THE OSCHOLARS: Special Teleny issue

––––––

Going Wilde In Romania: On Translating Teleny Or The Reverse Of The Medal Into Romanian

Chris Tanasescu

In the autumn of 2000 a lady publisher presented me with a book authored by an ‘Anonymous’ writer, which had come out from Wordsworth in 1995, in the Classic Erotica series. The blurb on the back cover admitted to the long time suspicions regarding Oscar Wilde’s having written this book at least partly as well as to some salient similarities between its style and thematic structure and the ones of the famously classical Picture of Dorian Gray. As a fresh MA in English and a somewhat non-conformist emerging poet and poetry performer I was credited with both the competence and audacity to translate that ‘brazen’ book into Romanian.

.

But I practically knew almost nothing at the time about Wilde’s homoeroticism and even less about his erotic literature. The academic curriculum lay its main stress on his plays and especially, of course, on the ‘one and only’ ‘Importance of Being Earnest,’ and while we were (probably) all aware of the homosexual elements in the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the serious approaches to the book resorted prevailingly to its cultural, aesthetic, mythological and literary history related values. Although multicultural, Feminist, and Gay & Lesbian Studies had already been in full swing in our English section of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Faculty of the University of Bucharest since the mid 1990s – especially in the American Studies Department where I also have taught poetry and creative writing since the year 2000 – their relevance to undergraduate students specifically was still quite limited, while the graduate ones were not so eager yet to tackle classical subjects in light of those new approaches. The freshly formed Irish Studies Department chaired by the erudite and mettlesome Ioana Zirra was providing mainly electives for undergraduates and main courses only in the master’s programs, but Dr. Zirra herself was (as she still is) always available for any kind of Irish culture related queries and willing to help anyone out with their individual research projects in her field of study. It was she who enthusiastically welcomed my translating endeavors related to Teleny and who even participated in the book launch where she gave an inspiring presentation speech.

.

So I started to work on it. From the very first pages I found myself plunging into a fluid speech flooding both my auditory sensitivity and my cultural imagination. A language that was at the same time modern and a bit elegantly obsolete, palpable and sensuous but also bookish, cosmopolitan and high accented was alluring me into the most compelling eroticism of all – that of translating. It was the language of a great poet and thus a marriage of music and numbers, of volatile mellifluousness and rhythmically framing measures. And as in any other great modern poet, the language was speaking of itself: ‘A nervous organization – having once been impressed by the charm of tsardas – ever thrills in response to those magic numbers.’ (Wilde 9) Of itself, but also of me, since what was an instance of late Victorian exoticism in those opening pages, was to me just Eastern European cultural koine – ‘… the latent spell that pervades every song of Tsigane’ (idem).

.

But while the book talked to me in so many familiar and exciting ways it also put me to a dire trial as the prodigal narrator started not later than the third page of the book to pour his endless sequences of sometimes extremely long and convoluted, swerving, alembicated and intrinsically euphonical sentences. Such a masterly river-like sentence that burns the translator to the stake of impossible rendition is the enthralling eight-line one starting with ‘Those strains usually begin with a soft and low andante, something like the plaintive wail of forlorn hope’ and ends close to the bottom of the page with ‘a paroxysm of mysterious passion, now melting into a mournful dirge, then bursting out into the brazen blast of a fiery and warlike anthem.’ (idem). It is the description of a music by its enactment in words (‘as a tune into a tune’ reads Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s perfectly chosen quote), and it is telling a story while also being actively (and erotically) involved in it, hence it is both the translation of an experience into words and the generating of an (ideally the same) experience through words. Translation and (re)generation were therefore already part of the original, which made me and my attempts also part of the text. ‘All’ I had to do was to be genuinely and effectively lithe in language and ‘passively’ receptive to the book’s flow and live crystallization within my mother tongue. Which was far from a quiet marriage, but rather a torturous (and yet insatiable) adulterous affair between heaven and hell.

.

For a translator, Wilde’s language is both pleasurable and merciless, just as the lovemaking of the two protagonists. Its richness and diversity had to be answered with comparable equivalents in my language, and in this respect I can say that Romanian did pretty well. The combination of rough Anglo-Saxon sounds with longer and gentler Latin-origin ones which is typical of English and which is further pushed in the novel by the author’s naturalization of even more Latinate words and phrases he borrows from French and Italian within shorter Germanic vocable frames could be mirrored by a somehow asymmetrically equivalent structure of Romanian – a main Latin base (thus sonorant and rich in vowels) and a rough sound dowry of ancient autochthonous words (of Dacian / Thracian origin) enriched by other ‘barbaric’ inflections coming mainly from Slavic and Turkish influences. Besides, Wilde’s highfalutin accommodation (that ironically enough sometimes hide the most obscene possible inserts) of classy French and Italian words, phrases, and quotes could be fittingly paralleled by the important amount of such borrowings that also started to occur in Romanian since the early 19th century and of which the more recent ones still have a pretentious ring to them.

.

So much for the easy ride part, though. Then comes the part with the words and phrases Wilde loves to use recurrently and develop on gradually, by placing them in newer and newer contexts, one of his ways to prove that although he is so permanently excited and thrilled by what he relates he is at the same time also in control of everything going on in the recounting. Speaking of ‘thrill’ for a very good instance, it appears in places in which it proves its actual diversity and scope of functions – such as where it expresses the emotions felt by the narrator while listening to Teleny play the piano, while meeting him in the foyer or on the bridge right when on the verge of committing suicide, but also in a context like the following one: ‘a convulsion which annihilated both mind and matter, a quivering delight which everyone has felt, to a greater or less degree – often a thrill almost too intense to be pleasurable.’ (88) It is an explicit sex scene and the fragment above describes the feelings and sensations of both the narrator and his lover, Teleny, as they experience orgasm. ‘Thrill’ is thus here somewhere at the crossroads of the mental and the physical, and the end of the sentence lays a definite emphasis on the latter. There is no Romanian univocal mot à mot equivalent to ‘thrill’ in such a context. The word is perfectly fit there and irreplaceable in English as well, as it covers both the meanings needed and it also brings a unique etymological (let alone euphonical) allusiveness. The word comes from the Middle English thrillen, to penetrate, which in turn comes through metathesis from thirlen (whence the dialectal thirl, to pierce), from the Old English thyrlian, derivative of thyrel, hole. The most satisfactory Romanian word (or better, the least infelicitous one) I could come up with was fior. It translates into English as shudder, or shiver, and it also has a figurative psychological acceptance – an unresting, fervid or, quite on the contrary, freezing awe. Its etymology is Latin, febris, fever, and thus although I missed out on the pierce / hole paradigm under the ‘thrill’ of the original, I managed to integrate with two other word families in the English text that the Romanian language could not cover exhaustively. One was the ‘quiver, shiver, shudder, quake, tremble, shake’ series that keeps popping up throughout the book and reaches its orgasmic flourishing and delirious apex in the 6th chapter (with its total fulfillment of desire), a family of words with relative paucity in Romanian in comparison with English. And the second was the ‘fever, fervid, frantic’ series also recurrent in describing love feelings, erotic moods, and sexual arousal at various moments in the novel.

.

Since I was working on the Wordsworth edition and John McRae’s 1999 foreworded and annotated one from Gay Men’s Press was not available in Romania, I had to do the annotating myself. Although a supplementary effort, it was a great opportunity for me to read at least three other parallel ‘stories’ that run in the subtext of the book, at their own pace, on or offbeat with the main one, growing louder or lower, intersecting each other or intertwining in turns with the mainstream of the novel. Their two main advantages are, first, bestowing a symphonic complexity upon the whole work and, second, making up for the stylistic inconsistencies that sometimes blur the course of the book. They are mainly the mythological, the theological and alchemical, and the literary / poetical allusion and quote layers. They are of course not the topic of an article focusing on translation issues, but I will note just a couple of details that spoke to the translator in a peculiar and sometimes even personal way. The alchemical drama reaches its apex in the 6th chapter where we come across a number of metaphors that equate the genitalia with the crucible (or, periphrastically, the thermometer) and the semen with the epitome agent of the alchemical process – quicksilver. The plot itself follows the rhythm of alchemical splitting and recoalescing (Paracelsus’ solve et coagula), as the protagonists get together and break up successively, at moments that mark certain evolutions in both characters. But to my eyes, as a Christian of the Eastern Church, certain details meant probably more than to other readers. The small secret chamber Teleny ushers Camille into (in the same 6th chapter) has a single piece of furniture, a couch, on which stood ‘an old silver lamp – evidently from some Byzantine church or some Eastern synagogue – [and which] shed a pale glimmering light […]’ (90) (emph. mine). It is not, I think, for no reason that the fulfillment of desire coincides to entering an erotic sancta sanctorum with its lamp shedding the mystical light of the world. In Christian Orthodox theology, that divine light of light makes eros and agapé coincide (cf. Staniloae, 190-3). That chamber is the space where the two protagonists converse and where they get involved in a twofold dialog – wordy and bodily. The whole book is actually devised as a dialog, which not only speaks of a whole classical tradition (starting as far back as the Platonic writings) but also prefigures the total intimacy of that small secret chamber and its mystical connotations, and thus illustrates a revelatory definition of the church itself – ‘the eternal dialog between God and the believers.’ (Ibidem 38)

.

Publishing and distributing the book was not as easy as it seemed in the beginning. The first publisher gave it up, changing her career, and becoming one of the most well renowned radio cultural journalists in Romania and the awarded book-reviews-Senior-Editor of TimeOut Bucharest – Ema Stere. Another publisher took over, Mari Oruz, a remarkably skilled and hard-working German-language literatures translator. She published the book in a 3000 copy print-run and the novel started to sell pretty well, although the distribution was so ineffective.

.

But alas, there was only one review, although I made sure that all the main literary reviews received the book. And even that single review was a short, superficial and once in a while even snappish one, suggesting that we should have better started with Apollinaire’s erotic writings but not explaining why or what was the problem with Teleny. Although the review proved utter incompetence in Wilde’s works and a very negligent reading of the novel, being signed by one of our established fiction writers, Stefan Agopian, it managed to attract attention to the book and the sales went up a bit. My fellow-poets who read it were quite impressed by the book and by the language of the translation, some even said they really enjoyed it, but then none of them wrote about it.

.

I would like to speculate here just a bit on why our literati abstained from reviewing the translation. Oscar Wilde is quite a popular author in Romania. The first fragments translated from his works and the first stagings of his plays date back from the beginning of the 20th century. The first respectable editions though started to come out in the 1960s and they went on until the mid 1970s and they covered his plays, The Portrait … and a few other fiction writings, some of his essays and of his fairy tales, as well as The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and they were all accompanied by consistent introductions and studies. In all those competent commentaries our critics showed significant discernment and also courage in tackling what they perceived as prejudices in the critical assessments of Wilde. But they never approached Wilde’s homoeroticism as such, all they did was just drop a few carefully veiled allusions to such aspects, but also as part of a specialized aesthetic discussion. To give just two examples, Mihai Miroiu in his prefatory study to a collection of essays titled Intenţiuni (Intentions) (1972), ‘Oscar Wilde the essayist’, argues that our author was an advocate of the autonomy of the aesthetic who ‘made a mistake’ (Miroiu 24) where he saw a total disruption between art and ethics, and that Wilde’s refinement prevented him from incorporating into the ‘worship of the beautiful’ the one of ‘moral beauty’ (28). To this author, The Picture of Dorian Gray is of course, Wilde’s only novel, although a paperback edition of Teleny had come out from Icon Books in 1966. Dan Grigorescu in his preface to an 1967 collection of Wildean plays including translations of ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, ‘A Woman of No Importance’, ‘An Ideal Husband’, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, and ‘Salomé’, argues against the preconceptions stating that the plays did not mirror Wilde’s aesthetic ideas to the extent to which the novel did. He reads those works in which there is a ‘classical simplicity’ about the characters’ line (Grigorescu, p. XVI), as an illustration of the ‘Parnassian idea of art’s impersonality’ (XVII). Without letting slip anything about Wilde’s eroticism, he writes that ‘he [the author] does not choose sin because it is beautiful, but because he believes that it is there where he can find something different from the drabness of the quotidian’ (XXI).

.

After the revolution of 1989, the book market experienced a remarkable resurrection of the translations from Oscar Wilde’s works. A new edition of The Picture… came out, more fiction, bulky editions of his essays (new versions of the already translated ones and an impressive number of new ones) and even letters were published in the 1990s and the early 2000s rhythmically and professionally. But the prefaces, the critical studies, the commentaries still avoided the neuralgic issue of Wilde’s and, more significantly, some of his characters’ sexual orientation. The only pale exception was represented by Mircea Mihăieş, a literary critic, essayist and cultural civil-servant, who mentioned in his prefatory study to a 2001 collection of essays, Decăderea minciunii (The Decay of Lying) Wilde’s homoeroticism and his relationship to Alfred Douglas, but does not follow the issue into his literary works and says nothing about Teleny. Paradoxically, it is the moral scruples that prevented our literature from assimilating an aesthetically important part of Wilde’s works, while pretending not to approach gender-related issue but focus on the works as such.

.

It is probably this same pudency that brought a wilde ending to the adventure of Teleny in Romania. After we managed to sell a few hundreds of copies, a third lady became part of this ruggedly eventful affair. I realized that reality was mimicking the novel, where there are also three major female characters – the duchess, the maid, and Camille’s mother. But I wasn’t smart enough to realize that just as the mother brought the heart-piercing and anticlimactic finale in the book, this third lady would act as a heartbreaker for my literary ambitions related to that Romanian version of Teleny. The lady bought all the remaining print-run and promised to distribute it more efficiently. The publisher was happy to sell, but the fact is that to this day the books are still kept under lock in a store-house, because the buyer realized after reading it that it represented a terrible menace to our mores and to our young people’s sanity. Sometimes, late at night, I can hear Teleny intoning in that utter seclusion of his a new Ballad of No Reading Gaol.

Works Cited

Anonim, trans. Chris Tanasescu. Teleny sau reversul medaliei. Bucureşti: Lolita, 2001.

Grigorescu, Dan. ‘Prefaţă’ in Oscar Wilde, Teatru, trans. Andrei Bantaş et al. Bucureşti: Editura pentru Literatură Universală, 1967.

Mihăieş, Mircea. ‘Un celt la porţile estetismului’, preface to Oscar Wilde, Decăderea miciunii. Eseuri, trans. Magda Teodorescu, Iaşi: Polirom, 2001.

Miroiu, Mihai. ‘Oscar Wilde, eseistul,’ preface to Oscar Wilde, Intenţiuni, trans. Mihai Rădulescu, Bucureşti: Univers, 1972.

Stăniloae, Dumitru. Teologia dogmatică ortodoxă. Vol. 1. Bucureşti: Editura Institutului Biblic şi de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1996.

Anonymous. Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal. London: Wordsworth, 1995.

Return to the Table of Contents | Return to hub page  | Return to THE OSCHOLARS home page