In this paper we focus on the verbs of saying in contemporary Romanian denoting conversation (symmetric verbal communication) between two or more speakers (e.g., a conversa, a dialoga, a discuta ‘to discuss, to conversate’, a negocia ‘to negotiate’, a flecări ‘to chatter’). There are differences between these verbs regarding their syntactic patterns, the grammatical voice, the register of usage (formal vs informal) and the functional styles they are specific to (belles-lettres, journalistic, scientific, and official style). A special type of writing is memoir, which resembles both belles-lettres and journalistic style. Important lexical semantic subclasses are well represented by conversational verbs expressing ’chatting’, ‘small talk’ (e.g., a bârfi ‘to chatter, to gossip’, a cleveti, a pălăvrăgi, a sporovăi, a trăncăni ‘to chatter, to blather’) and verbs denoting conflictive conversation (e.g., a se bălăcări, a se beșteli, a se ciondăni, a se ciorovăi, a se ocărî, a se rățoi, a se stropși), specific to colloquial register, especially with pejorative use.
Keywords: verba dicendi; conversation; formal/informal (register); functional styles
The poetic is the possibility of the language to say what is always apparently vague and that continually needs to be constructed, as an alternative way of accessing knowledge. In this possible "elsewhere", the poems of Gilda Vălcan (Romanian poetess, little known in Italy) challenge the reader, imposing the experience of a new universe that shakes the principles of what is considered firm, safe, ordinary, and trivial. This universe, in itself obscure and original – that is, founded on something that has nothing to do with the known, with the defined and with the representable –, witnesses a dialogue that is always in progress and in conflict with an interlocutor present/absent in the poetess's verses. By naming the surrounding world, Gilda Vălcan enters in its dimension, trying to give a space and a voice to her being in a continuous research of her own identity.
Keywords: Gilda Vălcan; poetry; Romanian literature; identity; the “Other”; research of oneself
This paper is a part of a larger research dedicated to the Romanian poetry of the Two World Wars, which separates different authorial postures, from the writer who becomes combatant to the combatant who becomes a writer. The study aims to recover the war poetry written by Avram Steuerman-Rodion (1872-1918), a Jewish Romanian writer who was recruited in the Word War I as a military doctor and awarded for his bravery, but who will choose to commit suicide after demobilization. The critical interrogation aims to trace the specificity of the poetic formula existing in author’s front sonnets, published posthumously in the volume – a rarity today – Frontul roșu [Red Front] (1920), questioning simultaneously the preference for the order of the sonnet in times of disorder and chaos. Along with this exercise to recover the author and his work, the paper is interested in a tragic biographical paradox – which makes the trauma of readjustment to the rhythm of civil society outweigh that of adapting to the horrors of the front – with echoes in literary creation.
Keywords: World War I; Avram Steuerman-Rodion; sonnets; Jewishness; derision: poetry of experience.
How is it possible that the most important decisions of the Trojan War be taken in the throws of extreme rage? What is the relationship between the Homeric heroes and the chants that describe their life journey? Why does Ulysses refuse the immortality promised by Calypso? This article sets out to analyze the role of emotions in the workings of the rapport between reality and fiction, as manifested in several episodes of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Keywords: Trojan War; heroic honour; melancholy; identity; Ithaca.
The present article will investigate the functions that objects play in Central and East-European fiction, especially when placed in relation with the subjective apprehension of reality (both factual and imaginary). Focusing on some fictional samples that may prove a good starting point for rethinking such concepts as trace, reference, personal and collective memory, the article aims, in effect, at revealing the complicity between things, stories, and history’s unresolved legacies.
Keywords: trace; forgery; East-European literature; obsolete objects; memory.
Starting from Ţepeneag’s latest novel, Bulgarian Truck, published in Romania in 2010, this article intends to investigate Ţepeneag’s “oniric literature” not only from a “structural” and narratological point of view, but also from a rhetorical and textual point of view. Ţepeneag moves in a metaliterary dimension that gives great space to the “mise en abyme” of writing. For Ţepeneag, the novel is not only art, but it is, above all, an instrument of knowledge that allows the reader to implement, in full freedom, all possible combinations and associations, questioning the models that naively rely on any form of realism objectivistic or transparency of the world, also allowing words to speak the truth of desire.
Keywords: Dumitru Ţepeneag; Romanian literature; psychoanalysis; comparative literature; critical theory; novel.
This paper analyses the uses and functions of the Romanian discourse maker păi and the English well, based on two comparable corpora of professional spoken interaction, CIVMP and ITICMC, trying to point out their possible equivalence. We have analysed these two discourse markers in an attempt to see their uses and functions and to record in statistics the number of occurrences and the frequency of păi and well in this type of discourse. In addition, according to corpus analysis, it could be said that speakers seem to constantly adapt to the conditions imposed by the interactional, social, ideological, and cultural requirements of the context.
Keywords: Romanian; English; professional spoken interaction; discourse markers; comparison; corpus linguistics; discourse strategies; statistics.
The essay aims to take into account the poem Strigoii by Eminescu and to study, for the first time, its similarities with a contemporary work, the film Only lovers left alive by Jim Jarmusch, in order to shed light on little-explored aspects of the Eminescu’s major work. In the first part, “Under the Sign of Deathly White and Scarlet Fire”, we concentrate on the similarities of the protagonists (Maria and Eva) whose portraits are constructed on the “coincidentia oppositorum” of White and Blood. In the second section, “The Lord of the Night”, we concentrate our attention on the portraits of Arald and Adam in order to shed light on masculine romantic beauty, fatal and dark. In the third part, “The Fantastic Ride”, we demonstrate the existence of the mythic substrate of the two works, while in the fourth part, “Lunar Magic”, we analyze the cyclical temporality of the eternal return associated with vampirism and its relation to music, of particular import in the film by Jarmusch.
Keywords: Eminescu; Jim Jarmusch; Marcel Iureş; Imaginary; Vampirism; Gothic.
The article discusses the 62 words coined, according to DEX (Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române), by contamination (Ro. contaminare), a special type of lexical blending. However, at a closer look, 25 words seem to have other etymological interpretations. The remaining 37 blends are analysed in an attempt to find the succesful blending patterns, since these patterns seem to be language-specific.
Keywords: lexical blending; lexicography; etymology; lexical contamination.