Lumina

Inferiority Complex On The Dâmboviţa Riverbanks

There existed in cultural Bucharest between the world wars a sort of upside-down provincialism that believed only in the City of Light: What's new in Paris? There was always something new to talk about, even if, in some cases, the new from Paris had been seen around

The Gods' Humor From Vishnu To ... Caragiale

God Himself had a great sense of humor when He allowed us to be born into this world… The gods' smile is a kind of gentle answer to human ignorance, but also the preparation of the human mind for understanding the mystery. Why are mysteries also revealed through

The Cultural And Intellectual Life Of Bucharest

As a princely seat Bucharest was once, for the Romanian authorities, a citadel watched over by God just like Byzantium was for the Eastern Christian world. Then, naturally, it was also the place where scholars needed by the Prince's Chancellery made their studies. They

Language As An Element Of The Romanian Soul

Among the elements making up the soulful repository of the Romanian people there is none to include more and to bespeak truer than its very language. In connection with this Romanian idiom – which, with due additions, proved apt to voice any idea, no matter how lofty,

Editor's Note

The threshold between the millenniums is an opportunity for evaluation: tributes, jubilees, festivals. Archives are being browsed, masterpieces are reappraised, and writings are redefined in the current context, then recirculated in today's competition. Everything becomes

Poem

I dreamt we werearound a stone tablewith men long-forgotten –I was there yet absentnonexistent yet alivedrinking with them yet dying with thirst.  Something white fellon the stone tableilluminating our facessomething always putting to shamethe inability to grow.  We

Memoirs

vol. II: 1937 – 1960 XXIIII begin to discover America… Chicago, December 10, 1984. For a whole fifteen minutes I have been standing by my window, staring blankly out into the street, without even understanding why. I got up from my desk because I thought it had started

Simona Noja

The International Dance Festival in Constanţa presented in the final gala a special guest: Simona Noja, prima ballerina of the Vienna State Opera, another Romanian who, having left her native country for 10 years, has built a successful career on the world's stages.

From The Country Of Jackasses

III. The Culture of Jackasses When an ass leaves his village to go live in the city a wonderful change occurs in him: his asininity leaves the body and sets straight into the soul. In donkey parlance this means the respective jackass becomes cultivated. Thus, an educated

The Lightened Burrow

excerpts When I call up one of these memories with my eyes closed and it is reborn with the intensity of its previous reality; when at other times, with the same intensity and in the same convincing light, settings and events which never happened pass through my mind; when

Mateiu I. Caragiale

Mateiu Caragiale left us a literary heritage, fragmentary in its outlook that puzzled and amazed through its originality, through an appetite for mystery it seemed to originate in, through the secret inspiration that fed it and through its old-fashioned lyricism which was

Old-Court Philanderers

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