On the day before Easter 2023, The Wild Detectives bookstore and bar in the arts district of Dallas, Texas, buzzed with anticipation for the arrival of a man with a messianic, cult-like following. With a prolific output of novels, poetry collections, critical essays, and published diaries since the 1980s, the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu is a highly acclaimed and frequently translated literary celebrity in Europe and Latin America. His reception in the Anglosphere, however, has been muted and belated. Prior to 2022, the only Cărtărescu books available in English were his first novel, Nostalgia (New Directions, 2005), and the first part of his three-volume opus, Orbitor (published as Blinding by Archipelago Books in 2012).
But the arrival of Solenoid into English, via Dallas-based independent publisher Deep Vellum and translator Sean Cotter in November 2022, inaugurated a breakout year for Cărtărescu on the Anglophone literary scene. Solenoid drew glowing praise from reviewers in venues from the New York Times to n+1, sold out its first print run, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction (not translation). Cărtărescu is carving out a strong position in the niche of literature in translation in American letters, where there is only so much oxygen to go around: the available data suggests that literature in translation constitutes approximately one to three percent of all books published in the US. Of those translated works, the most heavily represented languages are those of Western Europe. Cărtărescu is one of only six living Romanian writers to see their works translated into English in the last five years.
One of the foundational premises of Solenoid is that the narrator’s life diverges from that of the real Cărtărescu when his alter ego’s grandly ambitious epic poem is panned by Bucharest’s premier literary workshop. Where the real Cărtărescu received a grave nod of approval from his literary elders, his fictional self descends into obscurity and commits himself to the pursuit of a true literature, where writer and audience are one and the same self. Writing a fantasy of being unread is a wryly comic move for one of Romania’s most famous living writers, but through the momentum of Cărtărescu’s exultant prose style of sentences-turned- sermons, postmodern parody mingles with and disappears into a kind of wishful thinking. Cărtărescu’s imaginary self, his “strange monster,” claws his way toward the faint possibility of renewed humanism in a fallen world. He conjures this figure with an unabashed seriousness, written with as much pathos as irony.
We sat down with Cărtărescu on the secluded patio of a small Dallas café a couple of hours before his first reading in the city. On first impression, he distinguishes himself easily from his literary alter ego in Solenoid, a lonely soul deranged by a visionary melancholy of cosmic proportions. Charming and consummately at ease in Texas-appropriate denim, he made small talk with us about the popularity of CBS drama Dallas in the Romania of his young adulthood, and the reputation of Chicago Review among Romanian writers of his generation (“a very good magazine,” he murmured, nodding respectfully, “very good.”) Later, after fielding dozens of audience questions about existential ennui in the Q&A following his reading, he put an end to the proceedings with a raised glass and an exhortation to “drink beer together and enjoy life.”
And yet, when the topic is literature, his down-to-earth demeanor can’t help but rise off the ground. His speech stretches with gravitational force toward soliloquy, punctuated by erudite allusions and fueled by an undercurrent of consuming passion. Since we have not yet finished learning Romanian, Cărtărescu graciously agreed to speak with us in English about translation, crossing the literary border of the Atlantic, and cosmic loneliness: topics which, for him, require minimal prompting.
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EH & ANP: Let’s talk about your experience being translated into many different languages. In the US, works like Solenoid come to a small, niche audience through a very difficult process and it’s usually not profitable for the publisher. The English translation of Solenoid comes to us from Deep Vellum, an independent nonprofit doing great work in new and translated writing; and the English translation of Nostalgia was published by New Directions, which is still a small company, although quite venerable; its capital dates back to the wayward son of a wealthy steel industrialist who was friends with Ezra Pound. Can you tell us about your experience getting published in Romania, and how you understand the relationship between what can be written and what is published?
MC: There are several problems here. The first is getting published. The other is getting translated, which is a very important thing for a writer who wants to embrace an international career. You have to have wonderful translators because a good translator gives you an advantage from the start. It can make you well known in an area.
A bad translator destroys you, totally crushes you. I’ve had experiences with good and bad translators, with the best and the worst. The worst translator that I had was a French lady who misunderstood almost everything from my first book translated in France in 1993. On each page, she had errors of understanding of the Romanian language and the Romanian realities of day-to-day life. The text became a surrealistic text, although my original was a realistic one. So the people who read the book thought that I was a kind of Dadaist, because they couldn’t get anything from what they were reading.
Of course, I have experience with fantastic translators, who are not only intelligent people but very erudite, who have, as Umberto Eco says, the same inner encyclopedia as the writer. In this respect, I very much appreciate Sean Cotter, who is not only one of my best friends but also a great person and a huge translator in my opinion. Translation is an art like every other art, although it is sometimes considered a sort of a Cinderella of the arts. But in my opinion, it’s very hard to translate well. Some translators are themselves geniuses, and I think Sean Cotter is one of them.
For me, writing is very natural. Writing literature is like breathing air or drinking water. It’s nothing special for me. I was supposed to write literature from the very beginning. I never thought that I could be useful in some other field. From my adolescence, I just started to write. I never stopped.
For example, I have a journal which this autumn will be fifty. I wrote in this journal for fifty years without missing a day. Without missing a dream—I wrote down every dream I had during this half-century—without missing a book that I read, without missing a lover. This journal is so important for me—I could call it my second skin. And from this journal, like from the stem of a tree, the branches—which are the novels, the poems, and so on—are emerging. For me, writing is natural. It’s the only way that I can imagine myself. Spreading my work in my country and around the world means working with a team of publishers, with the translators, with the public, with the people who love literature, who really love literature, and not any kind of literature, but good literature. Literature that is meaningful, that says something to the people who read it. Literature that is not only entertainment or a way of passing time.
EH & ANP: Following up on your relationship with translators, publishers, and the public, you also mentioned your first novel, Nostalgia. Nostalgia was first published in censored form, and wasn’t published as you originally intended for some years after. Given the kinds of social and political transformations you’ve experienced in your lifetime, how has your relationship with the public, translators, and publishers changed over time?
MC: As I told you, I feel myself to be a sort of writing tool. Like a fountain pen or a pen, an ordinary pen. It’s a feeling that it’s not me who puts down the words and the phrases and the paragraphs, but that I’m only a portal, a medium. I never write with a previous plan, for example. And I never edit my writing. I wrote all my books, from the first letter to the last letter, in a single line, from a single breath. It’s like what I want to say is already written on the paper, but it’s covered with a white film. And what I do is erase it with a shaving blade and free the page from this film, and let the text be there. So I never felt that I’m doing something myself. What I feel is that I’m used by a bigger and smarter entity.
Nostalgia is my first book of stories. It consists of five stories, which are the very first fiction I wrote. I had never written any short stories before, or any text in prose. I started to write it from the first story to the last one and I published the book with the stories in the same order. I didn’t change anything. And until this very day it is the most well-known, the most published, and the most translated book that I ever wrote. And this makes me very happy because it’s very unusual for a forty-year-old book to have the same success from the first edition to the last. This means it’s in a way immortal, in a way out of time. I’m very proud of it and I’m very grateful that this book opened the way for my other books of fiction. Before Nostalgia, I published a lot of poetry. I think that you had some questions about it. Even now, I consider myself mainly a poet. Many of my books can actually be called poems. Even my big novels, they’re not constructed like real novels, but are the product of a continuous act of inspiration, like a poem. For example, when I started—let’s say Solenoid—I had nothing in my mind, absolutely nothing. I started to write it in a state of zen confusion. It was white noise, noise in my mind. And when I first wrote the first phrase of the book, I understood that it would be a long book, a total novel. It would be an existentialist novel, a mystical and agnostic novel. It came with the first phrase, and after that I knew what I had in my mind.
EH & ANP: The lice?
MC: Yes, yes. Many people believe that a writer is someone who has the whole novel in his mind before starting, and it’s like opening your skull and taking out the first page, the second page, the third page, and so on, which is a fallacy. A sheer fallacy. I remember Wittgenstein said that a musician creates a quartet not by taking the notes one after another like a string of pearls from a cassette, but by inventing each and every note from the score, from the script. Inventing it on the spot in the very moment it was needed in the succession. It’s very true. You don’t have to have whole scenes, whole characters, whole stories in your head. Better to invent on the spot, because otherwise I would ask you, what would be your surprise? How could you be surprised by every little passage of your work?
When I write, I’m also a reader. Each writer is also a reader. The act of writing is also an act of reading what you do, and you are your first reader. So how can I write something without being bored as my own reader? By invention, continuing on every page. This is why I do not work with a plan, because when I had a previous plan, no, no. Surprise would be impossible.
EH & ANP: Speaking of surprising works, I wanted to ask you about what we would translate in English as The Levant.
MC: You know about that? [laughs] Yes.
EH & ANP: Sadly, it’s not in English yet, but hopefully someday someone will take on the task. But it strikes us that in some ways, Solenoid is about not getting published. The narrator has this great ambitious cosmic poem, that you say ranges from the “eschatological to the scatological,” and it’s called “The Fall.” Of course, you’ve also written a great epic poem called The Levant, but yours was published and recognized as a great work. So, could you tell us about the writing and the reception of The Levant, and why there’s this failed version of this poem in Solenoid?
MC: You are from Chicago, isn’t it? Have you heard of Henry Darger? He’s one of my great heroes. Because he, in my mind, is the purest, purest artist of all of them, maybe excepting Kafka himself. So Darger has always been my hero. I have always wanted to be a writer like him, which is to say a completely isolated writer, writing only for himself, praising himself only for what he made, leading an absolutely insignificant life without any glory, reputation, prizes, reviews, and so on, but also without a family, without friends. This was my ideal when I was seventeen or eighteen, my dream was to write only for myself for my whole life. Only one book, only one text. And when I was forty, which at the time felt unimaginably old, I would die. I would let myself starve in my very small room with my head on a huge manuscript, and they would discover me like that. Like Darger’s story. Yes, they would discover me like that, then they would have the revelation of the huge text that I wrote.
This was my ideal as a writer. And coming to The Levant—The Levant is a very special poem. It’s a sort of epic poem, a sort of novel in verses written in 7,000 alexandrines, so it’s one of the bigger poems I’ve written. And the main point with this poem is that each and every verse is a reference to some other verse or poem in the history of Romanian literature. It’s a revisiting of Romanian poetry, like how Joyce in Ulysses revisited the history of the English language while writing that famous chapter, the “Oxen of the Sun,” which takes place in a maternity ward.
I tried to do something similar, a very intertextual comedy of literature. And I think I succeeded in the Romanian original. Nowadays this book is a cult book. It’s in textbooks for students. But the problem came when I wanted this book translated, because it’s actually absolutely untranslatable. Because nobody abroad knows the history of Romanian poetry. So three quarters of the substance in this novel disappears, just vanishes away. You don’t know that the first line of the poem is an allusion to some eighteenth-century Romanian poet who also quoted “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” by Byron. There are multiple levels of quotations, so how on earth could a translator do this? Not to mention that he or she would have to write it in verses. The verses have the rhymes and rhythm of classical alexandrines.
Nobody could do this, and I was terribly sad to know that one of my very best books ever would never be translated. And then I had a crazy idea. It was absolutely crazy. I understood that before giving the poem to my translators, I should translate it myself into Romanian again, because it was written in nineteenth-century language. So I rewrote the whole poem, which is two hundred pages. I rewrote it in prose without those continuous allusions, letting it become a sort of a novel, but a strange novel, because it had the mentality and the language of the nineteenth century. It was something like The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, in a way the same kind of writing.
I rewrote The Levant completely in three months. I spent a summer with it, and then I gave it to my most important translators, fifteen in total. Four of them said it was worth trying. And so it happens that now I have this poem, this untranslatable poem, translated into four languages: Swedish, French, Spanish, and Italian.
Each of these four variants is totally different from the others, because each of the translators used their own traditions, their own history of poetry for recreating The Levant. For example, my Swedish translator used the sagas of Iceland and Sweden. For the Italian translation, Bruno Mazzoni, a wonderful person, used old Italian poetry, beginning with Ugo Foscolo. So I’m really terribly happy that The Levant can be read in four important languages.
EH & ANP: Well, we hope someone out there can pay Sean Cotter to give us an English Levant.
MC: That would be wonderful. Please. From Chaucer to Ginsberg.
EH & ANP: You just mentioned John Barth, the American postmodernist. Let’s reverse the question of how you get your work translated. Who are the Anglophone writers who are being evaluated and discussed, and who in particular is coming into Romanian literature through translation?
MC: Well, we have a tradition of translating almost everything—not only from the big languages but also from the lateral cultures, you might say, or marginal cultures. And this tradition never stopped, not even in the Communist period. Through the forty-one years of dictatorship, they still did translations. They still translated almost everything. Every novel that was hyped and famous, that became famous in the West, with some exceptions. For example, the poets of the Beat generation were never translated at that time because they were perceived as too aggressive, not fit for the regime’s views. But at that time we had many writers from the States and from Europe all translated almost on the spot. And the writers who were not translated were still available to us, because everyone who got a copy of a novel copied it on a Xerox or another copy machine. And it would spread to everyone in a sort of samizdat edition. I read Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Howl in the ’80s in Romania, and my whole generation was a sort of local Beat Generation. We had a very rich underground life, reading our texts in literary circles and inviting our friends to our places and reading poems. Not only our own, but Ferlinghetti’s, for example, or Gary Snyder’s and Frank O’Hara’s. We really loved the American poetry. My generation was actually called the generation in blue jeans. We were very, very close to those anti-system, underground movements in the States in the ’50s and the ’60s. We actually called ourselves Beatniks. We were Beatniks. By that time we were connected to rock music, and we took ideology from the States—flower power movements, and so on. This was an important stage in my development. I had wonderful friends and great poets. I’m very proud of my generation, which is now a very important point of discussion in every talk about literature in the younger generations.
EH & ANP: You mentioned American counterculture from the sixties. You’ve personally translated a book of Bob Dylan poems into Romanian, right?
MC: I met Bob Dylan in 1990 in Iowa City. I had that grant from the International Writers Program in Iowa City, and he happened to come to the city for a concert. I went, of course; I still keep the ticket. And I was so happy to see him. It’s like seeing God or Saint Paul [laughs]. And at the end I was one of the people who went to the stage to touch his hand. And for a tenth of a second, I felt his hand in my hand. My friends said you can’t take the talent by touching someone’s hand. But they were very envious about it. And then I had the opportunity to translate his lyrics for my publishing house, and I did it with great pleasure. I’m one of the people who say that he deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature. I translated exactly one hundred lyric texts by Dylan, and I wrote the preface to Tarantula, his novel. And in that preface, two years before he won the Nobel Prize, I said, he will win. He will win the Nobel Prize. It was a prophecy that got fulfilled. I just love him, I love his work. I think he’s the greatest of them all. And everyone after him owes him a lot, in my opinion. But a great poet, a great writer, a great mind.
EH & ANP: Couldn’t agree more. Hopefully you placed a bet on the Nobel win.
MC: No, I didn’t. I have enough money for it [laughs].
EH & ANP: Well, you’ve been very generous with your time. We have one more Solenoid question to cap it off. Solenoid is about, among other things, escape. To the world overlaying this one, to what Kafka might call the world of the spirit. How did you arrive at this idea? What were your early encounters with this idea of literature as escape?
MC: Well, it’s a paradox because although I wrote about the need to escape the material world, I’m not an escapist writer. I love being in this world, with the people I love. I love my life. I love the diversity of people and of literature. I enjoy life. But my character is not like that. My character is a strange monster, a strange Kafka-like character who imagines himself as a sort of a prisoner in this realm, in the realm of the material world. And his dream, as you said, is not only to escape, but to escape by returning to his primordial realm, the realm of our common fatherland, which is the reality of the fourth dimension that all the mystics and all the prophets dreamed of, for as long as the known history of religion, of culture, of literature. So the perspective of Solenoid is a gnostic one. The Gnostics had this saying: soma sema, the body is a prison.
In their consideration, we do not belong here in this life. We belong to another realm, to a real reality, embodied by the supreme God. But we are here because another God, Jehovah of the Bible, a bad God, put us here just to punish us, to punish everyone, to punish the world.
So the world is a world of crime, a world of ugliness. So this dream to escape into a world of the pure spirit is what animates my main character. He wants to be saved. He wants redemption from this dirty world. But something very strange happens in the middle of the novel. My character changes. And what changed him is that moral dilemma, that parable at the core of my novel, which is the House on Fire. There’s a house on fire and there is a little baby in it, and a great masterpiece. A Vermeer, for example. What would you choose if you only could save one thing? My character chooses the baby, to his great surprise. He never imagined that he would make this choice. It’s very simple, but for him, a monster who only praised culture, literature, and so on, the other choice was natural. He’s extremely surprised to see that he’s actually a humanist, that he loves humanity. It is the first time in his life that he feels close to humanity, that he has solidarity with all the people around him. And even if his lover is a devil’s advocate and says, well, but if the child grows up and becomes a serial murderer, what would you do? Or what would you do if you knew that the child would become Adolf Hitler? And he chooses the child, no matter what his future could be. After that, the narrator discovers love; he discovers solidarity. He discovers being with people, and this makes him refuse redemption when it is offered to him. He refuses to save himself, only himself. He gives up egoism and he chooses, as in the famous parable of Camus, Solitaire et Solidaire, human solidarity. My novel ends as I always wanted it to, as a hymn for humanity, a hymn for love, and for freedom. From this point of view, it’s the most optimistic novel that I have written so far.