Roma

excerpts Que voulez-vous, nous sommes ici aux portes de l'Orient, où tout est pris à la légère. Raymond Poincaré*Welcoming the Philanderers…au tapis-franc nous étions réunis. L. Protat**Although no further than the night before I had promised myself under

Mateiu Caragiale was the natural son of Ion Luca Caragiale, the greatest Romanian playwright. However, his literary output appears like a challenge to his heredity rather than a filiation. The world portrayed is the same, the Balkan one, with its mixture of pretension and

*More than a century ago Europe was not yet known as a cultural construction, an intellectual day-dream, a heap of broken images, a copy in a world without originals. Artists tried to escape the big fortress ensconced in coal smog and torn by wars, social conflicts, and

excerptsLet us begin with on obvious fact – Urmuz is a myth, is he not? Useless like all myths, functioning due to inertia, the coronation of certain clichés. Who reads Urmuz these days? Urmuz was the object of critical studies, his work has been translated, and his name

Urmuz was a great revelation to our generation, and it is reassuring to note that he was that to all generations, indeed: a providential personality, a Christopher Columbus reborn, the founder of a different America, of game and freedom; a native, solitary genius, perhaps

1. His parents christened him Dimitrie, but he knew the appropriate name for himself, so he changed it to Demetru. He had said this himself, people should find names for themselves in tune with their own personal reality, or they should change themselves, while that is still

The research with a satyr's eye of the flaccid, common, adjacent mores.  His heroes resemble us in the whims for the sake of which we all are sometimes weak, fictitious, camouflaged. St. ROLL Urmuz… alongside Eminescu, with their turmoil and tragic end, with their

IFuchs wasn't quite born by his mother… In the beginning, when he came into being, he wasn't even seen, he was only heard, for Fuchs, upon being born, chose to come out through one of his grandmother's ears, his mother having no musical ear to speak of…Fuchs

I Fuchs was not born by his real mother… At the beginning, when he came into being, he was not even seen, but only heard, because when Fuchs was born he preferred coming out through one of his grandmother's ears, as his own mother did not have an ear for music…

* Algazy is a nice old man with a toothless smile, his beard shaven and silky, neatly laid out on a grill that is screwed under his chin and surrounded by barbed wire… Algazy does not speak any European languages… but if you wait for him first thing in the morning and

Of all preparations for the voyage, the majority had been concluded; he finally managed to pay the rent, too, with the help of his two ducks who did not let him appeal to the compassion of his neighbours. The only thing they asked in exchange was that he should allow them

Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău, whose pen-name was Urmuz, published his first bizarre pages in 1922 and killed himself in 1923. His life was short, his literary life was one of the shortest ever, and his work is comparably short: just a few short stories. Yet his influence on