Translingualism as Dialogism in Romanian-American Poetry

This essay examines how translingual poetry by immigrant Romanian writers who live in or travel to the United States requires a transnational community framing rather than a national one and raises new questions about cultural and linguistic identity formation that reflect on both national and world literature issues. This analysis of the Romanian-American contemporary poets Mihaela Moscaliuc, Andrei Guruianu, Claudia Serea, and Aura Maru uses literary and rhetorical translingual theory to show that the “national literature” framing is no longer sufficient to address works created between two languages in a globalized world—Romanian and English, in this case. Born between two cultures and languages, their poetry does not belong entirely to either. In its turn, the national framing—both the Romanian and the American one— can become more porous and inclusive if read through a sociolinguistic “regime of mobility” (Blommaert) lens that gives a more powerful voice to migrant writers.

world, though, paradoxically, this poetry cannot circulate globally as it resists translation.Doris Sommer labels the writers who address their work to a limited audience who can read two or three languages as "particularist writers" (ix).The power of such texts is that they limit the authority of the monolingual privileged reader, creating estrangement, and accepting that estrangement as a consequence that limits circulation .If translingual poetry no longer belongs to only one language or one nation and it challenges national, cultural, and linguistic borders, then we could ask, like Stephen Owen, if it belongs to the "world," and if so, whose world?Analyzing the case of Chinese poets writing in the us or writing with the larger Western audience in mind, Stephen Owen dismisses the possibility of a world poetry that can truly maintain a solid relationship with a national literary tradition and its linguistic richness, which it sacrifices for international recognition; for Owen, this is just another way of accepting the imperialism of English and the domination of American values over the world and world literature.Less pessimistic than Owen, and much more welcoming to translation at the heart of the way books are produced and circulated on the world market, Rebecca Walkowitz shows how translingualism is the language of books that are "born translated" and which take translation as a theme, a structuring principle, and a mode of writing.Using world literary studies that discuss the possibility of world poetry and translingualism, but also rhetorical and sociolinguistic concepts, I analyze transculturality as a process enabling the discovery of the foreign inside, the "inner transculturalist" in the words of Wolfgang Welsch (qtd. in Nordin et al., ix).Even if translingual poetry's impact on the world market and its visibility vary according to the position of power and the circulation the languages involved have, the surprising forms in which it exists contribute significantly to conversations at the heart of world literary studies today: circulation as new means of production, translation as a mode of writing, and politics of language.

Multilingual Poetry
Multilingual writing is a mode of creation as old as literature itself.The "half-Numidian half-Gaetulian" ancient writer Apuleius opens his novel The Golden Ass by warning the reader that he enjoys switching Latin and Greek like a circus rider leaps from one horse to another.Medieval writers and intellectuals use Latin as lingua franca while mixing it with their own language, Dante being the most prominent example.In Vita nuova, he mixes Latin with his Tuscan dialect while he writes his major work, The Divine Comedy in Italian, though continuously guided mentally by Virgil's Latin.This is not the case only in Europe.As Walkowitz writes, "Eleventh century Iranian philosophers wrote not in Persian but in Arabic, while Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals used Chinese for nearly one thousand years" (11).
In early American religious poetry, for example, multilingualism is part of an effort to communicate better and reach the transcendent.2Patrick Erben writes that "radical Protestant poets in early America embraced translation and multilingual composition to capture the hidden script of divine wisdom in human language and make it visible, once more, to human eyes and minds" (336).This practice, called by contemporary linguists "code switching," has several functions, including "different languages being used for different characters or voices; to mark out different parts of the text; to represent a mixed speech mode which characterizes the community; or to bring in different registers or sets of allusions" (Gardner-Chrolos and Weston "Code-switching" 186).Steven Kellman supports this view as well in his book Translingual Imagination when he supports the views of translingual rhetoricians that "linguistic purity is of course a chimera" (12) and argues that "code-switching is common among bilingual speakers, and authors who would represent speech as it is actually spoken create internally translingual texts" (12).At the heart of fiction as well, literary language is never a closed monolingual system, but rather a system that negotiates its language at the intersection of several languages that interact historically, as the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argues (295).
Following in Benedict Anderson's steps, Gardner-Chrolos and Weston argue that in 19th-century Europe, with the advent of nationalism and national languages, multilingualism is no longer at the heart of language politics ("Mind the Gap" 198).The 19th-century ideological quest for the nation with its pursuit of cultural and linguistic uniformity contributes to the marginalization of multilingual literature.A good example of ideological monolingualism is Romanian literature, where, as Andrei Terian explains, nation and language had to be one as the ideal expression of national ethos.This position continued in the 20th century, and to a certain extent in the 21st as well, when different literary critics consider that only texts written in Romanian count as Roma-2 I use American poetry here as a reference point because the poets I analyze share this location and intersect with the American poetic tradition.The following example, using both English and German, comes from Francis Daniel Pastorius's poem "Bee-Hive": "How happy could men be in all their Course of life, / If they did strive to love as they do love to strive./ Wie klüglich könnten wir Ja glücklich allhier leben, / Wann Lieben uns so lieb wolt seÿn als widerstreben" (Francis Daniel Pastorius "Bee-Hive" qtd. in Erben 339).Other multilingual Protestant poets were Johannes Kelpius, Christopher Witt, Conrad Beissel-all leaders of different religious communities.See Erben for more on these early poets.
nian literature (Terian "National Literature" 9).3If language was the ultimate test of belonging to a national literary corpus, writers who left the country and sometimes even chose to write in a different language were outsiders.Jahan Ramazani argues that the critical literary establishment attempted to contain especially poetic identities by "issuing passports" (332) and ignoring the inherent multilingualism of poets who think and read beyond national borders.
Ramazani also emphasizes that though the phenomenon of displaced, exiled, migrant writers is as old as literature, the national literary establishment has not fully adapted to this "cross-culturalism," or considered its consequences on the national literary establishment (333).As poetry travels in translation less easily than fiction, all the more so when it's poetry in a minor language of small circulation like Romanian, the stakes are high because poetic pedagogy can either reinforce a model of national insularity or, in the form of transnational poetics, "define an alternative to nationalist and even to civilizational ideologies" (Ramazani 336).
Transnational poets are often analyzed by literary critics who work on national contexts with the tools of area studies.As Ramazani notes, "an army of anthologies, job descriptions, library catalogs, books, articles, and annotations reterritorializes the cross-national mobility and migrancy of modern and contemporary poetry under the banner of the single-nation norm" (332).Nationally framed literary studies need to adapt to the realities of a globalized 21st century by paying more attention to the work done in comparative and world literary studies to rethink concepts like nation, language, and cultural identity.One such illustrative example is the immediate reception in Romania of Herta Müller's receiving the Nobel Prize in 2009.The first day after the announcement, the online journal Jurnalul.roannounces in the headline that "Romanian writer Herta Müller wins the Nobel Prize for literature," though ironically the article itself begins with a nuanced identification of the writer's national identity: "The German writer of Romanian origin Herta Müller …" (Baltoc).The journalist's undecidedness about the migrant writer's nationality is illustrative of the way ethnic minorities are perceived in Romania, but also of the way they are represented in the university curriculum.For instance, at the University of Bucharest, a course on migrant and exile writing includes Herta Müller's works, which are however taught in translation in the Literary Studies ma program that's housed in the Department of Literary Studies.This department maintains its national focus as it includes 80% scholars working on Romanian literature and only 20% on comparative literature and literary theory.Still unsure how to frame her work, scholars and critics working in Romanian studies could rethink notions like nation and language starting from Herta Müller's own view on the translingual character of her writings: … that is my native tongue, German.I learned Romanian very late, when I was fifteen, in town, and I wanted to learn it.I like the language very much.Romanian is a very beautiful, sensual, poetic language … I have always seen that there are two stations, the one is the station on my language for something, and the other is this other station.It is not only a different word, it is a different view.Language has different eyes.In my case Romanian always writes with me, also when I am not writing in Romanian, because I have it in my head.
"Transcript" of müller's Nobel interview While Herta Müller's view on the use of language coincides with Rebecca Walkowitz' observation that translingual works use the syntax or metaphorical imagery from one language in another (40), Herta Müller's international success reopens debates in the national field related to the differences between the national and the world literature canon.As Stephen Owen argues, international success is usually dismissed nationally as a matter of the Nobel prize politics that reflects the politics of the time.Owen writes that If international recognition is a force, it is a force only on the edge of a national literature, pressing in different degrees and different ways … If however, the winner of the Nobel Prize implicitly represents a particular national literature and yet the person chosen is not someone well known or admired by the literary establishment or readership of that country then the members of that community suddenly realize that they have no say in world literature.
"Issues and Possibilities" 252-3 My analysis will show some of the ways in which poets acts as that force "on the edge of a national literature" challenging its boundaries.
Geographical mobility and multilingualism, understood as the inherent character of languages that never exist as "pure national languages" (see Bassnett, and Venuti), are at the heart of literature that speaks to wider audi-ences, not just national ones.In this essay, I am looking into the ways in which four Romanian-American transnational poets are speaking simultaneously to different national poetic traditions, including the tradition of Romanian poetry of the '80s generation, known as Romanian postmodernist poetry, that engages directly with the Beat Generation poetry and American postmodernism in theory and poetry.The poets of the '80s generation including Mircea Cărtărescu, Magda Cârneci, Traian T. Coşovei, Florin Iaru, Ion Stratan, engage in a playful intertextuality aiming at breaking existing patterns of expression, and creating an aesthetic and political distance from the communist ideological mainstream during what was the worst decade of the Romanian communist regime, the '80s.They were in dialogue with the '60s and '70s antiestablishment rebels in the United States-musicians, poets, novelists-and pushed the limits of Romanian poetic language, thus acting as precursors of the Romanian translingual poets who would enjoy the advantage of actually living in the world the '80s generation writers and poets could only dream about.The intertextual and transnational connections that both generations of poets build stand in contrast to Owen's statements that, in order to enter international "food court" of poetry, writers have to lose their national specificity down to only a "comfortable margin of difference" ("Issues and Possibilities" 253), and to mold their poetry to the hegemony of the Anglo-European system of values ("What is" 253) thus leading to a loss of poetic quality.Poets are in dialogue with both national and international models.I will analyze the poetic dialogue and the dialogism of literary language (in Bakhtin's sense) shaped at the intersection of the cultures these poets traverse, by birth or by choice, and focus on the poetic choices that challenge borders.Following in the footsteps of Rebecca Walkowitz who opened the discussion of world literary novels "born translated," I read poetry as a cross-cultural product that breaks the bond between nation and language by engaging creatively with another language in the poetic discourse and changing the way cultural identity is formed.This analysis shows that the boundaries of "national literature" become a lot more porous, flexible, and welcoming when reframed through a "regime of mobility" (Blommaert).Born between two cultures and languages, these poets' translingual poetry does not belong entirely to either.Nationalfocused literary studies could have a lot to gain if they adopted a framing that does not exclude the voice of the immigrant writer on linguistic or spatial grounds.

Background and Directionality
Romanian-American translingual poets traverse the world differently, and at different times in their life.The sense of directionality in their work exemplifies linguistic mobility: there is indeed direction in their work, the direction of identity, the gravitational pulls of home (land) versus host(land), creating a sense of bilocation, of belonging to at least two places at once.These pulls affect the ways in which their first language and especially their second language is used in their poetry.The audience for the foreign language is different.For Moscaliuc, Guruianu, and Serea the audience is mainly English.While they are, to a certain extent, considering the immigrant or Romanian speaking audience, their audience is mainly American.For Maru, the audience is primarily Romanian although Maru's recent move to English, as graduate student in the us, opens up a new audience for her.Owen claims that poets coming from semiperipheral cultures choose English as a way to enter international circulation, have a claim at international prestige and, in the process, as mentioned earlier, accept the English/American hegemony.Owen argues that such poets are trying to, somehow, game the system by dodging the established national system of evaluation that provides stability of values to any attempt to define "world poetry."However, Walkowitz short-circuits this argument by saying that, yes, "[t]hese works are written for translation, in the hope of being translated, but they are also often written as translations" (4 emphasis in the original).Here translation is an element of innovation, not compliance to the hegemonic culture, as the work of translingual writers is already written in translation, the original being the translation, thus removing the superiority of the original claimed by Owen.
Romanian-born poet and translator Claudia Serea immigrated to the us in 1995.She published several volumes of poetry, and was nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize.She co-edited the collection The Vanishing Point That Whistles: An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (2011).4Serea creates a hybrid poetry for the sake of communication in the same spirit as Herta Müller, confirming Adorno's assessment that "it may be foreign ideas or unusual syntax, rather than foreign diction itself, that create the impression of nonnative expression" (Walkowitz 40)."For me," writes Serea, "English comes naturally.I speak in English.I think in English.Of course, I didn't always write in English, I also wrote in Romanian.At some point, I felt the need to make the leap towards those around me.A natural leap happened towards English.The substance of my poems, though, is a hundred percent Romanian."5The same instinct to keep structures from one language when writing in another, for poetic effect, is shared by Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara: "a writer can use the idioms of his own language in a way that is understandable in English … Some may regard this way of writing in English as a desecration of the language.This is of course not true.Living languages grow like living things, and English is far from a dead language" (Okara 187).For Serea, this leap is an important individual poetic choice that disrupts the "passport issuing" tendency of national critical establishments in favor of enabling communication with nearby audiences.She shares this with the poets of the '80s generation in Romania.In his book, Postmodernismul Românesc (Romanian Postmodernism) Mircea Cărtărescu, the leading voice of this generation and one of the most widely acclaimed contemporary Romanian writers on the international market, writes that Romanian postmodern poets of the '80s were often accused that "under the influence of American poetry, they 'invented' a reality foreign to '80s Romania: that of highways, modern gas stations, snack-bars and Coke … The change in props was actually a change in poetic form" (374 author's emphasis).According to Cărtărescu, this "foreign" reality was actually a manifestation "of the poets' inner freedom" (374 author's emphasis).The poets create an inside/outside that matches the translinguals' hostland/homeland bilocation.The function of the translingual in the work of us-based Romanian poets is also to seek a change in poetic form that accommodates their different views of reality and also points to their above-mentioned bilocation.The transnational poets in this essay belong also to American poetry; they are not outsiders like their predecessors in the '80s Romania, and they speak back to American as well as Romanian literature.
Mihaela Moscaliuc immigrated to the us in 1996 and writes in English with Romanian words embedded.Immigrant Model (2015) followed her debut collection Father Dirt (2010).6As she writes in her poem "Portrait": "I thicken … language with accented mistranslations, / love with foreign words / oblong and trammeled and plum-brandied" (Father Dirt 7).She adopts an American/English point of view when she calls her Romanian words "accented."Foreign words are misfits, they smell and taste of other spaces.As Walkowitz would say, such poetry is "born translated … refusing to match language with geography" (6) pushing the boundaries of their community (29) and of world poetry.They go counter to Owen's claim that they domesticize the national, reducing it to tokens recognizable by the West ("What Is" 28).7 To paraphrase Owen, poems like this do not actually exist elsewhere, they do not have an original in another language that we can check for accuracy of translation.For Moscaliuc translation is creation, it is the original poetic act, and writing in English allows her to access and shape the new audiences of world poetry.In her poem, the adjective "trammeled" suggests that the poetic words are somehow restricted, their freedom limited.As a noun, "trammel" points to a three-layered fishnet that allows creatures in but it becomes finer and more restrictive the deeper they go, trapping them closer to the center.This view of words as creating a texture that captures one is important for my analysis, where I define translingual literature in terms of a performance of identity that creates new textures and opens new possibilities of expression precisely because it uses new words that come with different worldviews and layers of meaning.Like Serea and the Romanian '80s poets, Moscaliuc creates a poetic form that is inclusive of other spaces, often signaled by adding a location to her poems (for example "Eastern bloc, 1980s," "Chernobyl," "Ambohimiray, Madagascar," "Spain, Romania, America") to unsettle the language/location association.Increased intertextuality, foreign words, multiple locations (geographical or mental) and language play are part of the repertoire that she shares with the '80s poets.Generationally, the Romanian '80s are the formative place for most of the poets discussed here.It is in the post-1989 period that their personal and poetic trajectories pivot away from each other, retaining two common reference points: Romania/Romanian and two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from Le Château de Lavigny and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar fellowship from the United States Department of State.She is assistant professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey) and visiting faculty in the low-residency mfa Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University" (Chaffee).7 Moscaliuc herself stated in an interview that "I am not ready to become an amenable ethnic" (Pleiades).A similar attitude, coupled with unbound curiosity and love of learning, pushed Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri to venture into learning Italian and making it one of her writing languages.She details the adventure in the bilingual memoir In Other Words.
American/English language and culture.As this essay argues, these two "locations" change their direction and their function, but they remain essential to the poetic form.
Andrei Guruianu (b. 1979, Bucharest, Romania) immigrated to the us in 1991 as a child.English became his primary language, much earlier than for Moscaliuc and Serea; however, he maintains the "Romanian-born" descriptor on his website bio, a hint that such a detail may be significant in understanding his work.Although writing solely in English he also states "[f]ew things are more painfully unnatural than 'naturalization' " (Guruianu IthacaLit).This is not necessarily because of a distance from his own poetic language (English), but because he is often reminded that there should be a distance, because he continues to be labeled "immigrant writer."He has published widely in English, mostly poetry, but recently also fiction, and was the poet laureate of Boome County ny in 2009 and 2010.8The final poet, by date of arrival in the us, is Aura Maru (pen name, b. 1990, Republic of Moldova, formerly known as Bessarabia until the Communist period .Her 2015 Romanian language volume Du-te free (Chișinău, Moldova) won the Youth Prize in Moldova, and was nominated for the year's best poetry book by the Young Writer's Gala.She studied in Romania, us, and Germany and is currently a graduate student at University of California at Berkeley.Her poetry focuses on her condition as a frequent traveler and recently she started publishing poetry in English as well.Her border crossing is embedded in the language she uses, shared by two neighboring states, Romania and Moldova, separated by history and by different political views and also language politics.The Russophile separatist politics of the Republic of Moldova that became part of the Soviet Union starting 1940 until 1991, states that Moldovan is the official language, which means a "different language" than Romanian, whereas the history of language shows clearly that Moldavian is a Romanian dialect and not a distinct language called "Moldovan".
A review of Maru's volume in the Romanian literary magazine România literară points to the transnational effect of work published by Moldovan poets: "It is clear that the young Bessarabian poets are in a position to revitalize today's Romanian literature.Their agile, explosive imaginary, which epitomizes the bizarre (but, paradoxically, common-place) aspects of rural and urban life on the other side of the Prut River, is often accompanied by an intelligently orchestrated stylistic apparatus, which does not place technique over naturalness and spontaneity".9The reviewer emphasizes the positive side effects of crosspollination between national traditions, especially those that share a language, which can lead to a renewing effect on the Romanian literary tradition.

Poetic Practice
The work of these translingual poets shows in action what Jan Blommaert calls the "sociolinguistics of mobility": "various interacting with each other: language is not a static construction meeting other static constructions in a horizontal model.It is 'language-in-motion'" (5).Translingualism in poetry is a deliberate decision on the poets' side to better communicate the individual and unrepeatable feeling and voice.One of the literary theorists of language in modernist poetry, Carlos Bousoño argued that poetic language fights the limitations of common, spoken language by turning the generic character of words into a highly individualized one, and the analytical function of language-a word can be understood only explained through a number of words-into a synthetic one (93).To fight back the limitations of language, poets develop metaphors that singularize the unrepeatable poetic moment, and sometimes, in translingual poetry, metaphor is born when languages meet, as is the line quoted in the beginning of this essay from Moscaliuc's poetry: "when the hill sângeră ca un hemophiliac" (the hill bleeds like a hemophiliac) (Immigrant 49).As argued earlier, the word "sângeră" is a Romanian verb ("bleeds") that behaves like what Bousoño calls metaphor, making the word resonant of the English verb "sang" or the Spanish noun "sangre."When Romanian and English meet either through imperfect homophony (hemophiliac-hemofilic) or resonant phonetic patterns (sânger-sang), poetry is born.
Interestingly enough, two of the poets analyzed here, Moscaliuc and Serea, enter a dialogue with the Romanian folk legend of master builder Manole,10 a 9 "Este o certitudine deja faptul că tinerii poeţi basarabeni sunt în măsură să vitalizeze literatura română de azi.Imaginarul plastic, exploziv, care surprinde aspectele bizare (dar, paradoxal, comune) ale vieţii rurale şi urbane de peste Prut, este adesea dublat de o stilistică inteligent orchestrată, care nu aşază tehnicismul deasupra naturaleţii şi a dezinvolturii" (Conkan).10 In Levantul 14-513 Cathedral-falls to pieces at night.In a dream, he is told that he and his men must sacrifice their dearest person in order to complete their work.The first loved one that arrives on site happens to be Manole's pregnant wife, Ana.He builds the wall around her pretending he is playing a game, and the building stands, the most beautiful of its kind.The prince wants no one else to have a similar cathedral, so he abandons the masons on the roof, as it happened before to Daedalus, too.Attempting to fly away on makeshift wings like Icarus, Manole falls on the ground and is transformed into a fountain, next to the wall of the cathedral where his wife and unborn child are.11 Andrei Codrescu is a renowned Romanian-born author who emigrated to the us in 1966.He is not included in this analysis as his work has more in common with the diasporic/exile paradigm common to authors who emigrated before 1989.For more on his work, see his website.However, Mihaela Moscaliuc's poetic dialogue with his poetry in what the legend of Manole the Mason is concerned is important as it underlines the continuity between the Romanian avant-garde exilic writing and these translingual poets.12 Mircea Cărtărescu (b. 1956) is a graduate of the Romanian-English Program at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, and is now a professor at the University of Bucharest.He is fluent in English and he recently translated Allen Ginsberg's poetry.
Cărtărescu's text is not only in dialogue with previous works of Romanian literature (notably the early 19th century epic poem Ţiganiada by Ion Budai-Deleanu), and previous established forms of poetic language in Romanian, but he also connects the poem to postmodernism and to Western literary spaces that are not immediately accessible to him or the public in late communist Romania.His poem crisscrosses time and space, while his use of English rather than French is poetic rebellion in relation to the Romanian poetic tradition.As Codrescu writes in "Master Manole to Anna:" "I am the wall that will not stand unless I build my love within" (So Recently 38).The poem stands as a voice of poetic freedom because other spaces/identities have been built into it, enlarging the geography of the national poetic form.
For the transnational poets, traveling is a weaving in and out of other cultures that affects the poetic texture as they use different strategies when engaging with foreign words in their text.For example, in Immigrant Model, Moscaliuc uses italics to differentiate between English and Romanian words.The italics are not there to mainly highlight the foreign or to hint at the poet's linguistic background as in: "unthink dor" (4).Romanian words are italicized, but other words in English are also italicized.Sometimes italics mark other voices that intervene in the poetic discourse, increasing the heteroglossic element.Susan Bassnett argues along with Lawrence Venuti (46-7) that it is not untranslatable words that are kept in the original in the translation, but rather words that fight back against domestication and argue for the need of foreignization.Other times, Moscaliuc provides a translation for these words: "honey for the dying, miere pentru morți" (12), a phenomenon called by researchers "reiteration" (Gardner-Chrolos and Weston "Code-switching" 185) that helps readers navigate the multilingual text.In the poem "Rehearsal" (Immigrant 12) this reiteration also marks the transition between present and past.And at other times, she delays the translation."Rehearsal" starts with the Romanian phrase "Hai să repetăm", translated only in the beginning of the fifth stanza, "Let's rehearse dying" a mirroring in the present time of the past action, with an added clarification about what exactly is rehearsed.The reader is left guessing, experiencing the unfamiliar.
In her poem "Daniel's Bagel Place" (To Part 79), Serea italicizes the names of foods to bring out the idea of diversity: "challah," "burekas," "matbucha".While this might be read as Owen's mall "food court," where national specificity is lost to the homogenizing force of the West, Serea resists this interpretation.The italicizing itself indicates that the words and the foods they represent have not been domesticized.Other foods in the poem do not get the same treatment ("trays of meatballs," "pickled lox").The italicized words are like doors, they are contact points, an association suggested by the location of the poetic voice who observes the scene ("I sit by the door", herself an outsider) and who remarks on the comings and goings of customers.I stand with Lawrence Venuti when he argues that "the foreign can be a disruption of the current hierarchy of values in the receiving culture, an estrangement of them that seeks to establish a cultural difference by drawing on the marginal" (177).While writing in English might have a domesticating effect on the foreign, Venuti argues that it does not exclude resistance (177), here by interrupting the English text with foreign italicized words.This is the same effect that the Romanian poets of the '80s achieved when they interrupted the oppressive official Communist Romanian discourse with poems that turned to English and referred to the Western world and its culture.
In the poem "Spring on 7th Avenue," physical space, language, and memories become entangled.The space is marked as New York's 7th Avenue in the present; however, it is overlaid with the obsessive fear of being surveilled by the Securitate, the secret police during Communist Romania.Serea's transitive, direct, narrative style of poetry is inherited from the poetry of the '80s generation: "The clouds passed by the windows / and looked inside at us./ The blank walls reported our words./ The mailbox read our letters./ The gas stove spied on our ciorba /14 … The antenna ratted to Securitate / that we listened to Radio Free Europe" (69).The Securitate, the communist Secret Police, was the main means of controlling the population, through-among other methods-telephone tapping and a wide network of informers.Such informers could report anybody listening to programming on Radio Free Europe,15 especially to political refugees Monica Lovinescu and Virgil Ierunca.The two realities, the present American and the past Communist Romanian one, are deeply entangled in the émigré's biography and are a natural consequence for someone who lived during the years of terror of the '80s in Communist Romania and then emigrated to the United States.Similarly, in the opening of Norman Manea's autobiographical memoir The Hooligan's Return we can see the narrator walking the streets of New York in the present moment while images of his traumatic past haunt him.
In the penultimate stanza, the poem shifts to the past, to Romania: "But nothing was like our spring in Grozavesti," the university campus where most 14 Ciorbă, traditional Romanian sour soup.Serea removes the diacritic, a common choice when switching from English to Romanian on English ready word-processing systems.The inclusion of the word here also adds a comedic effect, highlighting the irrational fear.15 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty was a us funded broadcaster that hosted anti-communist content aimed at the Soviet Union and its satellites.Communist regimes strongly opposed the rfe, harassing and attacking its employees and jamming broadcasts.
of the student dorms are located, a space that becomes an integral part of the youth culture in the '80s in the capital city, Bucharest.Here, students develop their own alternate, Americanized reality that functions at the same time as a political declaration against the reality manipulated through the official propaganda, as Magda Răduță shows in her article included in this issue of the Journal of World Literature.The final stanza is a return to the present and to a personal and emotional New York, inscribed with memories of her Romanian past: "Spring comes now on 7th Avenue./ Rushing, it untangles memories / from Central Park's hair with the laughter of a vanished girl / quickly walking next to me" (69).
In a different way, Aura Maru unsettles the Romanian-language reader used to identifying nation and language.When she says "here" in Romanian, she might actually mean Moldova, as her language crosses borders breaking the legal borders of national identification.Her debut volume Du-te Free is a play upon words, combining the English "duty free" with the Romanian reflexive verb "a se duce" (to go) in the imperative mode, second person singular "du-te" ([you] go).A reader with both English and Romanian competence can read this in a number of ways: you are free to go, go free, or the tax-free spaces in airports where one can buy expensive brand products for less money than in regular shops.But there is another possible reading if one looks at Romanian as the meeting place of different dialects, including the Moldavian one.The region of Moldavia was historically split between the Romanian province between the Carpathian Mountains in the West and the Prut River in the East, and Bessarabia, a region that included today's Republic of Moldova, with the Prut River in the West and the Nistru River in the East.During the fifty-one years of Communist politics as part of the former Soviet Union, Bessarabia, now the Republic of Moldova, led a Russophile politics that aimed at showing that "Moldovan"-as opposed to the Moldavian dialect of Romanian-is a separate language.To this end, they enforced ideologically and also more recently through Vasile Stati's Dicționar moldovenesc-românesc (Moldovan-Romanian Dictionary, Chișinău, 2005) a more archaic version of the vocabulary, whereas grammar remained unchanged.Standard literary Romanian is based on the Wallachian dialect spoken in Southern Romania, and Moldavians from Romania are often the subject of jokes due to the dialect particularities of their spoken language, especially when they move to the capital city Bucharest that used to be the capital of Wallachia.All the more so are Moldovans from the Republic of Moldova due to its archaic vocabulary that is resonant of 18th and early 19th century Romanian, although through education and border crossing the two dialects are increasing in similarity.In the Moldavian dialect, "du-te" would be spoken as "du-ti," so "Du-te Free" could also be voiced mocking the pronunciation in the Moldavian dialect to point at the difficulty of adapting to the Western world and society.Maru's irony is double: it mocks the foreign from a marginal space exposed to the Western world that's a dream during the '80s in Communist Romania and even today continues to be in the Republic of Moldova, while she interprets these in-between spaces with no taxation for the purchased goods as "free spaces," spaces where no one owes any tax to anyone.
Often, Maru's poems deal with rethinking identity when faced with border crossing.Who does one become when one crosses a border, what are the proper words to use?In the poem "oil, wine" she writes: "the Americans get you, they hug you.hi-how-are-you-good-how-are-you.16 they know everything is sinuous.they all come from somewhere, and this somewhere leaves traces.you are this handful of traces.if you cut using a blade, a rivulet of stereotypes flow through, case by case, oil, coffee, wine" (84-5).As Steven Kellman wrote, "For those who do succeed at the translingual enterprise, the creation of a new voice means the invention of a new self" (16).Andrei Guruianu's poetry uses Romanian less openly, yet it is often describing or referencing Romanian reality, imbuing English with foreign ideas, emotions, and spaces, in the spirit of literature "born translated".In the poem "Show of Force" (Anamnesis 4) he describes the selective application of the law on the post-1989 streets of Bucharest against street vendors while the high city officials are becoming richer and fatter through their illegal activities.The poem asks the reader to empathize with the street vendors, the "little guys," by contrasting the images of fresh colorful fruit with those of the puppet-like police: "They make themselves big in their tall leather boots, / navy uniforms that hang on skinny arms and legs / like legs on a scarecrow some farmer has planted out of habit./ They take the crates of peaches, apples, cherries./ They box up the cucumbers, the radishes, the onions" (Anamnesis 4).His poems continue to address the events of 1989, including the dissolution that followed the fall of communism.The title of the volume, anamnesis, is symbolically apt for remembering a previous existence, as his life in Romania is both "another life" but also, given his age when he left, a "remembered life;" not one directly experienced, but often mediated through the memory of others.We might even say, a translated life as the past is rendered in a different language.
of Bucharest at midnight," "This is the place where we always talk of returning."A shift occurs a couple of lines down: "This is the place where my parents dream / of walking again."This makes the reader doubt the timeline and the speaking voice.The shift is further emphasized by the line: "My parents want to go back there."The contrast between the earlier "this" with the "there" is a change in perspective."This" and "there" refer to the same place, Romania; however, the words mark the difference between homeland and hostland, belonging and not belonging.Guruianu shows that this place his parents long for is what Salman Rushdie called an "imaginary homeland."The Bucharest he sees is different from the one his parents left, and "there's nothing left for them here, there never has been" (Guruianu "My Parents" 209).His condition is different, as the immigrant identity is sometimes forced on him.Nostalgia, or longing for the lost homeland, the emotion usually experienced by immigrants, is not a feeling he shares with his parents: "But on days like these I like to keep my mouth shut, hoping people won't notice that I like it here" ("A Terrible Place" 226).Salman Rushdie too examines the difference between the first-generation immigrants and the second-generation ones in his short story "The Courter" from the collection East, West.The first-person narrator is a young man who feels at home in England, whereas his former nanny who followed his family to the new country, Certainly-Mary, ends up by returning to her homeland India as she felt her death was near.As it turns out, she was only homesick, so the minute she returned to India she was well again.The second-generation immigrant feels the pull of both locations but seeks a compromise.

Conclusion
The translingual poets Mihaela Moscaliuc, Andrei Guruianu, Claudia Serea, and Aura Maru share an interest in a recurrent space in their poetry: New York.This is the city where they arrived soon after they left Romania as well as the city representing the new culture they inhabit.New York becomes more than a city; it stands for many of the changes the poets are experiencing creatively and personally.In Serea's volume Nothing Important Happened Today, the New York moment comes up in Part iii entitled with admiration and awe "The Greatest City on Earth" (Nothing 48).After a first part evoking the towering reflecting windows of the busy city that engulf the identity of the visitor, Serea offers her re-reading, in a new cultural and geographical context, of the legend about the master mason Manole and his wife Ana, connecting her poetry to that of the long line of Romanian and Romanian-American poets referencing the legend and its characters.She does not introduce the names in the original story, which for her American audience would immediately connect the story to a specific tradition, but the tale is easy to recognize for a reader of Romanian literature and it evokes a feeling similar to that of Codrescu: "And everything we build / is ruined again at night … until we build our love inside the walls, / our most precious love, / buried alive / inside these walls" (Nothing 50).However, here, as we find out in the next sequence, the fresh blood required for the city to grow and not crumble is that of immigrants.She offers herself as a willing sacrifice: "I won't let that happen to you, / beautiful, carnivorous city./ … Here I come, sweet New York./ Here's fresh marrow to suck" (52).For the city to thrive it needs new blood, new ideas.The masons, old and new, are invested as well, as they have to sacrifice, suffer, and love in order to survive in the new city.Serea thus points to the idea that the connections between place and immigrants is organic, it cannot be easily made or broken; these connections are essential to the survival of the city as one of its sources for renewal.We find a similar image of a carnivorous city in Mircea Cărtărescu's pre-1989 poetry.In his poem "a wild thing," also analyzed by Magda Răduță in this special issue, Cărtărescu writes: "you animal, beyond reach, in your blue jeans & / silk panties.the raw meat you feed on / growling like a cat.Oh god, / what a woman!".Here, the city, personified as a seductive but vulgar female, obsessed with material possessions sourced in the West, is worth much more than the poet's entire work.This city is needed, however, a source of inspiration.As it is in his 1994 poem "I [heart] ny" where he brings back the image of (an almost identical) woman as city: "(god, what butt she had: / like steel springs, bulldozers, Derrida …)" (Dragostea 70).Cărtarescu blends signs and objects of the West, and images of undisciplined bodies in order to break the dreary grey monotony of the communist city.Both the '80s poets and the translingual poets have a symbiotic relationship to the cities they inhabit, drawing energy from each other.
The new voices of translingual poetry can give a new life to one of the world's most impressive metropolises and cultural centers where artists and writers meet from all over the world, as they used to in the interwar period to meet in Paris.If poets of the '80s generation in communist Romania could only dream of America through its cultural or consumer products, translingual post-communist poets actually walk the streets of New York.But they carry with them the legacy of the young Romanian poets of the '80s who first looked West and opened the path for a translingual literature in a world with fewer borders.
reference that exists in other Balkan cultures as well, but also in the work of the '80s generation poet Mircea Cărtărescu and in the poetry of another American-Romanian writer, AndreiCodrescu.11InCărtărescu's 1989epic Levantul (The Levant), a masterpiece of Romanian poetry, the character Manoil/Emanuel ("God is with us") /Manoli/Manole is an allusion to Meșterul (Master) Manole as the absolute figure of the creator.He is the hero of the epic and the authorial mask of the poet himself.As Manoil leaves for Greece to get help and save his Romanian country he meets the Greek Iaurta Chiorul, a pirate whose son turns out to have been a student at Cambridge with Manoil himself.The authorial mask, Manoil, is trained in English and the text gives us examples of this early translingualism.12When Iaurta meets Manoil, the following dialogue occurs (I italicized the words in English in the original, even the mispronounced ones): the Romanian lyrical ballad Meșterul Manole (Manole the Mason), everything that Manole, the master mason, and his team build during the day-a beautiful new Orthodox major cultural "Are you ingles [English]?"screamed Iaurta when he noticed Manoil […] "I'm not ingles, Rumanian they call me, and Rumanian I'll die.""But you speak perfectly English," says the Greek amazed."Well, I studied once at Cambridge," replied the young man.