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Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Schimbarea La Fata A Romaniei




















Someone appears to have put the full text of Cioran's The Transformation of Romania online. You can read it here, assuming you're on nodding terms with Romanian. It's the 1990 edition though, which I believe is heavily bowdlerized. Inject yourself with some liquid racism before you read it to make up for all the censored rants.

I'm told Romanian contains more Latin-derived words than Italian. It also has a pleasant panoply of little curlicue diacritics and a definite article that consists of sticking the suffix -ul onto nouns. Try reading the following out loud to any passing Eastern Europeans (maybe not a Hungarian) who look like they're in the mood for revolution:

România nu‑si va rata momentul sãu revolutionar. Dar revolutia pe care va face‑o, de nu va întrece limitele imanente ale mediocritãtii noastre autohtone, dacã nu va da tãrii proportii peste conditiile ei firesti, nivelul nostru istoric nu va cunoaste un salt, si ca atare revolutia noastrã n‑a fãcut decît sã mãreascã superfluul nostru în lume.

{Quotation ends}

Eastern Europeans in the mood for a revolution remind me of that joke about the Budapest string quartet, who were Russian by the way, not Magyar. One Russian is a nihilist, two is a chess game, three is a revolution, and four is the Budapest string quartet.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

No non-being. No absolute impossibility.
No alternative. No imperative. No irreparable.
Ease in facing life. No fear of death.

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Nichifor Crainic
Legiuea Archanghelul Mihail/Garda de Fier