Oana Sandu-Popescu examines the translingualism of poets whose first language is Romanian but who choose to write in English with Romanian mixed in (Mihaela Moscaliuc, Andrei Guruianu, Claudia Serea, Adriana Oniță among others). She analyzes transculturality as a process enabling, in the host culture, the rediscovery of the foreign inside, the “inner transculturalist” (Wolfgang Welsch), in order to promote a critical practice that rejects methodological nationalism and adopts a transnational view of poetics, exemplified online by the organization Bucharest Inside the Beltway, which “defines an alternative to nationalist and even to civilizational ideologies” (Jahan Ramazani). The boundaries of “national literature” become more porous, flexible, and welcoming when reframed through a “regime of mobility” (Ulf Blommaert), introduced by the immigration of writers or by aterritorial social media platforms. Using Rebecca Walkowitz’s concept of “born translated” literature, Sandu-Popescu reads translingual poetry as a cross-cultural product that breaks the nationalist bond between geography, nation, and language in engaging creatively with other languages and changing the way cultural identity is formed and represented. Born between cultures and languages, these poets’ translingual poetry belongs entirely to no culture.
Christene d’Anca carries on the idea of immigrant refashioning of compliance to hegemonic culture as underground subversion of it through the work of Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian born author who continues to imbue the English language with the distinct flavor of Eastern Europe. As Codrescu muses in Road Scholar about his experience in the U.S., “[W]e are all aliens with very obvious accents working undercover for the American Dream” (176). Thus, he acknowledges the possibility of maintaining his Romanian identity even as he immerses himself within the American culture. At the point that Codrescu finds himself spatially reconfigured, as he sheds various husks of past identifies, his newfound person is an emblem of his vitality, and his ability to thrive in a cultural multilingualism. His self-translation from a Romanian into an American allows him to use his words to build a bridge between cultures, and languages, and his corpus of works attests to the varied paths he has taken towards defining his American self.
Ioana Unk’s inclusion of the immigrant’s “portable homeland” as part of “the American dream” reinforces the idea of America’s story as an immigrant’s story. From the perspective of acculturation and transnationalism she reads Romanian writer Bogdan Suceavă’s novel, Avalon: secretele emigranților fericiți, as a story of perseverance, ambition and success in the American academic environment. The novel prompts an investigation of the various forms of multilingualism in the US context, through the themes of ethnic and cultural identity, and the idea of a “portable homeland,” in order to attempt to identify acculturation and transnationalism techniques that bring the characters closer to the ever-elusive American dream.
Octavian Gabor and Elena Gabor conclude with an interrogation of what makes the Romanian sentiment of being (even as it gives insight about being itself) more special than the Paraguayan, French, Vietnamese, Nigerian, or American ones? With the question of being within (“întru”) a language, they explore the difficulties of translating a work about the inner depths of Romanian, C. Noica’s The Romanian Sentiment of Being by Constantin Noica (initially published in 1996 by Humanitas) from Romanian to English. Octavian Gabor focuses on the philosophical aspects of the translation, while Elena Gabor discusses the translation of “Tinerete fara Batranete si Viata Fara de Moarte” (Ageless Youth and Deathless Life), well-known story in the Romanian folklore, which Noica analyzes in detail.
More broadly, the four papers recast the immigrant’s feeling of being unsettled as a familiar mode of being and belonging, thus challenging the dichotomy between foreign and familiar/native.