You are invited to the eighth in a series of talks and discussions to be held at Wild and Homeless Books, 12 South Street, Bridport at 7.30 for 8pm on Thursday 24 June. Ioana Morpurgo will lead a discussion on the ‘period of transition’ for Romanian literature.
Phase Two: A Revolution’s Coming of Age and Its Literature
Ten years into ‘transition’, two young Romanian poets write a manifesto according to which authenticity shall primarily mean responsibility. Amongst other things, they were rightfully reacting against the hijacking of the literary scene by ‘frustration writing’ (i.e. writers unable to publish their work before 1989, now producing manuscripts detailing the awfulness of the communist past).
The responsibility the two poets and the group that rapidly formed around them were referring to meant that whoever takes to the pen in that claustrophobic chaos of the aftermath of the revolution, must do so fully acknowledging that words should not serve the aesthetic rhetoric, not add to the public language of separation and dissipation and will not dodge the reality no matter how difficult it is.
I shall discuss these urgent conclusions reached at the turn of the millennium in Bucharest by a group of young writers, outlining the so-called ‘period of transition’ and its reflection in poetry and prose.
Ioana Morpurgo graduated in English and Romanian literature from the University of Bucharest in 2002, and an MA in Cultural Anthropology in 2004. She is the author of a novel, Birth Certificate (Polirom,2004) that explores the decomposition of the self in a post communist, transitional society and of several pieces published in Romanian and British journals (such as Contemporary Review, the New Internationalist). She now lives in Bridport, runs a project celebrating the hedonism of knowledge (‘Lectures on Everything’) and is currently at work on her second novel on the subject of East European immigration to the UK.
