| Title: | Visages du français dans une épopée roumaine moderne : Mircea Cărtărescu, Levantul |
| Author: | Valeria Maria Pioraș |
| Publication: | Annales Universitatis Apulensis. Series Philologica, 11 (3), p. 74-82 |
| p-ISSN: | 1582-5523 |
| Publisher: | Universitatea „1 Decembrie 1918” |
| Place: | Alba Iulia |
| Year: | 2010 |
| Abstract: | Under the title Levantul, Mircea Cărtărescu offers a book and an unusual topic: his epic poem recalls the major episodes in the history of Romanian literature. In this retrospective, our comments relate to the meeting of the Romanian elite of the 19th century with the West, particularly with France, with its culture and civilization, the adoption of French as a lingua franca in aristocratic circles at the expense of Greek, to the linguistic and literary models provided through this language to our island of latinity located at the gates of the Levant. Present in very large numbers, the French authentic terms allow multiple approaches. According to the fields, they evoke the literature (authors, titles, characters: Voltaire, Monte Cristo), the visual arts (Rodin), the music. In addition there are quotations (“The long sobs of the violins ...”) and refrains (“zon, zon, zon, great sound / great sound of the gun”) drawn from the most varied registers, included in their original form. In the graph one notices the French terms reproduced with identical (“Victor Hugo, hélas!”), faithful transcriptions of the oral forms (“altfel nu ştiu de ce viv”) or approximate ones (Carmaniola), adapted to the articulatory base of Romanian. On the other hand, the text abounds in terms evocative of French, beginning with the archaic ethnonyms, attached to France (“cavalerul frânc Languedoc”); the neologisms do not miss, quoted such as the 19th century had launched them (“fenomenuri subatomic”) and their copies (“sanchiloţii”; “cap d’operă”). The work as a whole also lends itself to an intertextual reading, with many allusions, quotations, leitmotifs, symbols, forms and expressions referring to the literary space, to the French history and culture: although in the 18th and 19th centuries the epic was, in France, a literary species belonging to the past, we see it revived in the writings of Romanian writers. Cultivating the full verse and the morphology of the traditional epic poem, Mircea Cărtărescu involves the reader in the Wallachian atmosphere from about two hundred years ago, when the Levantine age was touching at its end under the blows of the political and social events produced in France. In the tumult of modern times when, in our corner of Europe, everything is to be reformed and built, the West is heard through the voice of this country: the motto of the new social order, namely freedom (“libertaua”), equality (“egalitaua”), universal suffrage (“sufragiul universal”), the Phrygian cap (“boneta frigiană”) which is its symbol, as well as the rise of the working class (“uvrerul”), but also the positive effects of the rise of science, technology and arts of this time, everything is expressed in terms inspired by France and French. Far from the sobriety of the traditional epic, this novel in verse relates in a comic manner the serious journey of Romanian literature and its efforts to cultivate our language. |
| Key words: | Romanian literature; French influence; Levantine age; epic poem |
| Language: | French |
| Links: |  html |
Citations to this publication: 1
| 1 | Florin Sterian | Bibliografia românească de lingvistică (BRL, 53, 2010). Lucrări de lingvistică apărute în țara noastră în cursul anului 2010 | LR, LX (3), 307-453 | 2011 | pdf html |
References in this publication: 0
The citations/references list is based on indexed publications only, and may therefore be incomplete.
For any and all inquiries related to the database, please contact us at [Please enable javascript to view.].
