Star with no Name

Mihail Sebastian

Description

Thrown off the train for not having a ticket, Mona finds herself, alone, in a rural town at night. Although she is fashionably dressed, she has no money and nowhere to stay. Fortunately, the local schoolteacher, Marin, invites her to stay at his home while he sleeps over at a friend's place. However, an attraction soon develops. Marin, a keen astronomer, reveals that he has discovered a star which is not marked on any star chart. They share a wonderfully happy night together. But their idyll is soon shattered by the arrival of Mona's boyfriend, Grig. Will Mona choose to return to her old life in the city or settle for a quieter life with Marin?This play was a hit in Romania at the time it was written and has subsequently been adapted for film in both France and Russia. Available for the first time in a new English translation by Gabi Reigh.

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed By PublishDrive
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912430529
• Langue: English

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 an English PEN Award for translation of Sebastian’s The Town with Acacia Trees ( Aurora Metro, 2019 ). This was followed by Women also by Sebastian (Aurora Metro, 2020). 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.
First published in the UK in 2020 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.
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Cover design copyright © 2020 Aurora Metro Publications
Copyright © 2020 Translation of The Star with no Name Gabi Reigh
Production: Sumedha Mane
Editor: Cheryl Robson
With many thanks to: Marina Tuffier, Didem Uzum, Bella Taylor
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Printed in the UK by 4edge Printers, Essex.
ISBNs:
978-1-912430-51-2 ( print )
ISBNs: 978-1-912430-52-9 ( ebook )
The Star with no Name
by
Mihail Sebastian
Translated by Gabi Reigh
INTRODUCTION
Alex Boican
The Star with no Name is probably Mihail Sebastian’s best comedy, certainly his most popular. It was written and first performed in the 1940s, a dark moment in human history, and particularly so for Sebastian. During his rather short career (he was born Iosif Hechter in 1907 in the Romanian Danube port of Braila, and died in a tragic road accident in 1945), Sebastian witnessed first- hand the growing of antisemitism and the rise of fascism in Romania.
As a Jewish Romanian lawyer and author, he suffered numerous attacks in the press, even from close collaborators, and in 1940 eventually lost the right to employment and to publish. In these circumstances, The Star with no Name could not be performed under Sebastian’s name. In order to facilitate its performance, Stefan Enescu, a friend of Sebastian, offered to assume authorship under the pen-name Stefan Mincu.
The play was first performed in 1944. Since then, it has been a regular presence in Romanian theatres, and has often been adapted for TV. Its popularity also led to several film adaptations, notably a French Romanian co-production in 1966, Mona, l’etoie sans nome , starring Marina Vladi and Claude Rich, and a Soviet version in 1978. Its translation into English reveals another facet of Sebastian’s richly creative personality, which has been known to the English language reader through works such as the novel For Two Thousand Years, and his Journal .
Sebastian’s writing is commonly categorised into the political and apolitical works. His political writing includes most of his early journalism published in the journal Cuvantul between 1927 and 1934, his novel For Two Thousand Years (1934), the volume How I Became a Hooligan (1935) that contains Sebastian’s commentaries on the reactions generated by that novel, and his posthumously published Journal (1996).
His early journalism was conducted in the vein of the tradition set up by Titu Maiorescu and Mihail Eminescu, two eminent figures of nineteenth century Romanian culture. It was also heavily influenced by philosopher and publicist Nae Ionescu. Nae Ionescu was his professor and mentor; he brought in Sebastian as redactor at Cuvantul , the journal he directed. In his articles, Sebastian proved a redoubtable polemicist whose sharp wit dissected all aspects of Romanian political reality, particularly the corruption, superficiality and inefficiency of Romanian political and cultural institutions of the time. This has led some critics, for example Marta Petreu, to consider Sebastian’s early political views to be ideologically situated on the right and characterised by criticism of liberalism and democracy.
By 1934, while Sebastian was still its redactor, Cuvantul , under Nae Ionescu’s direction, became the de facto ideological platform for Romanian fascist organisation the Iron Guard. Things changed with the publication of Sebastian’s novel For Two Thousand Years , which had a preface by Nae Ionescu. In the novel, Sebastian tackles the condition of the Jew in Romania in the context of growing antisemitism. Paradoxically, Nae Ionescu’s preface, which Sebastian had requested from his mentor since 1931, displayed a vicious antisemitism. The novel, which confronted Romanian society with its antisemitism, and the preface, which unashamedly assumed it, generated a scandal in the press. Sebastian was attacked from both the right and the left. The scandal ended the collaboration between Sebastian and Nae Ionescu. The following year, Sebastian responded to his critics in the volume How I Became a Hooligan . There, he rearticulated his views, rejecting both the extreme right and the extreme left criticisms of his novel.
Another insight into Sebastian’s political views was revealed half a century after his death with the publication of his Journal in 1996. As Radu Ioanid has argued, Sebastian’s Journal generated a second shock in Romanian society with its description of the intoxicating pull the extreme right had on many of Sebastian’s friends and major Romanian personalities of the interwar period.
The apolitical writings include his literary debut, Fragments from a Found Notebook (1932), the novels Women (1933), The Town with Acacia Trees (1935), and Accident (1940), as well as the plays The Game of Holidaymaking (1938), The Star with no Name (1944), The Last Hour ( 1945), and Island ( 1947) show that there is a clear difference in style and tone between Sebastian’s prose works and plays. Sebastian was an admirer of French literature, and the influence of Marcel Proust and Andre Gide is particularly noticeable in his prose writing. In his novels, Sebastian experiments with a modernist style, exploring the character’s consciousness rather than plot. The central theme is the search for an authentic life. In this way, Sebastian’s prose is aligned with that of other major Romanian writers of the time, such as Camil Petrescu and Mircea Eliade, who were Sebastian’s friends.
However, Sebastian’s writing displays neither Camil Petrescu’s radically experimental narrative style, nor Mircea Eliade’s fascination with extreme experiences. In Sebastian’s prose work the individual’s Romantic search for an authentic existence is counterbalanced by an ingrained consciousness of the necessity of social order and belonging. The same theme is to be found also in his political writings, especially in For Two Thousand Years. The difference is that in this novel, the conflict between individual authenticity and social belonging is explored in the context of the interwar period’s rising antisemitism. The thematic unity of Sebastian’s writing shows that the difference between the “political” and “apolitical” works is perhaps less significant than is usually assumed.
In contrast to his prose writing, Sebastian’s plays are rather conventional in form. This confronts us with a paradox and reveals Sebastian’s creative and ideological complexity. Sebastian was also a drama critic and seems to have rejected the conventional rules of the theatre, which he described in the following manner: “In fact, all these assumed theatre rules are describing one type of play only: the three act comedy, which is short, designed for a two hour show, with the intrigue reduced to a simple anecdote, the scenes and characters clearly drawn, and above all brisk dialogue. 1 ”
Surprisingly, his three comedies, The Game of Holidaymaking, The Star with no Name, and The Last Hour, all follow these rules. Yet Sebastian manages to create captivating theatre, offsetting the simplicity of conventions with a profoundly modern thematic: the conflict between the individual’s search for authentic existence and the necessity of social belonging.
An exemplary illustration is The Star with no Name. The play is both social satire and doomed love story. Set in a small provincial town on the railway line between Bucharest and Sinaia, a mountain resort popular with high society, the play satirises both the narrow mindedness of the provincial mentality, illustrated by characters such as Miss Cucu and stationmaster Ipistat, and the vacuity and boredom plaguing the metropolitan socialites, Mona and Grig. In different ways, both provincial life and high society are dominated by self-interest and material concerns, i.e. money.
This does not allow for an authentic individual existence that would fulfil human desire. Between these two worlds, Sebastian inserts the figure of Marin Miroiu