364
PARTISAN REVIEW
West, but which live on in Soviet literature for various historical
reasons , about which Andrei Siniavsky spoke in his article " On
Socialist Realism" ; that is, about Soviet classicism-epigrams,
fables, and all kinds of other genres, and a special genre that has
extraordinary significance for Soviet literature: translation, in
which, as it turns out, it is possible
to
say everything that cannot
be said in the original literature. Here is an example fror:n a re–
markable book by the recently deceased, brilliant translator Lev
Ginzburg, who, for example, translated an epigram written by
the German poet Logau . The epigram goes this way. (Just let
somebody try to publish it as a Russian work!)
What does it mean nowadays
to
be fabulously bold,
to call black-black
and white-white,
to compose no pompous odes
to
murderers,
to lie only out of need
and without need not
to
li e?
Literature always finds the possibility and means for exist–
ence, even, it seems, when it appears to be at an impasse, and can
exist no longer. Thank you.
JAN BUDHARU: I am from Rumania, and I am a writer. I left
Rumania because I couldn't read, I couldn't live my life with
dignity. Jan Kott reminded us of the Stalin slogan "engineer of
the human sou!." All my young years as a writer I remembered
these wonderful words. Then, anybody had a right to look at my
.manuscript and give me guidance and criticism. I don't know if
you'll believe it, but I remember rewriting a novel twenty-two
times, until I had forgotten what it was I had first begun
to
write.
It
doesn ' t matter. The problem is silence.
In
Rumania, as in
Russia and Poland, we couldn't talk-we couldn't speak the
truth. This caused a decay of the human personality, a degrada–
tion of the writer's profession. Here, because I
can
speak English
(I
have been here for six years), I listen, and still I don't talk. Be–
cause language is the instrument by which we transmit our
thought and soul, and because we are living in America, we
should speak and write in English. But we ca n't.
