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111 pages

English

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On a cold bright day, fifteen year old Adriana Dunea wakes up to find that her world has transformed overnight. Her parents irritate her, school is a bore and her body is changing in ways she does not understand. As the seasons turn, she grows into a beautiful young woman, forges new friendships and falls in and out of love. Yet her days spent dreaming of romance and listening to the latest gramophone records in her provincial town swiftly come to an end when the sudden opportunity arises to move to Bucharest.Seduced by the charms of the 'Little Paris of the East', a chance encounter with the hot-headed composer Cello Viorin tests her attachment to her longstanding sweetheart, Gelu. In this witty, lyrical coming-of-age novel, Mihail Sebastian sensitively charts his heroine's journey of self-awakening as she discovers the limits of her freedom and strives to shape her identity as a woman.

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Historical fiction

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Publié par	Distributed By PublishDrive
Date de parution	26 novembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781912430307
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Extrait

MIHAIL SEBASTIAN
Mihail Sebastian was the pen-name of the Romanian writer Iosif Hechter. Born in the Danube port of Brăila, he died in a road accident in 1945. During the period between the wars he was well-known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays. His novel For Two Thousand Years is a Penguin Modern Classic.
GABI REIGH
Gabi Reigh’s translations and fiction have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today and The Fortnightly Review. She has won the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation and was shortlisted for the Tom-Gallon Society of Authors short story award. She was also awarded a PEN Translates Award for translation of this novel. She is currently engaged in a translation project called ‘Interbellum Series,’ focusing on works from the Romanian interwar period, including the poetry of Lucian Blaga and the novels of Mihail Sebastian. Gabi has also translated Sebastian's novel Women (Aurora Metro, 2020).
First published in the UK in 2019 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd. 67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham, TW1 4HX www.aurorametro.com info@aurorametro.com t: @aurorametro F: facebook.com/AuroraMetroBooks
The Town with Acacia Trees by Mihail Sebastian, English translation copyright © 2019 Gabi Reigh
Introduction copyright © 2019 Gabi Reigh
Afterword copyright © 2019 Radu Ioanid
Cover image from photograph courtesy: © Costica Ascinte 1941
Cover design: copyright © 2019 Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.
Editor: Cheryl Robson
Aurora Metro Books would like to thank Marina Tuffier, Taylor Gill, Didem Uzum, Maja Florczak, Ferroccio Viridiani
All rights are strictly reserved. For rights enquiries please contact the publisher: info@aurorametro.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBNs: 978-1-912430-29-1 (print) 978-1-912430-30-7 (ebook)

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.
Each year, a dedicated committee of professionals selects books that are translated into English from a wide variety of foreign languages. We award grants to UK publishers to help translate, promote, market and champion these titles. Our aim is to celebrate books of outstanding literary quality, which have a clear link to the PEN charter and promote free speech and intercultural understanding.
In 2011, Writers in Translation’s outstanding work and contribution to diversity in the UK literary scene was recognised by Arts Council England. English PEN was awarded a threefold increase in funding to develop its support for world writing in translation.
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Introduction
Gabi Reigh
Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was a prominent literary figure in the interwar period, an urbane young man who had studied law in Paris and whose novels and plays gained him celebrity and access to Bucharest’s most fashionable circles. He was also a member of the literary group Criterion that included the philosophers Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran and the playwright Eugen Ionescu. Sebastian died the same year that the Second World War ended, having escaped the pogroms that ended the lives of 400,000 Jews like himself, and having endured with dignity the rejection of former friends and fellow intellectuals during the last fifteen years of his life.
In response to the rise of antisemitism in Romanian public life, Sebastian wrote the novel For Two Thousand Years in 1934, depicting the challenges of living as a Jew in this new political climate. Norman Manea, another Jewish-Romanian writer, now a professor in the United States, recreates for us Sebastian’s position in the Criterion group in the 1930s: “He was a Jew who had become entirely assimilated, an exceptionally literary man devoted to Romanian culture, yet all of his friends were Orthodox Christians, there wasn’t another Jew amongst them, and there was something in the air, a new, nationalistic zeitgeist, and he found himself in this group where suddenly they all lowered their voices the moment he entered the room.”
The “interbellum period” has been described by many as a golden era of Romanian literature and philosophy. The writer Ioana Parvulescu describes the atmosphere of interwar Bucharest, the city that was known as the ‘Little Paris of the East’: “In interwar Bucharest people lived in extreme sophistication and in vulgar blindness, they were generous and they were callous, tolerant and fanatical, clear-sighted and deluded, evil and saintly, saintly and evil. Each one of them was different and no-one ordered them to think in the same way or say the same things. The wonderful thing about this world is that it was not a paradise nor was it hell, but an ordinary world, a world where everything was possible and a world like everywhere else under the sun.”
Parvulescu’s description captures the paradoxical nature of this golden era: the “extreme sophistication” of Sebastian’s fellow members of the Criterion group was eventually matched by their fanatical devotion to the Iron Guard, causing them to alienate Sebastian despite many years of friendship and fruitful collaboration.
However, although Sebastian has come to the attention of the world after the translations of For Two Thousand Years and his Journal, which documents his life under the Iron Guard, the rest of his literary works defy the categorisation of him as a victim. Novels such as The Town with Acacia Trees (1935) , a playful, lyrical coming-of-age novel published a year after For Two Thousand Years , celebrate the pleasures and glory of ordinary life, steering away from contemporary conflicts. Sebastian was not merely interested in exposing the dark side of interwar society, as he had in For Two Thousand Years , but also wanted to depict the lives of modern young people just like himself, living in “a world like everywhere else under the sun”.
In some ways it seems strange, reading The Town with Acacia Trees , to think that it was written at a time when Sebastian’s life and reputation were being systematically destroyed by the people he felt closest to. Unlike For Two Thousand Years , it eschews politics completely. It is a novel about young people learning to love, discovering music, books, all the beautiful things that life has to offer. These are the same things, according to Sebastian’s Journal, that mattered the most to its author. Reading the entries from 1935, when Sebastian was adding his finishing touches to the novel, it is clear to see that he was still determined to cling on to the normal life of a metropolitan young man, his descriptions of antisemitic abuse buried amongst longer passages detailing his love affair with the actress Leny Caler, promenades through Cişmigiu park, “coffee and cognac” on the terraces of belle époque restaurants, dancing until dawn at Zissu nightclub and concerns as to whether his new glasses made him look ugly.
The Town with Acacia Trees follows the lives of a group of young people in a provincial town as they move from adolescence to adulthood. Its chief protagonists are Adriana and Gelu, whose relationship transforms over time from friendship into love. The narrative changes in its focalization, sometimes presenting the relationship from Adriana’s point of view and at other times providing us with Gelu’s perspective, thus enabling us to empathize with both characters while at the same time revealing their delusions and vanities. Like Sebastian’s other works, such as the novels Women (1933) and The Accident (1940) as well as the play A Star without a Name (1944), The Town with Acacia Trees is first and foremost an exploration of love, its thrilling intensity and inevitable transience.
Music pervades Sebastian’s novels and plays an important role in The Town with Acacia Trees . This is not surprising as his journal entries often begin with detailed descriptions of the concerts he had listened to on the radio that day – Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and especially Bach – broadcast from concert halls in Prague, Warsaw, Stuttgart, Vienna. Just as the hours Sebastian spent listening to this music in his Bucharest apartment insulated him from the horrors of the world outside, Adriana’s group of friends found refuge from the obligations and restrictions of the adult world in her room, listening to gramophone records or to their young host playing the latest sonatas on the piano. Sebastian was influenced by the French modernists and his rendering of this communal experience of music as something that binds the friends together and creates shared memories echoes Proust’s description of it as “a means of communication between souls”:
“No, none of them understood anything at all. And yet, despite these faltering first attempts, full of mistakes, Songs for the Fair Agnes became an emblem of their togetherness. When the winter, drifting by too swiftly, had passed and altered them in ways they’d never