol. 1 of the Blinding trilogy, if you want a better introduction to Cărtărescu’s work (I do have quite a lot of issues with the way he portrays women in his work though – very typical of Romanian male writers or perhaps Murakami Haruki). See what Tony Malone thought of that book.

If you feel I’ve been too harsh with Julian Semilian, I should say that on paper he seemed to be an excellent translator for this particular author: they are of roughly the same age, Semilian was born in Romania but soon moved to the States, where he had a successful career as a Hollywood film editor, and more recently as a writer and documentary filmmaker. He corresponded with the author during the translation process and I can imagine they became friends. But I couldn’t help feeling that Julian is not immersed in the Romanian language and culture, especially not in the way it has evolved since he left the country – it does not come as naturally as breathing to him, so he overthinks it. [Or maybe he is just too much of an academic now.]

This ‘immersion’ is precisely the subject of the second book that made me ponder on linguistic expertise recently: Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words. I read the bilingual version, with the Italian on the left-hand side and the English on the right, and was surprised to discover I could understand quite a bit of the Italian – which Italian speakers have told me is partly because the author starts out with quite simple, basic Italian, but that it gets more sophisticated as it goes along. I enjoyed this book and found the passages about growing up bilingual but with very different approaches to the two languages extremely relatable. However, it seemed more self-absorbed and far less interesting than Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, which is also about falling in love with a language and a culture.

I too have recently started learning Italian for no other reason other than that I love the language and the culture – but I did not feel that I was getting a full sense of the beauty, charm, history of the place and its people in this book. For something that has been labelled ‘a love story’, there was little attempt to capture just what made the object of one’s love so irresistible. I admired the hard work and determination in learning the language, and I could understand the temptation of starting afresh in a new language, the freedom of being allowed to be imperfect. But at times she does make things needlessly complicated and repetitive, and I feel like saying: ‘Get over yourself!’ Still, I was relieved to discover this was not Eat Pray Love with a lexicon attached. Despite its simplistic style (a style that is neither English nor Italian, I feel, but hovers somewhere in the middle), there are moments of true insight, beautifully expressed.

Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

In conclusion, I suppose what I am trying to say is that I am glad that translators are gaining more visibility and sharing their thoughts on the challenges of moving between languages and cultures. I greatly enjoyed Daniel Hahn’s translation diary, for example, and found much food for thought there. I am pleased that language learning and translation are viewed as serious and praiseworthy undertakings. But, just like in ballet I admire something that seems effortless even though I know the huge amount of effort that goes into it, I prefer translations to feel as natural as leaves on a tree, not to poke my eyes out with their branches.

Friday Fun: Romanian Painter Ion Andreescu

Not as well known as Nicolae Grigorescu or Constantin Brancusi for fans of Romanian art, Ion Andreescu is my favourite Romanian painter. He lived a quiet, sadly all too brief life as an art teacher, studied for a short while in Paris in 1878/79, and painted some of the most evocative Romanian landscapes before his death in 1882 at the age of 32 from TB. He is particularly good at capturing the forest in all seasons and all moods. His paintings offer me pure escapism, a breath of fresh air.

Women sitting at the edge of the forest.

Friday Fun: A Romanian Landscape Photographer

Autumn is spectacular in the Romanian mountains and, as if to alleviate my homesickness, I’ve discovered the amazing photographs of the very talented Alex Robciuc. Here are just a few examples, but you can follow all his work on alexrobciuc.wixsite.com/photo or check him out on Facebook. He was the award winner for Romania in the Sony World Photography Awards 2019. No filter required!

Almost like a toy landscape in Transylvania.

Makes me want to move there immediately…

Reculegem

There is a Romanian expression: ‘Să luăm o pauză și să ne reculegem.’ Translation: ‘Let’s take a break and gather our thoughts or our forces or our strength.’ There is a similar word in French: ‘recueillir’, and we could potentially say it’s equivalent to ‘recollect’ in English. But it means a lot more than just remembering: it has nuances of ‘meditation’, ‘keeping a minute’s silence’, ‘recovering your equilibrium after an emotional upset’ and so much more.

So why am I launching into this lengthy etymological explanation? I suppose it’s my way of saying that I need a break as my personal life gets more complicated and unpleasant. Previously, I was able to find refuge in reading and writing when things got tough (summer of 2014 – bet you didn’t even notice at the time that things had gone awry). But as things drag on and on even longer than the Brexit negotiations, and with an equally impossible outcome, I need all my strength to cope with the turmoil. I’m finding it very difficult to write reviews or poetry or anything that is not an angry rant.

In other words, it’s time to press the ‘Pause’ button.

East European Literature Month: The Good Life Elsewhere

Stu from Winston’s Dad blog is an inspiration for all lovers of translated fiction. He seems to get through more books (and from a wider variety of countries) than nearly anyone else I know. For March, he is challenging and encouraging us to read fiction from Eastern Europe and I can only say bravo to him and feel slightly ashamed that I hadn’t thought of it myself, since I originally come from that part of the world. Which, of course, is currently very keen to rebrand itself as ‘Central European’.

Knowing what a massive problem emigration is for many of the former Communist countries, I picked a book from Moldova about economic migrants: ‘The Good Life Elsewhere’ by Vladimir Lorchenkov (translated by Ross Ufberg, published by New Vessel Press). This little-known former Soviet Republic is said to be one of the poorest countries in Europe. I have a special fondness for Moldova because it used to be a part of Romania, with whom it shares religious, historical and cultural traditions, and the majority population speaks Romanian (although the Russian state and minority population persist in calling it ‘Moldovan’).

It consists of a series of vignettes of the villagers of Larga in Moldova, who spend most of the book trying (and failing) to get to Italy, by hook or by crook, legally but mostly illegally. Italy becomes the ‘promised land’, the land of milk and honey, of plenty of job opportunities (cleaner, dishwashers or caring for the elderly) and amazing salaries of no less than 600-800 euros. Serafim Botezatu has a different but equally burning reason to get to Italy: he has been dreaming of its rich history and culture, its artists and architecture since he had come across a book called Views of Rome in the library as a ten-year-old. He has even taught himself Italian from an ancient, torn textbook that he borrowed from the library.

Needless to say, his dreams – and those of his friends and neighbours in the village – are systematically shattered. They each pay 4000 euros to people smugglers who fail to deliver them to their destination in Rome. They form a curling team in an effort to obtain an Italian visa, undeterred by the fact that they have no ice rinks or equipment, and need to practise using brooms on raked earth. They attempt to convert a tractor into a plane, only to be shot down by the cloud-dispersing bullets of the Moldovan government. The submarine they attempt to build out of the remains of the same tractor does not fare much better. One man sells a kidney and then tries to raise a pig as an organ donor. The village priest organises the First Holy Crusade of Eastern Orthodox Christians to the unclean land of Italy to reclaim the lost souls of Moldovans who have gone there.

vladimir-lorchenkov-01 — Author portrait from World Literature Today.

All of these stories are cobbled together in a non-linear fashion, with jumps between viewpoints and time settings. It’s not very hard to follow, but it can be distracting, and adds to the slightly surreal quality of the tales. The humour is very black indeed: there is a lot of death by accident or suicide. Lorchenkov depicts a village and a country where everyone is corrupt, stupid, crazy or just desperate to leave, including the president, who is ready to fake his own death in a plane crash in order to find a job in a pizzeria in Italy. The satire is sharp, often biting, the stories grotesque, and – although I did smile at some of the scurrilous humour and absurd predicaments – I thought the author sometimes lacked real compassion.

I may be biased, but I did wonder if that was because he himself is Russian rather than Moldovan, and the son of an army officer rather than a farmer. At many points in the story the characters express a distaste for agriculture and hatred for the land, which does not quite ring true for at least the older generation of farmers. There were some comments about how life had deteriorated after the fall of the Soviet empire, which is probably true – the power supply, for instance, was always firmly situated on the Russian side of the border – and overall he sounds really fed up with life in that ‘failed state that no one wants’, as he has called it in interviews. But what irked me is the lack of presence of any Russians in the story, as if only Romanians and gypsies are doing silly or nasty things in present-day Moldova.

Moldova lives in constant fear that it could become the next Ukraine. In fact, there was a brief civil war between the two ethnic groups in the early 1990s and there is a separatist state within its tiny surface already. It remains a country with beautiful landscapes, delicious fruit and wine, a tortured history and a difficult present. I enjoyed this corrosive and viciously entertaining portrayal of a disillusioned society, but for a more nuanced depiction of the plight of Moldovan villages and the desire to emigrate, I’d recommend reading Stela Brinzeanu’s Bessarabian Nights.

This book also counts towards my Global Reading Challenge for Europe.