I promised Jonathan this Romanian anthology a few years ago but soon found myself overwhelmed by the task, because so few of the truly formative Romanian authors have been translated into English, even less so their short stories.
Occasionally, where I might have been able to present an extract from a novel, the translations were dated or poor. The situation has not necessarily improved significantly in the intervening years, but I have managed to source a few additional translations, although I should warn you that some of them are my own, often done at short notice in a fit of pique because I was frustrated with not finding something suitable to share with you.
But we have to start somewhere, so here is my imperfect initial list of recommendations. His short stories paint a discomfiting picture of the pretentiousness of Romanian society in the late 19th Century, although one might argue that the targets of his sarcasm β corruption, snobbishness and self-serving hypocrisy β are universal subjects. Most Romanians can recite many of his catchphrases, but I chose a slightly less well-known short story about helicopter parenting and influencing exam outcomes, which still shows his talent for capturing human foibles and rhythms of speech.
First published in , you can read a work-in-progress translation of it on my blog. The novella Ciuleandra , published in , falls into the second category and is the story of a young aristocrat who strangles his beautiful and blameless wife of peasant origin on the night of the royal ball.
His father arranges to have him committed to an asylum to avoid a public trial and thereby besmirching the family name β a more extreme and tragic example of helicopter parenting perhaps. He was living in France when he wrote it and first published it in French, before completely reworking it and publishing it in Romanian.
