I recently finished reading and analyzing "Mara" by Ioan Slavici. What does Veeky Forums think of Romanian literature...

I am actually Romanian. I thought I'd drop by to ask for your opinion. I've never read translated Romanian literature because I assume that it loses a lot of its meaning. Our language is beautiful and complex and no bastardization of our works will ever come close to the original. Then again, you might find it enjoyable in English.

OP here. You must suffer from some form of autism if you think edgy western authors rambling about muh scientific advancements are better than true Eastern folklore. Literature is meant to be beautiful and surrounded in myth.

>i'm not going to substantiate my claim with any proof or any reason why you should read said author, but you're wrong because i said so
Well argued, friend. Maybe you should join Sanderson fags on /sffg/.
Hmm, not so much. I think Russian village life and folklore has a very different feel to it, and so do Russians compared to Romanians (and this is coming from someone that lives close to the Ukrainian border). Not to mention I enjoy reading Russian lit.
With Romanian authors the feeling I get (generalizing, of course) is that they're too desperate to seem cosmopolitan and European. They might have a good grasp on how to write good literature, but their minds are warped and they're still mired in old ideas - pretty much trapped in continental thinking, having almost no ties with the Eternal Anglo. I'm sure some Romanian lit student is going to "prove me wrong" and show me some author that wrote a sci-fi book back in day or some shit--but those aren't the sort of people that make up this tradition for the most part.
>edgy western authors rambling about muh scientific advancements
They're not edgy nor are they supposed to ramble. And I'm well aware that most Western authors from that period are also stuck in the past... but not all of them.
>Literature is meant to be beautiful and surrounded in myth.
If you want to be surrounded in myth you can go read fantasy or history. Nor does that have anything to do with what I'm saying. You're taking it as if I'm requesting these people talk about steam engines and electricity or some shit like that. I'm not.
It's just that human ecology has changed drastically since the early 1900s and what these stories have to offer is largely irrelevant. When human cognition is failing and our heuristics are coming apart at the seams, I don't think Luceafarul is going to save you.
Romanian lit is an antiquarian's preoccupation.

Aeneid
Meditations

>pretty much trapped in continental thinking, having almost no ties with the Eternal Anglo.
>implying there is anything wrong with this

I did the translation of Caragiale posted above. Granted, a lot of the music of formal poetry is lost in translation but the meaning and the imagery can be preserved if done properly. Additionally, resigning oneself to "muh untranslatable lit" is a weak position, of course Eminescu is better in the original, but I want more people to read him and I'm not going to do that by forcing everyone I meet to learn Romanian to a high standard. Are you saying it's sacrilege to translate Dostoevsky or Balzac?

Will The Brothers Karamazov or Keats" save" me any more than Luceafarul when, as you so beautifully put it, cognisance fails and heuristics emaciate? What I do know is that Luceafarul is, from an outsider's perspective, perhaps the last great long-form work of European Romanticism and worthy of a much wider readership. Tell me that Dorința or Pe lângă plopii fără soț isn't as good as anything Keats, Heine or Mallarmé produced. I'm an Anglo who can read French and discovering the Romanian poetic canon was still a revelation for me.

As to your point about Romanian writers trying to be European, that's undoubtedly the case; it's also why their works are pretty asinine compared to writers that have constructed a truly unique idiom of their own (I'm thinking of a truly unique modernist like Arghezi here, compared to someone like Blandiana). Or Lucian Blaga, for god's sake, the man was a genius. If his philosophy had been translated into English and disseminated more widely in academic circles at the time he'd be more famous than either Cioran or Eliade.

There's nothing wrong with the Eastern take on works such as "Mara" and "Baltagul", which are clearly meant to be fiction stories, giving you a traditional insight on things like human nature.
It being old doesn't make it bad.
Take "Mara" for example, which I mentioned in the OP. It pursues the story of a cheap woman whose children go to years of mistreatment because of their mother's carelessness. Slavici paints the struggles of a world long gone and tells us what it truly means to neglect, to not care about the spiritual, instead pursuing money.
Her cheapness turns out to be detrimental to both of the children and the extent of her neglect makes them take life matters into their own hands.
The self is directly shaped by its surroundings and molded into a shape untrue to itself.
A single novel gives you a deep enough understanding of human nature to call it a day. I don't see what else you could possibly want.

cont. because I'm an autistic phoneposting tard.
Not only that, but it also paints a beautiful picture of innocent love as it unfolds throughout the years and morphs into a poor relationship based upon the values of a traditional choice. It shows what it's like to fall into a love so deep that you have to put your cultural differences, and even your wounds, aside, in order to stay afloat.
It shows how a family was and how it should be. Not even in the 12th hour does anything fully break apart, and the novel beautifully streamlines everything from childhood to marriage.
We need shit like that to awaken the degenerate western society.

Low quality troll

>Will The Brothers Karamazov or Keats" save" me any more than Luceafarul when, as you so beautifully put it, cognisance fails and heuristics emaciate?
I didn't put forward those names. I could give you a fake rationalization as to why I enjoy Dostoevsky over, say, Rebreanu, but I'm sure it's just that I'm wired to find more palatable things in C&B, BK, and so on.
I'm not railing against it being old, exactly, I'm just saying that most of those traditional insights on human nature aren't as relevant now as they were then, and new insights are needed.
I guess I was a bit too hasty and hyperbolic when I made my initial statement, because I don't think Romanian literature is particularly bad per se, it's just that I can't think of any author that's been recommended to me that made me think, "Aha, this guy truly gets it."
I just... don't see what there is to take out of it unless you're already invested in literature as an art-form.
>A single novel gives you a deep enough understanding of human nature to call it a day. I don't see what else you could possibly want.
I genuinely don't think this is possible. There's a reason you only "get" some books/movies when you're older. No amount of reading literature is going to make a person grow up if they haven't had those experiences themselves.
And before you say, "Well, isn't it the same with what you're recommending people write about?" I would say no, because the things I'd want people to get from lit aren't things they would get with maturing.

What sort of insights did you gather from different forms of literature that work in this day and age?
In my opinion, the closer to traditional ideals a work is the better it is. It takes one big jug of water to swallow this pill. You must have figured out how degraded and degenerate today's society is.
Coming up with anything but what happened before we fell into degeneracy seems pointless to me. We have to go back to how it was.

>We have to go back to how it was.
That's impossible, user.
>What sort of insights did you gather from different forms of literature that work in this day and age?
I think ideally you want the same sort of warnings you get from science fiction but in a way that makes it clear that it's not far-fetched at all. That it's very likely if we continue down this path we may end up in a dystopia or may bring about our own destruction, in a way far worse than anything the SJWs can conjure up.
In general, I think people should understand better how their bodies and brains function; and that there is, in fact, a right and a wrong way to go about things, which is related to what you were saying, I suppose. While the progress we make in the sciences is great, we are clearly not built for these life styles--and people that keep saying humans are adaptable to anything are out of their fucking minds.
Going into blog territory almost here, but for the longest time I thought that our day and age was completely contemptible, and that it was due to technology. So I spent my childhood reading fantasy and ancient history. Now that I've grown up, I realize that that's not the case at all. We've arbitrarily decided to construct a horrid global, bureaucratic, capitalist system, that's slowly building up into either our demise as a species or a total enslavement to things people won't even understand are their overlords (as many are today with social media).
In essence, I think we need to take a step back insofar as our life styles are concerned before we seriously threaten ourselves as a species, and people on a large scale need to be educated on how they work so they can avoid being brainwashed slaves.

Also, I wanted to post a passage from Chesterton that I've always loved, because it's what I'm saying in spirit, if not in content.
>Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

>In general, I think people should understand better how their bodies and brains function; and that there is, in fact, a right and a wrong way to go about things
I think I understand what you mean. Then again such a way of thinking shouldn't lead people to shun older works (I'm not saying you are).
If you think about it, though, people percieve information differently, and, 21st century or not, many are ignorant when it comes to science.
The best way to go about it in my opinion would be to combine the traditionalism of older works with the predictibility of science.
That way, you have proof by analogy and proof by demonstration
>don't do that because this and that happened in this older book
and
>don't do this because this newer book explains why you shouldn't
becomes
>don't do it because nobody thinks you should

Read Cioran

The problem is that there's no real guarantee people are going to interpret the old books in the same way. Academia has tainted everything. They might even take, say, family values from an older work, and warp them into how you should be loyal to your family today, your gay boyfriend and your gender-fluid kid. Either that, or they may just seem parochial.
People need to wake up and realize that there are things that are bad for you and bad for you, and stop falling for all this moralistic memery going on in the media. And I don't blame them because growing up you truly do feel that it's impossible that so many people could be wrong and that society as a whole is just fucked up.
That's why the praise of Eastern Europe irritates me at time. People live in a more traditional fashion, but they're by no means more awake or anything. They're still blind sheep.

>metaphysical advancements

I think he was talking about the way the authors' perception of the self changed over the course of the last couple of hundred years.

tl;dr of this post:
>I am too desperate to seem cosmopolitan and European, which is why I denigrate the literature written in my own language in favour of foreign works.
Such multilayered irony. I hate your kind so much user. And everyone like you, the type of cargo cultist that worships everything "Western" as an escape (as in escapism) from his inferiority complex.

>projection the post
Read what's being said before you go autistic.

>tfw skipped most of my high school romanian lit reading assignments to start with the Greeks and read Belle Epoque English lit from my school library

I regret nothing I'm in a bit of a strait 'cause I'll need to know these books to pass my final high school exam that's loomin in a few months, to be quite verily honest (I am over 18)

I don't think the books are without merit and have enjoyed a few of them but I still would have rather spent my youth reading the classics as I did.

Grammar is shabby because I tend as much to it as my reading appointments if you dig me.

You're given very little historical background to enjoy these works if you don't refer to resources outside your classroom.

How can I be projecting when that's exactly what you said.

Hey, Lucian Blaga's "Eu nu strivesc corola de minuni a lumii" is what lit in me an awareness that I love poetry. I'm very curious to read it in English if you have translated it. (I tried translating it myself sometime this year, but I gave up after around 40 minutes.)

Bumping with my own attempt (I am very unsatisfied with it): romanianvoice.com/poezii/poezii/corola.php

I do not crush the wide world's crown of wonders
and do not slay
with my mind's light the mysteries I find
on my path
on blossoms, eyes, on lips or inner graves.
The light of others
may smother the impenetrable veil's spell
that covers all in deepest blackness,
but I,
I with my candle thicken nature's puzzle -
as verily with her soft rays the moon
does not diminish, but glimmering
enhances ever stronger the shadows of the night,
so I enrich the enigmatic picture
with flowers full of sacred secrets
and all that is unnamed
retreats to ever farther nameless edges
under my gaze -
because I love
all blossoms, eyes, lips and graves.

Hey Iustin

Sorry user, your translation is very far off (polysemy and figurative meanings are a bitch, I know). Some corrections/tips:

First stanza --
In the first line you misread "s t e r n ă" = cistern/container/tank (from the Greek στέρνα) as "s t e m ă" = coat of arms, emblem.
In the second line "puternic" is used as an adverb with the meaning of "fiercely"/"furiously"/"frantically" not "mightily"/"powerfully". The line is about the eeriness of the raven, here used as a harbinger/symbol of death; this is also connected with the first line, where "senin" = serene ("depărtări senine" is both "clear horizons/skies" but also Heaven/the Afterlife).
In the third line, "ușor" = "lightly", not "easily".
In the fourth line, "rotind în clipe line" = "swirling during tender moments".

Second stanza --
In the second line "foișor" = "pavilion" not "pew".

Third Stanza --
2nd line, "blând" = "gently" so "the air gently sifts... valleys"
3rd line, "în faptul serii" = "at nightfall"/"at sunset"

Fourth stanza--
1st line: "schit" = "hermitage", a small monastic retreat. "Monastery" = "mănăstire" (too general).
2nd line: "Îmbălsămată" = here "filled" (with mystery), "balmy" (with)/"perfumed" (by) ancient secrets and "florile uitării" = "the flowers of loss" (genitive case).
3rd line: "troienesc" = "cover thickly" (usually used for snowstorms, when snow forms large piles, I forgot the exact English terms; "strew" is too light).

The wording in general is also kinda off, but that's too much to go into right now.

ro.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Argeș

meant for

Iustine, ar trebui să citeşti Craii de Curtea Veche de Mateiu Caragiale. Cred că e cea mai bună operă românească.

Cine pula mea e Iustin?

Cine dracu' e Iustin?

>In the first line you misread "s t e r n ă" = cistern/container/tank (from the Greek στέρνα) as "s t e m ă" = coat of arms, emblem.
Actually, I think I misread this one. I need to change my browser's default font.

Do you translate into other languages than English?

Thank you user. Point by point:

First stanza: every rendering I can find of the poem online says "stemă", not "sternă", I think your browser misread it.
You're right about the second line, I still have trouble with discerning when adjectives function as adverbs, particularly in poems. "Clear afar" was an attempt to incorporate another definition of "departe" - serene is clearly a better translation of the adjective. I went with "easily" over "lightly" because the scansion mimics the rhythm of "time to time" and they're sufficiently synonymous in English that it doesn't pervert the meaning of it. (A Romanian read it and said that they preferred the scansion of the former to me, but of course you're right). I recognised "clipă" in the fourth line but I only knew "line" as "smooth" - not being Romanian I don't know its meaning in that context as "tender".
Second stanza: I went with pew because I'd been told about the story of Meșterul Manole, so I assumed that "foișor" referred to something religious. Having consulted a dictionary, you're right, of course.
Third stanza: thanks.
Fourth stanza: here I thought "schit" was a reference to the monastery Manole built his wife into, hence the "ruined monastery" in which she abides. As the woman is question is a corpse, although I knew that "îmbălsămată" means "perfumed" I went with "embalmed" because it seemed to fit the context. "Tainic" is one of those lovely untranslatable words. In this context what is meant by "De taină-mbălsămată" - is it "of mystery embalmed"? The case is right like you say. With "troienesc" I reckoned it had the same root as "to strew" in English, and flowers are certainly strewn at a marriage or funeral. In autumn the ground is strewn with leaves, I wouldn't say it's too light.
I have a decent grasp of French and Farsi, if you want something translated into or from either of those I could give it a go.
I will translate this.

Anglo traducător user here. This is the first Romanian Veeky Forums thread I've ever seen with more than five replies. I used to have to go to /pol/ to find any conversation about Romanian literature (which is how I ended up translating Mormântul căpitanului). What a time to be alive.

doesnt depărtări mean far away/somewhere else

Literally it means "distant places".

>depărtări
"Departe" is the adverb of place, which means "far", whereas "departari" is the noun. I've never seen it outside of "în departari", which basically means "far" or "in far away places".

What made you anglos interested in Romanian lit in the first place? I admit it is hard to get into based on a combination of it's dense opera, niche language and very little quality translation available. I've only really gotten into it recently, being of the newer generation that has grown up outside of Romania in the west.

Radu Gyr is one of my favorite poets admittedly. Maybe I've been visiting /pol/ one too many times or maybe I'm too much of a mystic, but I feel like there is something more to legionarism than just populist fascism. They sounded genuine when they sang about death.

La Argeș alludes to the forgotten glory of the first dynasty of Wallachia (House of Basarab, of which Vlad the Impaler was also part). Legend has it that Wallachia was founded by Negru Vodă after crossing the Carpathian mountains (during a pilgrimage/trial of sorts) from Făgăraș at the end of the 13th century. The Manole legend is related to Neagoe Basarab (House of Craiovești), who ruled in the early 16th century.
I can see why you'd make that mistake though. Negru Vodă sometimes gets confused with Basarab I, which is the first historically attested (in a Hungarian charter from 1324) ruler of Wallachia, which in turn gets confused with Neagoe Basarab due to their similar names and both being dynastic founders.

The House of Basarab coat of arms featured an escutcheon, a helmet, a cross and a raven. Wherefore the opening line (the House is long dead).

>mfw being the only faggot ITT who does not worship the Legionnaires
>mfw interest in Romanian literature on Veeky Forums seems to be mostly due to the fascism of the Interbellum
>mfw it's the same in Romania, with the vast majority of those interested in Romanian literature being various stripes of reactionary, while the leftists hate it (because they hate themselves)

>In this context what is meant by "De taină-mbălsămată"
Imbued by mystery or shrouded in legend.

Also,
>not being Romanian I don't know its meaning in that context as "tender".
"Lin" there actually means calm or gentle (its primary meaning is slow or slowly though), but in in that line tender also works because the fragility of the situation is evident in context: both the leaves and their gentle descent are fragile phenomena (leaves are pretty fragile in and of themselves, and dead leaves even more so, while their gentle descent can be easily destroyed by a gust of wind).

Meant for

Forgot to add
>La Argeș alludes to the forgotten glory
"Glorie" is a feminine noun in Romanian. The Lady = glory. Similarly, "murindele văpăi" = the dying memory of dead soldiers/heroes.
"Văpaie" can also mean "life" or "soul", the association being that the past heroes are now living among the stars, but their memory on earth (the reflection of the stars on the water) is fading.

Further tips:
2nd stanza, line 1: for "ca odinioară" a better translation would be "as long ago" since the meaning is not just that this had been happening previously, but that the occurrence is temporally far removed from the speaker. It comes from the latin "de una hora" (literally, "out of a certain time"/"concerning a certain hour").

2nd stanza, line 3: "împurpurând de dor" means "imbuing with a purple haze of wistfulness". "Dor" is too complicated to get into, but here it is not used with the meaning of longing for something/someone not seen in a long while but of pensive sadness.
"Împurpurând" is in the gerund mood. It does not refer to the sun being coloured purple/blushing, but to the sun colouring the scenery in purple whilst it is setting.

Another detail you might want to consider if you'll ever edit your translation is the fact that "soarele-asfințește" is a pun. It literally means "the sun sets" but it also has the figurative meaning of "to make holy" here (referring to the lionisation of past figures as they enter the annals of history). The exact etymology of "a asfinți" is unknown, but it is generally agreed that it has acquired its present form due to its various colloquial associations with the lexical family of "holy" (the sun and light viewed as holy in folklore, the death of saints as not being a real death but the start of a new life just like sunsets etc).
The older and more commonly used verb for the setting of the sun is "a apune" (from latin "appono").

As you can probably tell by now, this is an extremely patriotic poem.

>the sun colouring the scenery in purple
which is also connected to the previous pun, since purple/dark-red (in Romanian the word covers a wider colour spectrum, from shades of purple to shades of vermilion) is the colour of the nobility ("purpură" is also used with the literal meaning of "royal mantle").

Anyway, I hope this will help you do a more accurate translation, if you ever decide to, given that (I believe) the poem is actually very different from what you initially though it to be.

"Embalmed" works too, since it the power of legends that is keeping glory (renown after death) from decaying.

>What made you anglos interested in Romanian lit in the first place?
Bumping with this. Romanian here, I'm really curious to read some answers. I've always disconsidered my tongue's literature, nevet saw too much value in it to be honest. I don't even read translations in my native language, I usually stick to to the original language or search for a good English/French translation.

Other than the guy translating (which seems to be interested in Romanian for /pol/ reasons, at least partially) I think we're all Romanian here user. What is it about Romanian literature that leaves you unimpressed?

>I don't even read translations in my native language, I usually stick to to the original language or search for a good English/French translation.
This is common sense. They have a much older academic tradition and a much deeper pool of interpreters to draw from, so it's more likely that out of all of them at least some would get the original text right and manage to float to the top, compared to the much smaller Romanian pool of "talent".
This is true of any language with limited to no international circulation or few native speakers. Rule of thumb is, if you can't read the original, read the lingua franca translation.

Not Romanian here, just happened to like some lit and so I lurk these threads

Anglo traduc user here. In all honesty I only started translating because my girlfriend is Romanian. I had a background in languages (French, Farsi and Kurdish) but I picked up the language for her. So far I've translated about 70 poems though, so it's going fairly well. As for Gyr, I think has a wonderful ear for music, and it's not political (neither my girlfriend nor I like Nichifor Crainic that much, for example). "Avem o țară" is stunningly beautiful. I wouldn't say it's /pol/ reasons because I'm not NatSoc, Ancap, etc. My girlfriend is more racist than I am (although I get it with gypsies, manele is despicable). Studying Farsi gave me a strong sense of overlooked literary traditions and I was quite pleasantly surprised by how much Romanian literature had to offer - I don't think it's unreasonable to say that it has produced as much work of value as, say, Italy. Eminescu, Macedonski and Alecsandri deserve to be in the canon of European Romanticism - Eminescu is one of the greats, as good as Keats, Nerval or Tennyson. Romania produced the best Symbolism in Europe after France and in Arghezi, Pillat and Blaga has two poets who deserve to be alongside other great Modernists in a global anthology (I translated Caprioara de porțelan last week, what a poem that is).

Thank you for addressing that confusion, when I was translating the poem I spoke to a couple of Romanians, both of whom assumed that the poem referred to the Manole myth. I assume that the story of the village of Tântâva in the first book of Cărtărescu's 'Orbitor' is similarly allegorical (after a disaster the villagers cross the mountains and build a new village by the Argeș).

I'm hardly a legionary either, user. Jewish blood, you see. Politically I'm some sort of left nationalist. A sense of patriotism is something people grow into rather than grow out of, I think.

"Sfânt", "sfint" and other variations are probably the words most people learning Romanian end up recognising quite quickly! I noticed the pun but as with a similar pun in the Arghezi poem 'Creion', I am a prisoner of my language. I thought, having read Hopkins and Heaney, of something like "blessed-sets" - it's something I'll have to consider further. As for 'impurpurând', I'm aware it refers to a sunset sort-of haze, the kind that covers a river on certain evenings. You rightly note that purple is a royal colour - I hope that this is a theme an English reader will be able to pick on through Caragiale's sumptuous imagery. It's a wonderful poem. I'll add the "long ago" too.

La Argeș

As if loose from a coat of arms, to places serene and far,
An old raven spreads its dark flight mightily,
Lightly, from time to time, in deep tranquility,
From the elms fall dead leaves, rotating in tender moments.

But why does she no longer come
As long ago, the lady, to watch from the high pavilion,
As the sun sets, empurpling with longing
The shadowed copse of a sad spell full,

When the dying flames, reflected in the water,
And the air gently sifts ash over the valley —
Why no more does she rise, smiling at nightfall?

— No, for long she sleeps in the ruined hermitage
By mystery embalmed, and the flowers of loss
Strew with gloom the abandoned tomb.

Nice. This is quite a lot closer to the actual meaning in Romanian. One last tiny little thing -- 1st line of the 3rd stanza: there should be an "are" in there. As is it also makes the 2nd line in the same stanza come across as a non sequitur.
Maybe (?)
>When dying flames are reflected in the water,
>And the air sifts gently ash over the valley —

>I assume that the story of the village of Tântâva in the first book of Cărtărescu's 'Orbitor' is similarly allegorical
It's quite possible but I haven't read it so I wouldn't know.
>I hope that this is a theme an English reader will be able to pick on through Caragiale's sumptuous imagery.
I don't know. Most Romanian readers wouldn't pick up on it either. Caragiale is being pretty subtle/cryptic throughout the poem. You have to know a bit about the history of "Romania", Mateiu's keen interest in it, and his traditionalist-reactionary outlook (he was something of a Romanian J.K. Huysmans in that regard).

(I don't like Arghezi.)

I don't think about romanian literature.

Okay friend thanks for posting

absolute shit, with a few exceptions like Caragiale, Eliade, Blaga and others
sums it up pretty well
most romanian lit is cheap copy of french or german lit

t. romanian (5 în bac la romană, fute-m-aș în ea de literatură)

Huysmans is a pretty adroit comparison. My girlfriend said that Craii de Curtea-Veche reminded her of À rebours, in life Caragiale was something of a Des Esseintes. Ion Luca's poem "Cameleon-Femeie" feels like it could have come out of that Huysmans/Baudelaire milieu.

I get your point about Romanian literature relying on literary trends set by France, for instance, but if Eliade et al. are examples of great literature, which Romanian writers would you consider derivative?

i don't speak romanian but having read this is beautiful

You have to be a total brainlet to get a 5 at the Baccalaureate exam. The grammar and essay composition subjects alone can get you a 7, both subjects being piss easy if you're not some illiterate retard.
All this without even considering how much the Baccalaureate has been dumbed down in recent years.

My girlfriend brought back a hardback anthology of modern Romanian poetry in English from Iași (published in the early 70s) and it has a translation of this poem. Enjoy.

That translation is so damn stiff and literal I just had to compare it with how a machine (bing's) would do it:

I do not crush the Corola of the wonders of the World
And I don't kill
With the mind of the mysteries, I meet them
In my Way
In the flowers, in the eyes, on the lips or tombs.
The light of Others
Strangle the spell of the hidden unpiercing
In the Depths of darkness,
But I,
I with my light increase the world's secret-
And just as with her white rays the moon
Not shrinking, but trembling
Magnify the mystery of the Night,
That's how I enrich the dark.
With the broad creeps of the holy Mystery
And all that's misunderstood
They change in misunderstandings and higher
Under My eyes-
For I Love
and flowers and eyes and lips and graves.

>from Iași (published in the early 70s)
Typical communist era quality.

I am the diaspora user that posted before, but given my lack of formal education in romanian grammar/language, it is sometimes hard to read some authors without having a dictionary open. Does anyone know of any classic authors that have a more... simpler prose? I'm not asking for YA shit, but something that isn't filled with antiquated words that I never really learned. I'm looking for a bridge really that will help me transition into the more difficult authors.

yes i second this. would like to see a jpg chart with tiers of difficulty, simpler vocabs in lower tier. not sure how idiom factors in as we probably won't get it anyway. also a recommended dictionary. ive got an edition of eliade but the vocab is a real chore. also a bit illiterate myself, can take some seconds to pronounce the text in my mind to where its sound matches a known word. the spelling-to-pronunctiation of vowels isn't exactly consistent with english. grammar/syntax doesnt seem like it'd be much of an issue if you can speak it, is there much difference between spoken and written romanian?

>is there much difference between spoken and written romanian?

I'm sorry I can't help with the rest of the post, user, but I can answer this question: no, there is not much difference between the two. I mean, sure, if it were that simple, romanian phonology wouldn't exist, and yet, here we are. Still, it's almost entirely read letter-by-letter, with few composed sounds (more exactly, "che", "chi" "ce", "ci"). This of course excludes foreign words, but that shouldn't be a problem. You're still going to be off on the intonation some times ("torturi" as in the plural form for "cake" vs. "torturi" as in the plural form of the noun for "torture"), but it's 95% fine.

From what I've heard, the latin part of romanian developed as a sort of vulgarization of the language, spoken by common people living in this land under the romans at the time. It got a written form pretty late too. So its simple written-spoken simplicity shouldn't come as surprise.

- some Romanian

simple written-spoken relationship*, sorry