Mircea Cartarescu De Ce Iubim Femeile Pdf

[Randell Magtoto]

WhyWe Love Women (Romanian: De ce iubim femeile) is a 2004 short story collection by the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu. The twenty stories all have a female protagonist, and had previously been published in the magazine Elle.[1] The book was published in English in 2011 through University of Plymouth Press.[2]

De ce iubim femeile este o carte de povestiri scrisă de Mircea Cărtărescu. Cartea se structurează n douăzeci și unu de capitole, douăzeci dintre ele cuprinznd povestioare din viața amoroasă a naratorului, iar cea de-a douăzeci și una, care poartă numele cărții (sau invers), cuprinde motivele pentru care, n viziunea naratorului, bărbații iubesc femeile.

Mircea Cartarescu is an associate professor at the University of Bucharest, a writer, an essayist, a journalist and a literary critic. He studied and completed his doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest.

Cartarescu has been publishing poems and prose since 1978. In 2008, Warum wir die Frauen lieben (Why We Love Women) was released by the Suhrkamp publishing house, the German translation of a collection of short stories, a best seller in Romania in 2004 (De ce iubim femeile, Humanitas). In 2007, his novel Die Wissenden (The Ones Who Know) was published in German by the Zsolnay publishing house. The novel is the first part of a trilogy, originally entitled Orbitor.

I was delighted but also relieved. You see, although I worked on a number of drafts with a wonderful editor whose ear I trusted, and had signed off on the final version happy with what we had achieved, when I first read the piece on the website, I was horrified. It seemed choppy to me, missing transitions where I would expect them, jumping into information without warming the reader up. The musicality seemed off, not like my writing at all.

I have to share your beautiful essay with my sons, who are in this exact linguistic situation (like many other children of immigrants). Their Romanian is mine and my husband's, not the Romanian people speak back in the country. Stuck somehwere in the 2000s, full of words that other people might not use (but we do - "trebuie sa printez ceva" says my oldest son, instead of "sa imprim", but we don't even question the made up word, as we also use it), adn strangely adapting itself to an English syntax that sounds strange in translation ("Pot sa am un pupic?"). Thank you for this well-crafted reflection on linguistic alienation.

A fortnight ago I decided to start a newsletter, after a long time wondering whether it was a good idea or just an advanced form of procrastination. (\u201CWhy not both?\u201D, the chorus pipes up. Shut up, chorus.) Then my life turned into one of those Texas days where bright sunshine gives way to an apocalypse of thunderstorms. I had wanted to write about the essays I\u2019d had come out, and I had wanted to write about how tricky it is to be a person with a lot of interests in a world that rewards specialization. Frankly, I had wanted to write about Kris Jenner. (\u201CQueen,\u201D the chorus whispers.) But I\u2019ll have to hold off on that. Because right now what is on my heart is the story of writing an essay for the first time in my mother tongue.

Last week, The Rumpus published \u201CTongue Stuck,\u201D in which I describe my fractured relationship to Romanian, and the imperfect, though dogged, way I\u2019ve still tried to pass it on to my son. The essay seemed to resonate with quite a few people. Language is the great divider, but linguistic alienation seems to be a bridge between people of vastly different backgrounds. When we see our birth-grammar falling apart, our shock is the same.

You see, \u201CTongue Stuck\u201D was my own translation, adapted and expanded, of an essay I wrote in Romanian. It\u2019s at this point I must tell you that I have the Romanian of a five-year-old. A clever five-year-old, it is true, but no more. I was born in Romania and learned to read and write in a basic way, but we emigrated before I could attend school. Nor have I read much in Romanian over the years. Poetry and fiction are written using a vocabulary that\u2019s difficult for me, too different from the daily conversational Romanian I\u2019m used to. My Romanian is a heritage language, blended with English syntax and sprinkled with grammatical mistakes.

It had never occurred to me even to try writing in Romanian. But back in 2019, I received an email from Luiza Vasiliu, an editor at Scena9, a cultural journal based in Bucharest. She was interested in collaborating, and I quickly agreed to have my essay about moving across borders with things, \u201CThe Things We Take, the Things We Leave Behind,\u201D (originally published in the Southwest Review) translated into Romanian. (\u201CDid you rip off Ferrante?\u201D asks the chorus churlishly. Probably, but not on purpose.)

In the halcyon days before a worldwide pandemic, back when I only thought I was tired, I had the bandwidth for this sort of thing. So, while on vacation, I decided to give it a go. Before I sat English exams in high school I always primed myself by reading P. G. Wodehouse, and so it seemed like a good idea to try the technique this time too. I picked an easy enough Romanian book from my shelf, Mircea C\u0103rt\u0103rescu\u2019s De ce iubim femeile (Why We Love Women), a collection of short stories about a topic you might guess. By the time I finished it, I was thinking in Romanian again. So I started writing.

Composing in Romanian for, well, pretty much the first time in my life was surprisingly liberating. I write about this in the essay, the way I was almost magically free of writer\u2019s block. It was like the linguistic version of the Comic Sans trick. It was so clear that what I was writing was at a child\u2019s level, that I was lucky to have any words show up at all, that I took anything I was given. No worrying about precision, about melody, about length of sentence or variation. If a word came into my head, I used it three times, because by God, that was the word I had.

A few times I only had the vocabulary to say something that wasn\u2019t quite right, not exactly what I meant, but I just put that down anyway. By the time I was finished writing, I believed my own little lie. This is a convenient way to write. (\u201CYou should try it more often.\u201D Yes, I should, but I think that\u2019s called fiction.)

Editing was easy, because I couldn\u2019t edit myself at all. I sent the draft off to Luiza, and when she sent her notes back, I simply accepted them. No sitting there wondering if I really liked the editor\u2019s suggestion or if I could think of something better. I was more dependent on my editor than I ever have been, and that reduced the tension too. There was a sense in which I couldn\u2019t hold myself fully responsible for the quality of the work.

There were also some things that were easier to write in Romanian simply because they had taken place in Romanian. I realised as I wrote that I am so often translating my experience into English, especially when writing memoir, and that the result is something that sounds strangely bloodless compared to the scene I remember. It\u2019s like watching a silent film without a soundtrack.

The essay was published in print only in Romania, so I couldn\u2019t really tell what responses were to it, if there were any. Since I loved the topic, I decided to translate the piece into English in the summer of 2020. Because I was incapable of polishing the original version myself, I decided to keep the English a little rough too. In some ways it was rougher, since I deleted some details that didn\u2019t make sense in translation, and had to find awkward English equivalents for language that sounded so natural \u2014 finally \u2014 in Romanian.

Now that the English has been read by so many people, and had a warmer reception than I\u2019d expected (it was featured by Longreads and Memoir Monday), I\u2019m at peace with its odd flavour. It seems oddly authentic to me that it exists imperfectly in two languages now, just as I do. (\u201CYou should translate it into German.\u201D No really, that\u2019s enough from you.)

PS. I\u2019d be remiss if I didn\u2019t tell you about the essay I published with Avidly on how Kris Jenner is like Eleanor of Aquitaine, or about the new episode in my London Review of Books podcast with Mary Wellesley, on Julian of Norwich. Mary\u2019s book on the secret lives of medieval manuscripts is out right now, and having gotten to know her brilliance and humour I feel comfortable saying you should probably read it.

De ce iubim femeile este un buchet de povestiri cules de Cărtărescu din unghiurile cele mai lugrube ale memoriei sale. Naratorul principal este un Mircea care se contopește pe alocuri cu autorul, dar care se diferențiază de acesta. Nu pot defini ct la sută din ce am citit sunt fapte reale și cte sunt scornite. Nu pot trage o line pentru a indica locul unde realul se contopește cu imaginarul, iar visarea se deosebește de nevisare. Este prima carte scrisă de Cărtărescu care mi-a ajuns n mini, dar pot spune că iremediabil ndrăgostită de stilul acestuia de a așterne ideile pe hrtie. n urma acestei cărți am rămas cu ntrebări. ntrebarea supremă se nvrte n jurul unei cărți pe care naratorul o amintește n carte ca fiind favorita sa, dar despre care nu am găsit nici o dovadă a existenței sale n lumea din afara cărții. Citind, am călătorit alături de personaj ntr-un castel bntuit din Irlanda, n Torino, n Bucureștiul comunist, n vremuri apuse pe care noi nu le vom mai trăi niciodată.

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