Women

Mihail Sebastian

Description

The frustrated wife of a French-Tunisian plantation owner, a mysterious older woman, a world weary tomboy, an unhappy mistress, a Parisian factory worker destined for tragedy, an acrobat turned cabaret sensation - these are the women whose lives are linked by their relationship with one man - Stefan Valeriu. Divided into four separate stories connected by one man, Women takes us from Stefan's amorous entanglements at an Alpine lake resort, to his life in Bucharest and Paris, as each of the women in his life opens up new worlds for him. Women is a hymn to love in all its forms, romantic or platonic, sometimes reckless, often glorious and always, ultimately, ephemeral. Reviews:"He wonderfully captures the atmosphere of prewar Romania in all its complexity, all the beauty and the horror I love Sebastian for his lightness, for his wit" -- John Banville,BBC4'It's an edgy account of sexuality, desire, and the strictures of contemporary relationships... a compelling portrait of desire in its many convoluted manifestations.' -- Kirkus Reviews,Kirkus Reviews'..these concise stories... showcase Sebastian's brilliant eye for emotional detail.' --Publishers' Weekly'His prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation.' -- Arthur Miller"Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian's magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years." -- Phillipe Sands,The Guardian

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed By PublishDrive
• Date de parution: 26 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912430321
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

MIHAIL SEBASTIAN
Mihail Sebastian was the pen-name of the Romanian writer Iosif Hechter. Born in the Danube port of Brăila, he died in a road accident in 1945. During the period between the wars he was well-known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays. His novel For Two Thousand Years is a Penguin Modern Classic.
GABI REIGH
Gabi Reigh’s translations and fiction have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation World Literature Today and The Fortnightly Review. She has won the Stephen Spender prize for poetry in translation and was shortlisted for the Tom-Gallon Society of Authors short story award. She was also awarded a PEN Translates Award for translation of Sebastian’s The Town with Acacia Trees. She is currently engaged in a translation project called Interbellum Series, focusing on works from the Romanian interwar period, including the poetry of Lucian Blaga and the novels of Mihail Sebastian. The next two titles in Gabi’s Interbellum Series project will be A Star without a Name by Mihail Sebastian and Ciuleandra by Liviu Rebreanu.
First published in the UK in 2020 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd. 67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham, TW1 4HX www.aurorametro.com [e-mail] t: @aurorametro F: facebook.com/AuroraMetroBooks
Women by Mihail Sebastian, English translation copyright © 2020 Gabi Reigh
Introduction copyright © 2020 Gabi Reigh
Afterword copyright © 2019 Radu Ioanid
Cover image from photograph courtesy: © Costica Ascinte 1941
Cover design: copyright © 2020 Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.
Editors: Cheryl Robson Christian Muller
Aurora Metro Books would like to thank Marina Tuffier, Didem Uzum, Ferroccio Viridiani, Sumedha Mane
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Printed by 4 edge printers, Essex, UK
ISBNs: 978-1-912430-31-4 (print) 978-1-912430-32-1 (ebook)

Introduction
Gabi Reigh
Iosif Mendel Hechter was born in 1907 to a Jewish family in the port of Brăila, eastern Romania. After leaving his provincial hometown for Bucharest, where he began a law degree in 1927, he changed his name to Mihail Sebastian and began building a reputation as a journalist, essayist, novelist and playwright. From his first year at university, Sebastian caught the attention of Nae Ionescu, a professor of philosophy and journalist who became his mentor. With Ionescu’s encouragement, Sebastian soon became a regular contributor to the newspaper Cuvântul ( The Word ).
From 1930 to 1931, Sebastian spent a year in Paris, where he undertook doctoral studies. During his time there, Sebastian travelled widely through Europe and recorded his impressions of Geneva and Vienna, as well as the French capital, in articles he regularly sent to Cuvântul. In one of these articles, he remarks on the idealized image of Paris engraved in the imagination of his audience: “Haven’t we all lived with the legend of Paris, the hub of the universe? Haven’t we been told in schools, haven’t we read in books, haven’t we been reminded by magazines that it is France that does and undoes the destiny of Europe? Isn’t it true that for us, to a great extent, to be French is to be European?”
According to Diana Georgescu, 1 the years Sebastian spent in France had a formative effect on him, shaping his identity as a writer: “Travel functioned as a device that shuffled the various dimensions of his identity, eliciting identifications as both Romanian and Jewish in travel accounts that are imbued with the awareness of coming to an emblematic European metropolis from the provincial margins of Europe.”
Soon after returning from Paris, Sebastian published his first two fictional works, Fragments from a Found Notebook (1932) and Women (1933), both of which feature French settings and touch on his life abroad. But these do not present Paris as seen through the rose-tinted glasses of the awestruck tourist, but portray its reality, as experienced by him during his stay there. In Women , Ştefan Valeriu, fallen on hard times, moves to an impoverished district of Paris, renting an apartment in a “black, cadaverous row of houses, where white paint had peeled away like leprous skin, with an enormous courtyard full of weeds and too many children”. Far from being the “hub of the universe”, “his” Paris is inhabited by “quasi-painters, quasi-poets, quasi-critics”, “dubious people, united in their poverty”.
The action of Women moves between France and Romania, its four separate stories bringing snapshots from Ştefan Valeriu’s life, told through different voices. The first (‘Renée, Marthe, Odette’) and the last (‘Arabela’) deal with his romantic relationships. In ‘Émilie’ he is a detached observer, watching the relationship between an old school friend and a French girl unfold, while in ‘Maria’ he is entirely absent, placed in the same position as the reader as the invisible “listener” to a woman’s story.
This structure allows Sebastian to shift the focus away from his principal male character at certain points and to create a sense of empathy with the women he encounters. ‘Maria’ is written as a letter to Ştefan from the woman he loves, and the epistolary form, reminiscent of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman , gives us her own account of her humiliations and disappointments during her relationship with a younger man. In ‘Émilie’, Ştefan atones for his guilt for his involvement in a Parisian factory worker’s tragedy by attempting to understand her and tell her story: “I apologize to the reader for these crude details, but, to be frank, I care little about the reader and very much about Émilie Vignon. I want to tell the story of her life and to understand something about the soul of this girl whom I have previously walked past without noticing.”
Even though the stories are tied together by the presence of one man, the novel is just as concerned with the thoughts and feelings of the women in his life. The same desire to understand the female experience is conveyed in his later novel, The Town with Acacia Trees (1935), where the focalization of the narrative once again flits between his heroine Adriana, and her lover Gelu, thus offering us two perspectives on a relationship.
The experimental structure of Sebastian’s novels, moving between different narrators and perspectives, demonstrates the influence of Modernism on his work, but this same openness to alternative points of view was also characteristic of his own life. At the time when he was writing Women , he was a member of the Romanian literary group Criterion that included the philosophers Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran and the playwright Eugène Ionesco, but by the mid-1930s many of its members had become seduced by the Iron Guard’s nationalistic rhetoric and Sebastian was ostracized for being a Jew. In response to this change in atmosphere in Romanian public life, Sebastian wrote the novel For Two Thousand Years in 1934, depicting his challenges surviving in this new political climate. He asked his old friend and mentor Nae Ionescu to write a preface to the work. Ionescu agreed yet, shockingly, wrote a preface laden with anti-Semitic rhetoric, attacking the very premise of the book. Surprisingly, Sebastian decided to include the preface, deeming this openness to the other’s perspective as “the only intelligent revenge”. 2
Sebastian’s decision to publish his book with this preface sealed his fate as a persona non grata, exposing him to criticism from both camps: while his novel made him a target for fervent nationalists, who saw it as an “insult to national security and patriotic feelings” 3 , his decision to include the controversial preface made others revile him for being “Ionescu’s lap dog”. After years of success, Sebastian found himself an outsider. Arguably, Women is also a novel about outsiders. In ‘Renée, Marthe, Odette’, Ştefan is a Romanian tourist at an Alpine resort, “self-conscious about his accent”, and his lover, Renée, is a French-Tunisian yearning for the glamour of Paris. The eponymous heroine of the last story, Arabela, is a woman of “easy virtue” with a “dubious childhood”, while Maria, afraid of social disgrace, hides her sexual relationship with Andrei. But it is in ‘Émilie’ that we find the greatest misfits of all, Irimia C. Irimia, an “ungainly giant”, and his shy, awkward companion, a girl ridiculed by all her friends.
It is possible to see certain echoes of Sebastian’s own experiences in Paris in his characterization of Irimia C. Irimia’s struggle to adapt to life abroad. The Romanian law student comes to Paris to perfect his French, but he is a slow learner and finds himself unable to connect with the natives. Cristina A. Bejan writes that “while studying law in France, Sebastian initially struggled with bouts of melancholia and developing his confidence using the French language”. 4 In a letter to his friend Camil Petrescu, another writer, he expresses these feelings of alienation: “I feel like a stranger and I will most likely remain one for a long time [...] To start with, I have difficulties speaking French and I make only very slow progress [...] At the moment, I can only fl