Jeanie Han’s translation of Max Blecher’s Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată is now available online as Adventures in Immediate Unreality (free full text!). A paperback edition of this translation will be coming soon from Apache Plume Press. The translation reads well, with a nice flow to it, being all the more amazing as Han started learning Romanian only four years ago (!).
Also, UK publisher Old Street Books released last month the first English translation of Blecher’s Inimi cicatrizate (Scarred Hearts, trans. Henry Howard), advertising it as “a never before translated classic of modern European literature”. So far the book has received mixed reviews, ranging from “a lost classic that did not need to be found…an uneven mix of Thomas Mann and Mills & Boon” (Mark Thwaite, The Independent), to “worthwhile and impressive” (Complete Review) to “a masterpiece, and all the more poignant for being so beadily accurate about human behaviour in extremis” (Paul Bailey in his introduction to the novel).
In related Romanian-literature-in-translation news, the Observer Translation Project is up and running, featuring previously untranslated Romanian fiction (now translated into En/Fr/Ge/It/Sp/Du/Pol) as well as critical essays (En) on the featured writers and on contemporary Romanian lit in general. The first two numbers have been dedicated to Ștefan Bănulescu and Gheorghe Crăciun, respectively. I strongly recommend the excerpt from Crăciun’s Pupa Russa for a lovely account of going to school and learning to read in the People’s Republic of Romania. Kudos to the translator!
