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Book Launching (France): “Journal d’exil” by Mircea Milcovitch, Éditions Amalthée

January 8th, 2012 · No Comments · Books, Diaspora, International Media, PEOPLE, quotations, Reviews

Les “Éditions Amalthée” publieront dans la seconde moitié du mois de février 2012 le “Journal d’Exil”. Ce récit avait été rédigé après l’arrivée en France de l’artiste, entre octobre 1968 jusqu’à la fin de l’année 1969. Le livre est préfacé par le docteur Marc Andronikof.
he Éditions Amalthée publishing house will launch in February 2012 the Memoirs of artist sculptor Mircea Milcovitch (Mircea Milcovici), with a preface by Mark Andronikoff. This book is written by en exile, whose family was no stranger to the sad road of uprooting. Mircea’s father, himself a native of Bessarabia, was compelled to seek refuge in the Kingdom of Romania in the wake of the invasion by the Red Army, at the end of WWII. T
Whilst reading an early draft of this Memoir, one encounters a certain melancholy, imbued by generations of displaced ancestors, living at the confluence of warring empires. But beyond this one can detect a strong determination to live the newly-found freedom and to succeed in the artistic career.

Le rayonnement de la culture Roumaine en France (par Constantin ROMAN, Londres)

September 21st, 2011 · 3 Comments · Books, PEOPLE, Poetry, quotations, Translations

Le rayonnement de la culture Roumaine en France

(Plaidoyer pour la traduction en Français de l’Anthologie “Blouse Roumaine” par Constantin ROMAN)

Inspirée de la toile homonyme de Henri Matisse, oeuvre exposée au Musée d’Art Moderne du Centre Pompidou à Paris, “La Blouse Roumaine” est une anthologie des Femmes de Roumanie, présentant des personnalités incontournables de la culture universelle. Cet ouvrage contient une majorité des femmes francophones – des femmes qui se sont exprimées à un moment ou un autre dans cette langue, ont écrit ou écrivent en Français, ont vécu en France ou bien y vivent actuellement, contribuant à la culture française comme professeurs, écrivains, peintres, sculpteurs, psychologues, philosophes, médecins, analystes politiques, poètes, actrices de cinéma ou de théâtre (sociétaires de la Comédie française), des femmes qui ont tenu des salons littéraires à Paris, les égéries qui ont inspiré les artistes Rodin, Brancusi, Renoir, Vuillard, Matisse, Fantin Latour, les compositeurs Chausson, Poulenc, Gounod, Fauré ou Saint Saens et Ysaÿe, des écrivains comme Proust, Colette, Cocteau, Morand ou Anatole France et Sacha Guitry, des cinéastes comme Jean Renoir, Marc Allegret, Christian Jacques, Jean Boyer, ou Pierre Colombier et Claude Autant-Lara, des pianistes et violonistes, des chanteuses d’opéra, des ballerines, enfin, des Françaises qui ont épousé des Roumains ou la cause de la Roumanie et qui ont eu par la suite une contribution à l’histoire culturelle et politique de ce pays, des conseillères politiques, ou des Roumaines naturalisées françaises ou des Françaises d’origine Roumaine.

Patrick McGuinness’ first novel on Ceausescu’s Romania – on the Booker Prize Longlist for 1911

August 30th, 2011 · No Comments · Books, International Media, PEOPLE, quotations, Reviews

It takes an Irishman, like Patrick McGuinness, to write a fiction book on Romania, which is certainly one of the best on this subject to come out in the last one hundred years.
It is superbly crafted, gripping, witty and full of unexpected twists and turns as would befit the dark days of Ceausescu’s terminal dictatorship. The author’s acid style may not be one to be enjoyed by humourless Romanians, who, in spite of the last two decades of “freedom” remain shackled to the old mentality of the fallen dictator: it nevertheless caught the attention of the Booker Prize Jury which shortlisted it for the prize to be given later in 2011.

Ceausescu’s fall is not unlike the recent stories of other fallen dictators and the paranoia they imposed on their subjects yet the current political scene in the Middle East and North Africa makes this theme so much more compelling.
Despite the real pain and memories of suffering which this narrative brings to people cowered by fallen dictators, Patrick McG’s story deserves the highest accolade.
Watch out this space!

Constantin ROMAN – Dérive continentale ou européen en dérive

July 27th, 2011 · No Comments · Books, Diary, Diaspora, International Media, PEOPLE, Reviews

Voici une lecture aussi passionnante que captivante, bien qu’elle ne soit pas, comme le suggère son titre, un récit scientifique*/. Son auteur, un dissident Roumain ayant fait ses études de géophysique à Bucarest pendant les années folles du régime immonde de Ceausescu, est quand même parvenu a s’en échapper, afin de participer à une conférence à l’Université de Newcastle, en Grande Bretagne. N’étant plus retourné en Roumanie qu’après la chute du régime communiste, il est resté néanmoins un patriote Roumain, actuellement Professeur honoris causa de l’Université de Bucarest, tout en gardant sa résidence, près de Glyndebourne, dans une partie “chic” de l’Angleterre. Selon son propre récit, Constantin Roman doit être l’un des jeunes cientifiques recevant l’un des meilleurs honoraires du monde . Une fois arrivé en Angleterre, muni seulement d’un billet de £5 dans sa poche, il a utilisé son expertise, son charme, les meilleurs contacts ainsi que l’appui de l”unversité de Newcastle

Keith RUNCORN, invited Constantin ROMAN to a NATO Conference on Palaeomagnetism

comme plateforme de lancement. En parvenant à entretenir les meilleurs contacts, notamment avec le Professeur Keith Runcorn, de la Royal Society, il parvint à obtenir une bourse de recherches au Collège de Peterhouse, à Cambridge. Cela lui a permis de faire sa thèse de doctorat sur la tectonique des Carpathes et de l’Asie centrale, en étudiant des données sismiques afin d’identifier les limites et le mouvement des plaques lithosphériques. Dans ce contexte, utilisant les zones de compression et d’extension, il a défini l’existence de deux plaques lithosphériques non-rigides, les “plaques tampon”, ou “buffer plates”, du Tibet et du Sinkiang, cantonnées respectivement entre les plaques lithosphériques rigides de l”Inde et de l’Eurasie. Au début des années 70 une pareille suggestion aurait été étiquetée pour le moins comme iconoclaste. Une fois son doctorat obtenu, sous la direction du professeur Sir Edward Bullard, Roman est devenu par la suite Conseiller International de l’industrie petrolière, ayant gagné, je suppose, des honoraires prodigieux. Cet ouvrage traite essentiellement, de la folie des dictatures et des bureaucraties mais aussi de la douce vie de doctorant-chercheur a Cambridge. Quand aux détails de la bureaucratie “kafkaiesque”, les autorités britanniques semblent aussi obstinées que leurs consoeurs roumaines

Comrade Jonathan Swift’s “subversive” Gulliver and the “Genius of the Carpathians”

June 3rd, 2011 · No Comments · Books, International Media, PEOPLE, quotations

“Publishing Swift’s satires in 1985, I myself fought a lot with the censor in order to include “A Modest proposal” concerning eating Irish children, which had become subversive here on account of meat shortage in Romania. Faced with the alternative of not publishing the book at all, or doing it without the famous text, I gave it up. The supreme level of censorship was a department of the (Communist) Party Central Committee.”
source of quotation:
http://www.blouseroumaine.com

Carmen Sylva, Elena Vacarescu and the British Composer Sir Hubert Parry

May 28th, 2011 · No Comments · Art Exhibitions, Books, PEOPLE, Poetry, quotations, Reviews, Translations

This beautiful Queen Anne house @ nr 17 Kensington Square has the largest staircase in the square. Kensington Square, 17, was the home of Hubert Parry. His eldest daughter inherited the house in 1932. She was married to Lord Ponsonby, leader of the Labour opposition in the House of Lords. In 1936 Lord Ponsonby produced a detailed and well-researched history of Kensington Square.

A prolific musician, composer and from 1885 Director of the Royal Academy of Music who nursed a whole generation of British composers, Hubert Parry is much forgotten today except for his piece sang by riotous crowds at the last night of the Proms set on Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”. He composed chamber music, oratorios and symphonies.
On a more exotic note he set to music “The Soldier’s Tent” a poem by Carmen Sylva, Queen of Romania and Helene Vacaresco, which at the time of the Boer War was greatly en vogue raising the spirits of the British public at home.

The Soldier’s Tent
The Queen of Romania wrote the poem “The Soldier’s tent” put to music by Sir Herbert Parry – a song popular during the Boer War

Conversation with Domnica Radulescu, Romanian-American Academic and Novelist about her first Novel – “Train to Trieste”

May 2nd, 2011 · 1 Comment · Books, Diaspora, PEOPLE

CRS:
Most of Romanian exiles who became acknowledged as international greats, Cioran, Anna de Noailles, Marta Bibescu, Horia Vintila wrote directly in the language of their adoptive country, yet the native Romanian officials together with a raft of native critics considered this practice disloyal. The young Elena Vacarescu who received a prestigious French Prize for her poems.she was reviled, back in Romania, even before 1900. She returned only to be exiled again, yet she desperately loved her country wherever she was. Two generations later, under communism, the official critic George Calinescu in his opus on the History of Romanian literature dismissed Anna de Noailles as “unpatriotic” for not writing in Romanian. Even as recently as two years ago a director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris refused a Romanian author financial help for the translation of his book simply because this was written in a foreign language therefore stating that it did not qualify as Romanian (sic). We know that this seems bizarre and nonsensensical. Your choice of writing in English is clear and I for one I think it a great help in putting `Romania on the map, very much as Panait Istrati or Anna de Noailles did it before the war and many other exiles since – what are your views on such criticism? Do you find it justified?

DR:
I frankly don’t care much about such criticism nor do I pay much attention to it. I think a writer can write in any language under the sun she/he chooses and throughout history writers wrote in different languages, not always their first native or maternal languages. I left Romania for the United States in order to start a new life, a new me, a new destiny, when I was quite young. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to write in the language of the country in which I have been living for a quarter of a century. Besides I adore writing in English more than in any other language.

CRS:
On the occasion of the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Herta Muller much debate and controversy was stirred in the Romanian society about the Romanianness of a German ethnic born in Romania, who lived in Berlin and wrote in a foreign language… Some critics went even further as to suggest that one of the reasons why Romania may have been overlooked by the Nobel prize committee is the paucity of Romanian novels translated in languages of international circulation: do you find such suggestion justified?

DR:
I don’t know, again I don’t care much about such issues as someone’s “Romanianness” or “Frenchness,” and I think it’s silly of critics and the media to worry about things like that; the reason they do is because there is such a need to pin and label writers and place them in boxes of ethnic, national, linguistic affiliations. Maybe Romanians should do a better job at translating their own literature in other languages.

Four decades ago – A Romanian in Britain (A Story from the Home Office website)

April 23rd, 2011 · No Comments · Books, Diary, Diaspora, PEOPLE, Reviews

My greatest trouble in England arose from my refusal to give up my Romanian nationality. In retrospect this may seem bizarre, especially that I was menaced on a number of fronts: by Securitate operatives masquerading as diplomats keen to end my flouting of socialist order and drag me back to Romania; by a prospective mother-in-law who refused to allow her daughter to marry me unless I accepted British citizenship; and by officials of the British Home Office who assumed that my desire to retain what I saw as my unalienable right of birth, my nationality, might stem from communist loyalties.

Afterwards Lord Goodman decided to champion my cause, writing to the head of the Home Office that I was a

“man of impeccable character clearly determined to belong here and make a significant contribution to our national life.””

In retrospect I hope that I discharged myself honourably of Goodman‘s expectations as I gave generously my expertise in discovering oil and gas for Britain and batting for Britain abroad on the cultural and scientific front, especially in my native country – Romania

Lionel ROUX: “Odyssée pastorale” – Extrait “Chez les bergers des Carpates Roumaines”

March 2nd, 2011 · No Comments · Books, Diary, International Media, PEOPLE, Reviews

Son and grandson of moving shepherds…

in a biographical and reflexive quest, I was taken to look into a task that was the one of my father’s and my grandfather’s but will never be mine. My photographic quest draws its sources from a history of lines, of features, limits, traces, that constitute and mark a territory. It also finds roots in the ancient culture but in a very fragile way of the pastoral civilization.
In the beginning, there is the course where the line of the family roots stretches out between the alpine province and the Piémont mountains. The path (or rather paths) of the migratory shepherd, the trip that for centuries was brought twice a year by men and herds over the lands.
Shifts of altitude by the ones and shifts of attitude by my shepherd father to draw a line on this nomad life.
My artistic path, my photographer’s itinerary has been continually questionning the pastoral culture of the migration around the mediterranean area and even farther, ever since I was conscious of the fracture by my rejected inheritance.
It is not a simple quest for roots ( of which nomads don’t feel concerned ) but a semi-etnographic exploration of the mentioned event vanishing little by little : The trace of the pastoral routes, the mediterranean and african shepherd’s world.

Mon cheminement artistique mon itinérance de photographe n’a pas eu de cesse, dès lors que j’ai pris conscience de cette cassure (de cet héritage refusé) d’interroger l’épaisseur de cette culture pastorale de la transhumance, que ce soit en Europe ou en Afrique. Il ne s’agit pas d’une banale quête de racines (dont les nomades ne s’embarrassent pas), mais plutôt d’une exploration de ce qui se transforme peu à peu : la trace des trajets pastoraux, le monde des bergers.

Gabriel Badea-Paun awarded the prize “Le Second Empire-Fondation Napoléon”

December 11th, 2010 · No Comments · Books, Diary, Diaspora, International Media, PEOPLE

Monsieur Gabriel Badea-Paun awarded the prize “Le Second Empire-Fondation Napoléon” for his monograph:

“Le style Second Empire : Architecture, décors et art de vivre”

Monsieur Gabriel Badea-Paun had received from Her Imperial Highness the Princess Napoleon the medal “Le Second Empire-Fondation Napoléon”. The ceremony had taken place on 7th December 2010 in Paris at the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in the presence of the Chancellor and Army General Jean-Louis Georgelin.
Born in Sinaia in 1973 Gabriel Badea-Păun has an MA in History and a doctorate in History of Art (Sorbonne, 2005) . He is a Knight of the Cultural Merit (Romania 2009) and in 2010 he received the “King Michael Medal for Loyalty”.

Centre for Romanian Studies