“For all humanity it is very important that Ukraine resists”

2023-10-04 07:43:51

Time.news – “For all humanity it is very important that Ukraine resists. There was the opportunity of a providential man, who is President Zelensky, and I hope that this year he receives the Nobel Peace Prize”. The greatest Romanian writer speaks about the conflict in the heart of Europe, Mircea Cartarescu67 years old, among those eligible for the Nobel Prize for Literature which will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy.

In a long interview with the Argentine newspaper ‘Clarin’, Cartarescu talks about his connection with writing and with Latin America and gives his personal reading of the contemporary history of his country and of today’s Europe. For one of the finest writers of Eastern Europe, what is happening in Ukraine at the moment shows us that “for millennia nothing has changed in human beings. Along with genius, reason and goodness we also have the wild, criminal and oppressive. All this negative side is found today in Ukraine without any fault and without any act of provocation or aggression on its part.”

Cartarescu expresses a feeling of gratitude to Ukraine, convinced that “if it had not resisted this war, probably Romania would have been occupied like the other Eastern countries“. A very real war and present in Romania’s daily life due to the geographical proximity and the common border, which brings back to the Romanian poet the memory of the dictatorship in his homeland, the chaos and the subsequent violent revolution between the 80s and 90s.

“The dictatorship we experienced for 42 years after the Second War was called communist dictatorship, but in reality it was pure fascism, nationalism, myths of blood and soil”, the popular Romanian writer, born in Bucharest in 1956, told Clarin. also married to the Romanian poet, Ioana Nicolaie. Not only the hunger and cold of the Romanian winter, his compatriots also had to deal with “fear” and “a lot of violence” of a revolution that lasted 10 years.

“There was wild capitalism, huge inflation, a legislative coup, which allowed unscrupulous people to accumulate fortunes. Only after joining the European Union did we start to be a real democracy and this has been since 2008 onwards”, analyzed Cartarescu. Also for this reason he considers Europe his “second homeland” and defines himself as a “European writer” because “I love Europe, part of my construction, of my inner formula. A great place for culture and free life of people“, specifying however that “except for political reasons, I will not leave Bucharest”.

The relationship with America and with writing

Cartarescu also has a particular bond with Latin America, where he says “he feels at home, even in the culture of this region”, having read various Latin American authors at a young age, “learning a lot from them, with enthusiasm, amazement and Pleasure”. His fantastic streak comes precisely from those readings which, according to him, bring Latin America and Romania closer together, protagonists of partly similar historical experiences. Precisely in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, the Romanian writer met “the readers most passionate about my work”.

The essence of Cartarescu’s life is writing and literature: He has kept a diary since he was 17 – five of his volumes have been published – and he has enormous faith in literature, from which he says he has learned everything he knows today. In other words, “the driving force behind everything I write is the pleasure of writing. It’s what I love most and it’s my reason for existing.”

A daily ritual, an integral part of his DNA, consists of writing by hand one or two pages a day, always in the morning, but “I don’t control the writing” which he does not consider a job, but “an art, a personal religion, a act of faith”. For Cartarescu “writing literature is natural, like knowing how to breathe and walk, but I don’t have to think about how”, he told the Argentine newspaper. A ritual that leads him to sit at his desk, to listen to his inner voice “who knows better than me what I have to write”.

That’s when the magic happens, when, as the author himself explains, his hands become “the instrument of a voice that inhabits it and is the true owner of the words“, such as those contained in “Il Levante”, published in 1985 in Romania, and in his other most acclaimed works, the 1,500-page trilogy “Dazzling” (“Orbitor”) and the collection of short stories “Nostalgia”.

An infinite diary

“I am a writer of memory, of interior life, I simply want to express my feelings, what I think of things, create words that are more similar to me than to the world around me”, confided the Romanian writer, one of the favorites at the Nobel Prize for Literature. The diary, which he has kept for 50 years now, is the substance of “my mind, my dreams, hallucinations, memories, it is my autobiography”, from which he continues to draw ideas for his stories, novels and for his poetry, because “all literature is a metaphor for the world”.

Cartarescu is a poet, although he left this form of writing several decades ago, like every young man of his generation, born under a suffocating communist regime, where the secret police was omnipresent and people could not complain about hunger, poverty and lack of freedom. For him poetry and freedom are the same thingwhile in his prose writings we encounter disturbing metaphors, a fantastic and allegorical universe as well as a reality that seems alien, a fiction, not free from skepticism and a marked humorous streak.

As the years pass, the now 67-year-old Cartarescu says he is “more optimistic”, intent on enjoying more and more of what he receives, which is why “I feel very grateful both as a writer and in my personal life”. Regarding his relationship with the large readership, Cartarescu confides that he really appreciates his ‘aficionados’ as well as the fact that people of other cultures can be reached by his works. However, for him “the most important thing is to exist in my eyes”, therefore he would still continue to write even if “all the readers in the world disappeared, having always written for myself and for people like me

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