Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu - Nostalgia

Mircea Crtrescu was born in Bucharest in 1956. His novels and poetry are widely considered to be the best writing to emerge from post-communist Romania. His books have been translated into fourteen languages and he has received many awards, including most recently the Thomas Mann Prize and the Prix Formentor.

Julian Semilian is a translator, poet and filmmaker. He currently teaches at the North Carolina School of the Arts, after a twenty-four-year career as a film editor in Hollywood.

Mircea Crtrescu

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Nostalgia

Translated by Julian Semilian

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First published in Romanian by Editura Cartea Romneasc 1989
Revised edition published by Humanitas 1993
This translation first published in the United States of America by New Directions 2005
First published by Penguin Classics in 2021

Text copyright Editura Cartea Romneasc, 1989
Revised text copyright Humanitas, 1993
Translation copyright Julian Semilian, 2005

The moral right of the author and the translator has been asserted

The epigraph on page is from Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus, copyright 1947 by Thomas Mann.

Cover artwork: Geta Bratescu, Portrait, 2011 The Estate of Geta Bratescu
Courtesy the Estate of Geta Bratescu, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Stefan Sava. Private collection, Switzerland

ISBN: 978-0-141-99306-5

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Romanian uses all twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet, with the addition of four characters with diacritics: /, /, / and /

sounds something like the u in fur. There is no English equivalent for , but you might attempt to pronounce it if you said brrrr the sound you might get if youre expressing extreme cold and then trying to recognize the very short vowel between the b and the r. is pronounced as sh, while is tz.

The accent falls on the first syllable in all cases. Otherwise, there is a close similarity between Italian and Romanian pronunciation; in other words, both are pronounced pretty much as written. A is always ah, as in dart, for instance, but never as in fall or in pal.U is always 00, as in cool.Ce is chey,ci is chee.Che is keh,chi is kee. For instance, Mircea Crtrescu is pronounced (something like) Mercha Crturescoo.tefan cel Mare is Shtfahn chel Mhrey.Calea Moilor is Chleah Mshilor.Luci is Lochee.

J.S

I open the book, the book moans

I cast for the times, the times are gone

T UDOR A RGHEZI

Grant Israels consolation

To the one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

I record here (for what reason?) these verses from Eliot. In any case, not as a possible opening for one of my books, because I will never write anything else again. Yet, if I write these lines, I do not regard them as literature, not by far. I have written enough literature, for sixty years I did nothing but that, so let me permit myself now, at the ends end, one moment of lucidity: everything I wrote after the age of thirty was no more than painful imposture. Ive had enough of writing without the hope that I would ever surpass myself, that I would ever be capable of leaping over my shadow. Its true, up to a certain point I have been honest with myself, in the only manner possible for an artist; that is, I wanted to say everything about myself, absolutely everything. But so much more bitter was the illusion, since literature is not the adequate means to say anything real about yourself. From the first lines with which you layer the page, the hand that holds the pen slips into a foreign, mocking hand, as though entering a glove, while your image in the pages mirror scatters all over the place like quicksilver, so that out of its disordered blobs coagulates the Spider or the Worm or the Degenerate or the Unicorn or the God, when all you wanted to do was simply speak about yourself. Literature is teratology.

For a few solid years now Ive been sleeping an agitated sleep and dreaming of an old man who goes mad from loneliness. Only the dream reflects me realistically. I wake up weeping from loneliness, even though I may spend the day in the comfort of friends who are still living. I cant bear to live my life any longer, but the fact that today or tomorrow I will cross into endless death forces me to try to reflect. Because of this, because I must reflect, like someone who is thrown into a labyrinth is forced to seek an exit, even through walls smeared with dung, even through a rathole; this is the only reason I still write these lines. Not particularly to prove (to myself) that God exists. Unfortunately I have never been, despite all my efforts, a believer, I have never had to endure a battle with doubt or denial. It might have been better for me to be a believer, because writing requires drama and drama is born out of the agonizing struggle between hope and despair, where faith plays a role which I imagine is essential. In my youth half the writers converted, while the other half lost faith, which for their literature produced just about the same effect. How I envied them for the fire their demons fanned under the cauldrons where they wallowed as artists! And look at me now, cradled in my nook, a bundle of rags and cartilage, whose mind or heart or faith no one would think to bet on, because there is nothing more to take from me.

I drowse here in my armchair, terrified at the thought that nothing exists outside any more other than night, solid as an infinite lump of pitch, a black fog that has slowly gnawed, in pace with the advancing years, cities, houses, streets, faces. The only sun left in the universe seems to reside in the lamps light bulb, and the only thing illuminated by it an old mans shrivelled face.

After Im dead, my tomb, my cranny, will continue to float in the black fog, the solid fog, ferrying nowhere these pages which no one will read. But in them is finally everything. I have written a few thousand pages of literature powder and dust. Intrigues masterfully conducted, marionettes with electrifying grins, but how to say anything, even a little bit, in this immense convention of art? You would like to turn the readers heart inside out, but what does he do? At three hes done with your book, at four he takes up another, no matter how great the book you placed in his hands. But these ten, fifteen pages, they are a different matter, a different game. My reader now is no one else but death. I even see his black eyes, humid, attentive like a young girls, reading as I fill up the page, line after line. These pages contain my scheme for immortality.