On 31 August 2008, before the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, signandsight.com published an excerpt from Herta Müller’s latest novel, “Everything I Own I Carry With Me” (“Atemschaukel”). Here’s an excerpt from the excerpt that captures the ambiguities of close friendships in police states, at least judging from our own experience in [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Romania’
12 June 2009
Kim Jong Un: Apollo of the Amnok, Titan of the Tumen, …
Whenever I wonder what Romania might be like now if Nicolae Ceauşescu had somehow managed to survive long enough to pass his kingdom on to his son, Nicu (alas, poor Nicu!), I just turn my gaze to the royal succession in the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea, which fits Tony Judt’s characterization of Ceauşescu’s Romania [...]
23 April 2009
Ferguson on the Appeal of Fascism vs. Nazism
From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 230-231, 239-240:
Considering the emphasis the new dictatorships laid on their supposedly distinctive nationalistic traditions, they all looked remarkably alike: the coloured shirts [German Brownshirts, Italian Blackshirts, Irish Blueshirts, Romanian Greenshirts], the shiny boots, the [...]
15 April 2009
No Plebiscites for Germans, 1919
From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 160-161:
Applying the principle of self-determination proved far from easy, however, for two reasons. First, … there were more than thirteen million Germans already living east of the borders of the pre-war Reich – perhaps [...]
12 March 2009
The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944
From Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944, by David M. Glantz (U. Press of Kansas, 2007), pp. 372-378 (reviewed here and here):
Strategic Implications
Every officially sanctioned Soviet and, more recently, Russian history of the Soviet-German War published since war’s end categorically asserts that, immediately after the Red Army completed [...]
5 March 2009
Rushdie on Slumdog Tourism
In a dyspeptic disquisition on screen adaptations from books in last Saturday’s Guardian, Salman Rushdie coughs up some colorful bile in the general direction of the recent Oscar favorite.
It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in [...]
25 August 2008
Religion and Romania’s Iron Guard
From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 270-271:
Few European Fascist movements went so far as to proclaim that ‘God is a Fascist!’ or that ‘the ultimate goal of the Nation must be resurrection in Christ!’ Romania was the [...]
4 August 2008
Baciu’s Early Exile Network
From Mira, by Ştefan Baciu (Honolulu: Editura Mele, 1979 [also Bucuresti: Editura Albatros, 1998], p. iii (my translation):
I dedicate this “Double Autobiography” to our Brazilian friends, departed but always present:
Manuel Bandeira
Carlos Lacerda
Jorge de Lima
Cecilia Meireles
Augusto Frederico Schmidt
Benjamin de Mendonça
João Duarte, son
Prudente de Moraes, grandson
Ribeiro Couto
and to those in Hispanic America, just as present:
Mariano Picón-Salas (Venezuela)
Salomón [...]
14 July 2008
Baciu on Writing a “Double Autobiography”
From Mira, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1979), pp. v-vii (my translation):
Here is a book that I never in my whole life would have thought to write, or if I had ever thought to write it, I would have imagined something completely different from that which was imposed by the cruel circumstances I lived through [...]
10 July 2008
On Translating Baciu’s “Patria”
Barely more than a month after I started blogging, I translated a poem entitled Patria by the Romanian exile, Stefan Baciu, whom I knew from my graduate school days at the University of Hawai‘i. Baciu administered one of my two foreign language reading exams required for my Ph.D. program. My major language (rather useful for [...]
