From Bucharest to Barnes & Noble

the long road of Romanian writers to American success

Right before the Nobel announcement, I was trying to figure out who “Dan” was—the Romanian correspondent who went live on Swedish TV in 2009 when Romanian-born German novelist Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dan is mentioned in one of Mircea Cărtărescu’s journals as preparing to speak to the Swedes in the eventuality that Cărtărescu won. I pictured this Dan, waiting around the television studios, just in case a Romanian won an international prize. “He went live for Herta Müller.” 

The Nobel is one of the few literary prizes dispensed by European institutions that Cărtărescu has not yet won. He’s won the Dublin Literary Award, the Mondello Prize , the Formentor Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, the Leteo Prize, the Austrian State Prize, and the Spycher-Leuk Literary Prize, the Vileniča Prize, etc. In the US, he won the Los Angeles Book Prize. In Mexico, he won the FIL Prize. Last year, after a successful American tour for the English translation of his novel Solenoid—named one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, the Financial Times, and Words Without Borders—Cărtărescu had 11/1 odds of winning the Nobel (same as Thomas Pynchon, his idol). This year, his odds were 25/1 (higher than Han Kang’s 33/1). 

When Müller won the Nobel, people were mad at her. When Cărtărescu did not win, people were mad at him too. Last year, when everyone thought he was going to win, writers and critics quibbled in public about his role and responsibilities to the culture at large. Why did he not recommend contemporary Romanian authors during his American tour? How did he get funding for the translations of his books? Was he given preferential treatment by the Romanian Cultural Institute? There have been thoughtfully formulated observations, but also rushed accusations, and group letters. The latest installment was a call for Cărtărescu to donate his recently won Dublin Literary Award to Romanian public libraries. 

None of this is new. It’s common in many contexts for bitterness to break out in small groups when one person suddenly becomes a star. But that dynamic is stronger still in a country where so few of its writers gain attention or even translation in the Anglophone market. Cărtărescu spoke about how success is difficult “at least in a country as resentful as Romania.” What roils this small literary scene and how do these motions affect what gets translated into English? How does Romania’s foremost writer fit into all this?

Perhaps the answer lies in the common origin of the words “prize” and “price”—the writer and literary scholar Adriana Babeți drew attention to this common origin in the days leading to the Nobel announcement. What is the price that Romania is willing to pay to promote its writers in the Anglophone market?