Romanian Literature in Translation

Romanian The Cultural Observer (Observatorul Cultural) launched a translation project which ‘will host Romanian fiction, poetry, literary criticism and literary history, and news about Romanian writing abroad, all translated into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish starting in May 2008′.

The project inaugurates with Stefan Banulescu’s Men in Winter. As a whole, Iarna barbatilor/Men in Winter offers a specifically local variety of magic realism, discovered in Romania in the 1960s through the intermediation of the South Americans—a trend at once oriental, Balkan and southern: fabulatory in the extreme. The essence of this “magic” is dislocation.