Nostalgia

On some days I feel universal when listening to Hora în căruţă (Jig in the Cart); I can even picture a cart then, all its joints rattling among the frozen missiles of the world. I get dizzy and a teardrop warms up the Murmansk under my eyelids. Hora Stacatto (Stacatto

We have been acquainted with the fundamental myths of Romanian spirituality in Mircea Eliade's view and read his comments on the legend of Master Manole, the legend which, according to Eliade, certifies that myth is essential to the process of artistic creation, and

excerpt THE ROMANIANS' SPIRITUAL LIFE The Two Myths of Romanian SpiritualityIn any culture, there is always a central myth that discovers it and that is to be found in all its major works of art. Romanians' spiritual life is dominated by two myths that express,

excerpt23 Anghel is standing in the gateway. His house lies outside the barbed-wire fence surrounding the grounds of the Water House. It's true that his yard becomes indistinct as the grounds begin, but the front of his house is surrounded by a wall standing one meter

Evening. A gentleman is walking in front of a house: three steps to the left, three steps to the right. He examines the building, then the street, and again the building. He rubs his red eyelids. Three steps to the left, three steps to the right. A gentleman with a bamboo

A Great Man is one of the short stories that has haunted me since adolescence when I accidentally found it on one of the shelves in my bookcase, in a volume of short stories by Eliade. I was intrigued by the title and I chose to read it first. Its reading brought in front

excerpt The second time I went to Alina's parents', the neighborhood seemed too familiar not to imagine that my memory was playing a prank on me, and not a nice one. I had got off the tram a few steps away from the barber's called The Merry Whiskers, which

The air is bracing where your high breasts rise. Around their peaks I breathe with greater ease. Yet I descend, beloved, by degrees,Cheap bastard that I am, towards your thighs.  Your carnal hip is naked and asleep,So lily-like it makes my halo blush. I long to kiss it,

It is amazing how many children are begotten from the sentimental exultation that one or the other of their parents feel for a third person, another than the partner in the respective action, irrespective if the person in question be a man or a woman. Sometimes this third

excerpt They'd dozed off. The devilish furnace of the sun was blazing fiercely. They were positively stewing as through the shadow cast by their soles two Gypsy women walked by, bent under the burden of a galvanized bucket with a chunk of ice protruding from it. Ice-cold

I saw the light of day in an atypical village of Bucovina. It was a multiethnic village, a kind of summary of Europe. A European Union avant la lettre. It is there, I believe, that a direction in my life was traced, an ecumenical dominant feature, one of understanding of

excerpt Motto: Prophetic utterance comes into being via negation: it is the knowledge induced by ashes. In the aftermath of speaking the word entrusted to them, prophets taste the ashes of the world upon their tongues; their wisdom is the aftertaste of ashes.   A portraitMany