Why did I start writing in French? Well, to be perfectly honest, I switched to French to please my French publisher, who told me that my books did not sell well and translations were very costly.Sound familiar? During the same interview Tsepeneag also explained his discomfort with translation:
[W]hat worried me in the process of translation was that my Romanian words were serving the only purpose of finding French equivalents for them—my translator’s words, the only ones that would be visible in the end. My words were mere passageways, humble and ephemeral ones, condemned to complete anonymity, buried at the bottom of a drawer. In any event, I couldn’t publish my books in Romania, they were forbidden there because I was an opponent of the communist regime. In such conditions, writing had become a sort of mortal execution: my words had to die so that I, the writer, could survive as an author.After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Tsepeneag began writing in Romanian again as a kind of revenge.
See the full interview here.
1 comment:
Tsepeneag sounds like a very eloquent man.
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