October 28th, 2006

What I do: I arrived under the impression that I would be working with a group of Romanian translators who had already been translating a text into English. That turned out to not be the case. I came to find out, after a few days and countless conversations, that I was here, in Romania, to work with a group of translators from around the world to embark upon something like a "crash course" in Romanian translations and translation theory. This, of course, surprised me, but now after a few weeks here in Romania, living in a palace I've found that the grant is a good match.

Every day for two or three hours I meet with a group of translators and talk about Romanian literature. Among the group is a gang of three Czechs, one other American, an Italian, a Portugese, a Croat, and a very tall guy from Poland. Besides Schimo (the guy from Poland) I'm the only guy here; which is about par for the course in the world of language acquisition. They have all, at some level, studied Romanian literature and translation theory formally. It's an odd thing, coming from Peace Corps where our language skills concentrated not necessarily fluency and attaining an expansive vocabulary, to now sitting every day for three hours taking in lectures on the complexity of translating Romanian expressions, or discussing the impact of post modern techinques on Romanian literature. The class is taught by Florin Bican, a Romanian professor who has made a career out of teaching translation theory and translation theory both in Romania and abroad (in Germany and the UK) he's a wonderful, kind man that has really helped me through this time here.

Every week there are at least three or four things in town that we're invited to: plays, operas, readings, round table discussions and key note addresses for conferences. We're reguallary invited to appear on the radio (I've only been on once) and there's a rumor going around that we're all supposed to be interviewed on TV soon. We recently had the author Filip Florian stop by and discuss his novel "Degete Mici" which has been something of a Romanian literary smash. On top of all this I'm team teaching a class in English, with the other American, on English translations.

After my first week here we all climbed into a mini-bus and took off for the Danube river. In a villa on the corner of Romania where the Danube meets Serbia and Bulgaria, we stayed with Mircea Dinescu and his wife. Mircea Dinescu is a poet, wine maker, political voice for countless of silent Romanians, business man and essayist. He's good people. We spent the weekend talking to him about the Securitate papers that he's been an advocate for releasing to the public so they know if their current public officals were collaborators during communism (this could be an entire post but I'll avoid it for now), litearture, the difficulty of translating poetry, the paths that brought us all together, and Romania's entrance into the EU. It was a great weekend, looking out across the Danube and seeing Bulgaria and Serbia on the other side of the river, are images that are permanently etched into my mind.

It has all been a bit of a shock. Somehow with all of this going on I've been plowing into my thesis and working with my novel. I've made some good friends in the group, which I think I was intially resistant to considering how many different groups and teams I've been part of in the past 10 years. Whatever the case may be, whatever preconcieved notions I had of what I'd been doing here, fate brought me here to teach me something.