On Monday, March 30, Observator Cultural, a leading Romanian cultural review, named Norman Manea winner of the Gheorghe Crăciun Lifetime Achievement Award in a major ceremony held at Bucharest’s Odeon Theater.
This April, The Observer Translation Project (http://translations.observatorcultural.ro) carries on the celebration with a special edition that translates Norman Manea’s “Sentimental Education” into nine languages. Manea’s tale of sexual initiation is a charming, sexy, wistful and ferocious take on Flaubert’s novel of the same name, with references to Les Thibaults by Roger Martin Du Gard. Manea ironically contrasts the French subtext/s with love, instinct, longing and the search for the evanescent ideal woman in communist Bucharest, its psychological satellites and New York City, the Dada capital of the world.
This issue features an illustrated bibliography with nearly 100 Norman Manea book covers, six synopses, a Back Cover section with praise from Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, Cynthia Ozick, Claudio Magris, Octavio Paz, Heinrich Böll, John Bayle, Brad Morrow, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Berliner Tagespiel, and The New York Review of Books and two audio files, posted on the right side of the page. Click to hear Norman Manea read his poem “Lunar Nights” in English and Romanian, courtesy of Conjunctions. “Norman Manea: A World Voice, an essay with links” leads to Manea’s discussion of Kafka and exile in “The Fifth Impossibility” (located in the BOOKS section of The New York Times on Line) and to a farewell to Saul Steingerg, New York City’s favorite map maker of all times (in the archive of The New York Review of Books).
Translated by now into 20 languages and counting, Norman Manea is a World Voice. The Observer Translation Project features him with a bow to Pen World Voices Festival in the month of April when authors from around the globe flock to New York City.
“With his talent and creativity, Manea belongs to the great men of Romania.”
—Orhan Pamuk
The Observer Translation Project is an international magazine of Romanian writing in translation. Featuring a lead author each month, OTP appears in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish in each issue. We also publish in Hungarian and Bulgarian Russian and Serbian. Relying on a team of translators that includes award winning names, we offer fresh translations from a literature too little known. OTP regularly includes introductory articles, synopses, author CVs, illustrated bibliographies, author photos, NEWS items and a CULTURAL AGENDA of Romanian writing abroad.
Please note: English is the “lingua franca” of the non-literary parts of the site.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.
