Magda Cârneci is a luminary. Writing in the vein of what Beauvoir called the artist’s need to “will freedom in [themselves] and universally,” her novel FEM is a feat of feminine imagination, at once within and beyond the body. Structured in a fluid prose but intricate with poetry’s capacities to manifest the numinous, the resulting text is an immensely powerful excursion within the mysteries of the mind as it meets the mysteries of the universe. We are proud to feature FEM as our Book Club selection for the month of June, and also to speak to Cârneci alongside translater Sean Cotter in a live interview held for members. The conversation, transcribed below, touches on the intricacies of contemporary Romanian literature, the legacy of French feminism, and the transcendental experiences of everyday life.
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Andreea Iulia Scridon (AIS): Magda—you’re probably best known as a poet, but could you tell us about your history of writing fiction—or should I say prose? Did this represent a transition; were there anxieties about this process, or did it come naturally to you?
Magda Cârneci (MC): I used to write poetry, but at a certain moment, I realized that poetry is less read than prose, and the audience, unfortunately, is less numerous than it is for fiction. And as I had a message to transmit and some obsessions to confess, I felt the need to use fiction—the narrative as a tool, as a literary tool. It’s true that the prose form gives you possibilities which do not exist in poetry: describing and analysing feelings, or perceptions, or sensations in a minute way. So from this point of view, prose writing was a marvelous discovery for me. But I have to say that I mingle prose and poetry; I use poetry a lot in my writing, because I think it is a way of charging words with an intensity and with an aura of feelings. That does not exist in normal prose writing. So this is a kind of poetic prose or visionary prose, what I do in FEM.
AIS: Sean wrote a very interesting study called Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania, which I recommend to anybody interested in comparative literature, actually. So Sean, I was wondering if you could tell us what you think Romanian literature in particular is defined by, insomuch as it as possible to define a literature briefly, and what it brings to the corpus of world literature or global literature in particular.
Sean Cotter (SC): I don’t think that there’s an essence that would unite all Romanian literature in a useful way; what I would recommend is a difference in perspective when it comes to reading Romanian literature or understanding its history as a whole. This is something I addressed in the book—that in contrast to our usual ways of looking at national literatures (especially literature in the United States), I think we have to pay much more attention, when reading Romanian literature, to its interactions with other literatures. I think it’s much easier to misunderstand what is happening and why things changed, or why new things develop within Romanian literature, if we don’t attempt to document such interactions—and I think that FEM is a great example of this.
It’d be very difficult to explain the emergence of this novel without understanding Magda’s interaction with French feminism, and by the same token, without understanding how little people like Cixous and Irigaray and Kristeva are translated within Romania. We have to understand both her readings of other places, but also Romania’s dearth of engagement with French feminism. It’s very easy in the United States for us to start to telling stories about our literature without thinking of other literatures—we have the impression that we’re divorced from them, so we don’t read them. I think that’s debatable, but it seems to be our common impression. So in engagement with Romanian literature, it’s the necessity of taking that kind of transnational character of writing into account.
AIS: Magda, what does being a Romanian writer mean to you?
MC: Well, this is a strange question. I write in Romanian, but I do not feel exactly like only a Romanian writer—especially nowadays when people travel so easily, and books are translated into different languages. Nowadays, one can feel as though they are more than a national writer; I can feel like a postnational writer or transnational as Sean said, because we have another relationship to world literature, and we feel more comfortable within it, and as such we feel less of a complex in belonging to a minor language like Romanian. And this is really enriching and encouraging. I, for example, lived in France, in Paris for ten years, and I started to write in French, which became my second mother tongue, and I felt comfortable in it. Now that I’m back in Romania, I kind of oscillate between three languages; I write poetry in Romanian, I write essays or articles in French, but I write academic studies in English, because this is the international language for this kind of stuff.
Of course I’m Romanian, but at the same time, I feel like a cosmopolitan citizen and like an international writer. And I’m glad that nowadays there is this current of world literature discussed in academia, especially in the United States. This trend is really interesting and useful. And I’m also glad that there is a book entitled Romanian literature as World Literature, which speaks about this. We are, I think, at the beginning of a new era in which writers will be able to shift from one language to another to give their books a better chance.
AIS: In Romania, the so-called 80s generation—which Magda is a part of—still sort of runs the literary scene today, as many would say. So I wonder what your position is on being a continued member of this generation, which originally became well known for its opposition to the communist regime.
MC: Yes, I had the chance to start my career in the 80s with a range of young writers who were very gifted and who were connected to the tone of Anglophone literature, more than before, and thanks to this, we developed new literary tools. We were influenced by the Beat Generation, and then by postmodernism, and this constituted new tools for our writing. Because of this, this generation is considered the more creative or original of Romanian literature during the twentieth century. Now, we are all very mature and we have a role in Romanian culture, but we also have this opening towards the outer world which did not exist before, and we wish to be in contact with the rest of the world and with other literatures, to have a free commerce with other literatures.
Today, the 80s Generation is a consecrated one. It belongs now to the history of literature, in the manuals now, and maybe we should have more a freer attitude toward it. We have developed beautiful careers. The start of our lives were under communism, and then the Revolution came, we had to pass through pass communism and through that transitional period, and so now we are in full capitalism.
SC: Magda was mentioning how the 80s Generation was marked by a more intense engagement with American literature—and it’s true, this is one of the things that propelled that really remarkably creative time. If we follow these trains of connections between literatures—the 80s connection to something like Allen Ginsberg, and FEM to the French feminist writers—you would expect that to make translation easier, right? That the connections would already be made, and we would be able to recognize, bring Ginsberg home in the form of Cărtărescu or something, the same way that we bring Walt Whitman home when we bring in Neruda, right?
But actually, when I was translating FEM, the problem that I found was that we already had our doses of French feminism, which we’d gone through in the 1990s with such an intense engagement with these writers, and the part that was the most significant for the Romanian reception risked being the least significant for the American reception. For an American reader, the parts that were easy to digest were the parts about the female body and the lived experience in that body. The parts that were hard to digest were the more visionary passages and experience of other worlds, and the emphasis on escape. It’s interesting to see how these connections both enable and also complicate the work of translation.
MC: Oh, this is very interesting for me, I didn’t know that. But now I realize that the literature of French feminism and American feminism was not translated into Romanian during communism; we merely had some echoes from afar. And even now, French feminism is not translated into Romanian, so FEM is the first of its kind to appear in Romanian. I discovered the French feminists when I studied in Paris. I didn’t have much time to go deep into this kind of literature, but I was of course influenced by it. It took me ten years or so to digest these influences and to write my own book about my own femininity, which is both mine, and a form of feminine feminism. It’s not really a clear cut feminist text, as you find in the United States, for example.
AIS: Now that we’re on the subject of the book, I wonder, Sean, if you could define what it was about FEM that led you have to choose to translate it?
SC: Well, some of it was just curiosity. I knew Magda’s work as a poet, but I hadn’t read her novel, and I was curious about it. I think I made the decision to translate the work when I was about fifty pages in, and there’s a sequence set at a summer camp—I think it’s the summer camp where she describes menstruation. And it’s the most terrifying description I’ve ever read, where the pains are so intense that she’s fallen down a flight of stairs, and the section ends with her yelling at herself, keep your head up, or you’ll break your neck. Seeing this, I thought that there was something very profound in the book that stirred my curiosity, and I’m always looking for something that I have no experience of.
MC: I was impressed and a little bit surprised that Sean, as a man, wanted to translate this book, which is so feminine. But we had a very good collaboration, and I found that he has a woman within himself, as Jung would say. He has a certain refinement, delicacy, and goodness that fits with what this novel, FEM, wants to transmit. So I am grateful that Sean did this for me with such success.
In Romania, I didn’t have the same reception as I do in the States, and my work has met with oppositional attitudes from men. Well-known literary critics, or philosophers, or other important cultural figures who have read the book told me that they were shocked by what was written in the book. And I can understand them because they belong to an older generation, still more or less patriarchal in mindset. I think they haven’t read books on feminine or female topics, so for them, it was really shocking and surprising to have this from a person like me, who is also an academic and university professor—a respectable person, so to say. I have this kind of reaction not only from men, but also from women, and this is even more interesting because women were not accustomed with this sincerity about their body, their physiology and so on. So from this point of view, it was a beginning, my novel was a beginning in Romania.
AIS: What was the writing process like, between what you had in mind and how it then evolved practically?
MC: Oh, this is a good and difficult question. Well, this book obsessed me for many years—more than ten years—and I had written fragments of it, but couldn’t put them together because something was missing. And I realized only with time that I needed to pass through different experiences in order to accumulate more facts, more sensations, more thoughts and understandings: to put together a puzzle of existences that make a coherent discourse. It is strange, but I think that these experiences, which reveal our inner world, do not occur in a continuous way—they appear and disappear. One has to reconstruct a unity from all these fragments of living. To pass through maternity, or the loss of a lover, or the loss of a mother, and these kind of archetypal situations. So it took a lot of time.
When I started to put these fragments together, I was living in Paris and very busy with my position as a director of the Romanian Cultural Institute, so only from time to time did I have time to compose these fragments, and I finished the book only when I came back to Bucharest after ten years. I did it in one summer like this one. In one summer. I finished the book suddenly, because everything was already there, and I had the calm, the quiet, and the time to do it. This was a process of… becoming sane with myself, finding peace with myself. And only after writing this book did I feel that I had become a real woman, and I had reached maturity, my maturity.
AIS: Would it be incorrect to call it an auto-fiction?
MC: I put a lot of myself in this book, because I know my own self. I use my body as a tool for sensations, perceptions, understanding, and my mind for thoughts and reflections. As a poet, I always wanted to go beyond, to be more than what I am, to reach transcendence in writing, but at the same time, one cannot do this without one’s body. And the body, in the case of women, is very complicated, as everybody knows. We have to get along with this tool, which is also our person, which is also a mystery, and this mystery gives way to experiences which are wonderful and fascinating.
What I wanted to transmit through this book is that through our human life, and through our human body and condition, we can access—at least from time to time—more than ourselves. We can feel our unity with nature, we can expand our consciousness, and become one with the cosmos. Everybody has these kind of experiences, but many don’t care or don’t pay attention, and as such they pass over us too quickly. It’s a pity, because it is this entrance into harmony with the universe that gives us peace. Poetry, as I use it, is a mystical way to attain certain states of mind and soul. Poets do not need to take drugs, or to practice religion; they have this in their sensitivity. It’s like producing our own endorphins, in our neurons, through poetic feeling. My book is full of these poetic transgressions, from realistic descriptions to states of mind, which seem maybe fantastic or dreamlike—but I assure you that they are real. We all have our dreams, our visions, our feeling of expanding around our intuition, our moments of telepathy, and writing about it is a way of provoking it.
I wanted my book to be this kind of tool, to enter into a state of harmony with the rest of the world—with the other, either men or women. The main point of my novel is that we can and we need to reach a sort of transcendence—and only by way of experience can one become convinced of its existence, to further seek it out. This is why it is good to read poetry, because poetry gives you access to this state of mind very easily, and it is a democratic way of getting to special states of mind.
SC: The great thing that I learned while reading this book was the mystical argument it, via the body and via the text of the book itself. And this is one of the things that makes Magda’s work stand out from other works within the same area in American literature.
One of the questions I had while translating was—how far is this going to go? How much coincidence can we take, how many moments of overlap between the transcendent world and the everyday world are there? Then this happened to me in my own life; I went to Romania one summer, as I do as often as I can, and Magda and I met and had this very warm conversation. On the plane back to the United States, I’m doing a crossword. As we’re taking off and I’m watching Bucharest become paler and paler out the window, on the crossword, the word directly in the middle is a three-word clue—and the answer is f e m. Then I came back home and I set to work in earnest on translating the novel.
AIS: So we’ve talked about mysticism, and about that which is fluid, and encrypted in a way. But Sean, you spoke in a very interesting interview for The Blue Nib about determining the architecture of a book when you translate it. What that was like in a book that is apparently so fluid?
SC: Magda was talking about the struggle she had in assembling the bits of the book until they were reconciled and the narrative was made whole, and when I was going through the first draft, I too had some questions for how things are going to work. It’s different from simply reading the book. Reading the book is one experience, and translating the book is a dual experience, in a kind of beautiful dissonance. So I’m trying to see where the more accessible parts appear and in what rhythm—the same goes for the more discursive sections, the alternations between the first person sections and the second person sections, where she addresses the lover she seems to leaving. I had to figure out where I wanted to place the emphasis, depending on what was happening in the text. So “architecture” sounds too rigid, and I think you’re right to call the book fluid, so maybe I was really looking for the rhythm of the book.
Magda Cârneci is a widely acclaimed writer, translator and art critic in Romania, where she has become a leading voice among the gifted group of poets who began their careers under the waning influence of Communism in Eastern Europe. She is the recipient of prizes and grants from the Fulbright Foundation, Getty Trust, European Union, and more; in 2013, she won the “Opera Omnia” career prize from the Romanian Writers’ Union. Her poems have been translated into thirteen languages and included in numerous anthologies.
Sean Cotter has translated many works of Romanian literature, including Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding (Archipelago Books, 2013) and Wheel with a Single Spoke, a selection from Nichita Stănescu (Archipelago Books, 2012), winner of the Best Translated Book Award for poetry. He is Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he is part of the Center for Translation Studies. He is currently working on a translation of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid.
Andreea Iulia Scridon is a Romanian-American writer and translator. Her translation of a series of short stories by Ion D. Sîrbu, a representative of subversive writing under the communist regime, is forthcoming in 2021 with ABPress, and her co-translations with Adam J. Sorkin of the Romanian poet Traian T. Coșovei are due out with Broken Sleep Books. Scridon’s chapbook of her own poetry is appearing with Broken Sleep Books, and a book of poetry with MadHat Press is forthcoming in 2022.
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