“I do not know how to write. Sometimes I can write, but know, I don’t know.” That is what the Romanian Mircea C?rt?rescu (Bucharest, 1956), candidate, year after year, to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in his diary in December 2017. The Lleonard Muntaner publishing house has just published Dietaris 1990-2017 (selection and translation by Xavier Montoliu, with a prologue by Sam Abrams), based on the four volumes that the writer published in his country and had not been translated before – except one of its four volumes, which in 2011 was published in Swedish.
One of the constants of the diary is its doubt about writing, along with the awareness of where it wants to go literary.
No real writer feels totally safe, one is not sure if tomorrow or never he will be able to write again, it is the condition of the artist: a professional knows that he has to learn a job and do it, but an artist is never sure. If I had to compare my diary with those of other, much more famous writers, I would do so with those of Franz Kafka, with whom I see similarities such as continuous tribulation and anxiety about literature. Furthermore, like him, many of our books begin in diaries. He made no distinction between stories, novels or diary pages, he wrote everything in the same notebooks. I do three-quarters of the same, all my writing emerges from diaries. Sometimes I imagine what I write as a tree: the diary is the trunk and the branches are the other books. For me it is very important to write day by day.
How to go to the gym?
Yes, with the newspaper I maintain tension, without that muscular tension I would fall, I would not stand up. The writer should write every day to sustain himself. When I don’t feel very inspired to write a story or a novel, I write in the journal and keep the connection alive. Maybe I don’t write literary for months, but in the diary I do.
When you started publishing them in your country, did the way of writing them change?
No, I started publishing them when I became aware of their literary value and that they were written well enough, like any of my books.
Is that why you haven’t published those from before 1990?
Yes, and I will never publish them, because they were typical intimate diaries.
One of the mottos he writes: meditate, imagine, write and exist.
For me, existence, after all, is the sum of all that.
The diaries are like a laboratory, where we not only see him write, but also plan his own career, how he thinks about the books he has to write and publish each year…
My rational side is important to be able to organize and manage my work, and that has helped me a lot, it gives me perspective on what I am doing.
He writes that he hasn’t matured much since he was 27 years old.
If I close my eyes and don’t look in the mirror, I see myself as I did when I was around that age. It’s the age I truly felt like myself, and I’ve preserved the vision I had. I am a 27-year-old young man lost in my body.
Does there come a time when the writer lives looking back?
We all change throughout life, but it is important to improve. Being happy is changing positively with wisdom, something I always try to do. I don’t always succeed, of course, but with age I have improved.
For a time I believed that it would never have “access to international success,” and now it is routinely translated into more than twenty languages.
I believed that no one cared about a Romanian writer coming from the middle of nowhere, from an unknown culture with an unknown literary life. In fact, now it is more difficult for me to be considered in my own country than abroad, because in the world of letters the more success you have abroad the less you have in your country, people do not like others to succeed.
And do you still think you don’t know how to write?
It is normal to want to write better and better, I compete with myself. I will always be the Solenoid or Blinder writer, and I would be very unhappy if I thought they were better than the writer I am now. I always try to do different things and progress, and my latest novel, Theodoros (published two years ago in Romania, in September it will be published in Impedimenta in Spanish) is a step forward.
Every year he is considered a candidate to win the Nobel Prize. Are you worried?
It is an honor to be considered worthy of the award, but receiving it is like a lottery, I could become the great writer who would never have received it, and that is why I don’t think about it. If it happens, then great, and if not, also.
Thanks to the diaries we can access his dreams, very important in his literature.
I have a complex relationship with dreams. Due to my romantic nature, they have always fascinated me, to the point that not only have I been writing them all in diaries for more than fifty years, and there are hundreds, but I am also interested in the scientific part, the process of sleeping and dreaming. , and I have studied it a lot: I know better than many writers what they mean and what the connection is between real life and nightlife, with them we can enter another reality. This double life we ??have is fascinating, one common and the other totally private and intimate.
As a writer today he spends half his life traveling the world. Does he stress you out or leave you time to write?
I love to travel, and in recent years I have traveled so much that I spend more time abroad than in my country, and I have discovered Latin America, where I have traveled in almost all countries and I find it fascinating. Travel gives me a lot, and I have become accustomed to this life on the road and airports. And I am happy because I have not stopped writing, but on the contrary, it stimulates and inspires me. The periods I am at home, when I write at my desk I feel more inspired. It’s a good combination.
When he begins this published diary he is a poet, but progressively his prose gains ground.
I have never had the feeling of having abandoned poetry, I still consider myself a poet today. You are born a poet, you cannot say that until one day you are a poet and from now on you are not. If you are not born a poet, it means that you are not a poet from the beginning, and that has nothing to do with writing books of verses or poems, but with a certain mental state, a way of seeing the world, so my literary attitude, even in the novels, it is purely poetic. Yes, I have abandoned a certain way of writing poetry from when I was young. To protest in some way against the archetypal beatnik poems of my youth, I began to write a long postmodern history of Romanian poetry, which is the book The Levant (Impedimenta, 2015), with more than 7,000 verses. It was very prosaic poetry comparable to what is written today, but I didn’t like it, so I put the manuscript in a shoe box and forgot about it for twenty years. A few years ago I published it, and to my surprise, today’s poets consider me a precursor!
Covid made him write poems again.
Three years ago I published another collection of poems written in a very extreme way during the pandemic. It expresses all the pain of living in those dangerous times. Without images or metaphors, without anything, just a scream, a scream of pain. It is a hundred short, one-page poems, published under the title Never Ask for Help.
He explained that at that time he had suicidal thoughts…
I hadn’t had them until these last six or seven years, due to the depression I have suffered. I think I’ve overcome it, because you have to keep moving forward, even if bad things happen to you.
Catalan version, here
