The Weirdness of Bilingualism [by Andrei Codrescu]

PART ONE (to be continued)

Timp de trei decenii limba română a ițit în convorbiri (de obicei exasperante) cu mama.

I wrote the sentence above in Romanian, and the idea of it intrigued me so much I kept on writing. I was exploring this idea as fast as I could type. It was a complex thought cascading into words. I called a temporary stop when the idea seemed (temporarily) exhausted. I read what I wrote and saw the weirdest thing: the first sentence was in Romanian, but the rest was in English. I had intended to write the whole thing in Romanian. I hadn’t even noticed when it slipped into English. What makes this interesting to me and, possibly, to neurologists, is that the idea in question was part of an introduction to a chapter of my collected poetry written directly in Romanian. I have two bodies of work in Romanian, 1962-1973, and 1992-2019. From 1973 to 1992 I wrote exclusively in English. I recovered my native language beginning in December 1989, when I "covered" the collapse of the Ceausescu dictatorship for NPR and ABC News. I started writing Romanian "coherently" in 1992. The parentheses around "covered" and "coherently" are intentional (another story). In any case, I am bilingual in an odd way, with a nearly four-decade gap between my native and my adopted languages.

1962 marked my first appearance in print when M.R. Paraschivescu, a Romanian poet and critic, cited two of my verses in his column "Posta Redacției" (The Editorial Post) in the weekly literary magazine "Luceafărul" (The Evening Star). All the Romanian literary journals of that time had a charming column responding to submissions from poets around the country. This one, written by the eminent Paraschivescu, was particularly desirable to young poets because "Luceafărul" was one of the rare publications testing the waters of censorship in the post-stalinist era. I was in High School in Sibiu, a provincial town with an illustrious but dead past, and I wasn't doing well in school. I seemed to have a knack for poetry. It turned out to be my way out of school, provincialism, and a future of guaranteed boredom. In his response, M.R. Paraschivescu said:

Luceafărul, Anul V, Nr. 7 (90), 1 Aprilie 1962, p. 8.

Poşta redacţiei

 Andrei Permuter: Se simte o încordare plină de promisiuni , dar deocamdată multe versuri sînt încă legate de expresii tip; prea mult abuz de „flăcări”, „lumini” etc. Chiar în cele mai reuşite poezii îşi fac loc aceste expresii deficitare, de care ar trebui să te ţii cît mai departe, deoarece întunecă unele imagini virtual interesante. Astfel, în „Şantier” este un decalaj vădit între început şi final:

„Păduri de vuiete şi foc
ridică pulberea din loc
Şi la căldura razelor de soare
Îi dă putere, formă şi culoare."

Luceafărul, Year V, Nr. 7 (90), April 1 1962, p.8

Andrei Permuter: "A tension filled with promise is felt, but the poetry still abuses phrases like "flames," "lights," etc. These defficient tropes find their way even in the most accomplished poems, and you must stay away from them, because they obscure some virtually interesting images. In the Poem "Santier" (Construction Site) there is an obvious gap between the beginning and the end:

 "Roaring and fiery woods
Raise up dust from their floors
That heated by the sun
Gains force, form, and color."

Paraschivescu's was an intoxicating response in 1962. The misspelling of my name was a consistent prediction of all my future names. "Permuter" was a phonetic and nativized transcription of my original name, "Perlmutter." Whether Romanized for an antisemitic public, simplified for print, or just a typo, the act of misspelling followed me in the future like that "obvious gap" between the beginning and the end of my poem. One can barely imagine today M.R. Paraschivescu's daring poetic agenda in this answer: in condemning socialist-realist cliches like "fiery," "sun," "force," the columnist was condemning an entire corpus of Communist Party-mandated writing. In calling for enforced optimism, Stalin had introduced a body of false metaphors into the poetry of all Soviet fiefdoms. This doctrine was particularly egregious to Romanians, whose poetry had risen to lyric intensity in the pre-war era because of its profound insight into the futility of human existence. Our greatest pre-communist poets had pulverized ideology by either the worship of nature or the howl of protest. Romanian poetry had been raped by an alien lyric body. A badly educated high-school student like myself, who had read mainly the journals of the time, and a few (very few) poets of the interwar era, would take the communist imagery for granted. 1962 was not yet the anno mirabilis 1965, which represented for poets a genuine liberation from socialist-realism, and a return to its true poetry, but the "tension" which Paraschivescu granted my poems was the first tremor what would become the earthquake of 1965.

(to be continued)

Comments

[*as*]

Two small minor (no drinking, no smoking etc.) typos (I think):

In Romanian "a ițit" should read "s-a ițit", and in English "Year V, Nr. 7 (90)" should be "Year V, No. 7 (90)"!?