Emilia had grown up in rural
poverty but her glamorous urban Aunt Lucreția, with nice clothes and painted
nails, was her role model. As soon as
she could, not wanting a life that included treading dung in bare feet to make
briquettes for the fire, Emilia had escaped to the town, and consequently
valued a system that allowed her to make her way independently and not, as her
parents had wanted, remain in the village.
She had established herself with the initial help of Aunt Lucreția (who
did well out of the arrangement in terms of cleaning and childcare) then moved
on to a hostel, and finally was able to have a flat. She married and was educating herself at
evening class until she fell pregnant and gave it up for employment in a
metalworking factory.
Her parents had treated her with
sad reproach for abandoning them (as her sister had, also moving to town), but
Emilia’s engineer daughter Alice travels even further in search of greater
opportunities. She has emigrated to
Canada and married a local. A minor
theme of the book is the emptying of the countryside for a better life in
towns, or even in other countries. Now,
a decade after the revolution which toppled the Ceaușescu regime, elections are
about to take place in Romania, and Alice telephones to try to persuade her
mother to vote for a non-Communist candidate.
To Alice’s annoyance, Emilia argues life was better back then, and given
the choice she would go back to the way things were. The conversation prompts Emilia to look over
her life.
She had been a Party member, more
by accident than design as her factory needed to increase its number of women
comrades, though she concedes that membership brought privileges. She was certainly not ideologically driven
and kept her Orthodox faith (which nearly got her into trouble). The work was not too arduous and the workers
in her unit, producing for export and therefore for prized hard currency, were
looked after by an astute foreman and lived well, at least compared to the
average Romanian citizen. There may have
been difficulties for others, but she
did OK. Now in reduced circumstances, it’s
a case of ‘what has capitalism ever done for me?’
Emilia ignores the fact she led a
relatively privileged existence, able to acquire luxuries in roundabout ways, while
most citizens faced shortages of basics, long queues when goods were available,
and substandard housing. Under communism
there was bribery and nepotism, but that was fine for those who benefited from
the system, taking advantage of a thriving black market. Even teachers expected ‘presents’ and treated
their pupils according to the sweeteners they received from parents. Despite the situation for most people, Emilia
had been happy, ignoring the drawbacks.
The quality of her life changed
after 1989. Before, prices had been low,
but with market forces operating, inflation has eaten into her resources,
putting the goods on offer out of her reach.
What is the point of all this choice if one cannot afford any of
it? Her factory, which meant so much to
her, has been closed and stripped, and she cannot bear to look at it when she
passes by. For all its faults, communism
gave Emilia’s life meaning, its social structures providing security. No wonder not everybody welcomed its fall.
When her husband suggests moving
back to the country to make ends meet she refuses because a return to what she
had escaped from would be a defeat, so he commutes to work on his sister’s
holding, though not very efficiently. In
a way this pleases Emilia because the last thing she wanted to do was marry a
farmer, though she hates it when he returns smelling of dung, as it reminds her
of her childhood.
But while she was happy under
communism she learns of its darker side when talking to an elderly neighbour
whose father, a factory-owning tailor, was branded an enemy of the people in
the late 1940s and his factory expropriated.
It had meant hard times for the family for many years, and unfulfilled
promise for Emilia’s neighbour, who had had aspirations to be a painter. Emilia is told her old communist bosses have
all grown rich in the new Romania, suggesting they were only ever out for their
own interests, making the best of whatever political climate prevailed.
Mulling it over, she comes to a
more balanced view of the past, but still finds herself out of sympathy with
the present. Despite the political
repression then, now she sees that people die of hunger or sleep on the
streets, which would never have happened when ‘Uncle Nick’ was in charge. Previously she had a better life than many,
but now she is ‘other people’, and hankers for a time when ‘other people’ were
‘other people’.
To try to recreate some of the
feelings she used to have, she comes up with a plan to resurrect her old
workshop with her sister (who worked alongside her at the factory) and other
colleagues, but she finds they have moved on and do not share her rosy view of
the past. She even discovers that their
co-worker Mr Mitu, always ready with jokes about Ceaușescu, was in fact a
police informer. Feeling down at the end
of the novel, as she ponders on the forthcoming election she decides she will
probably not vote. She has been pushed
to the margins, so why should she bother?
What is the point of freedom when it is only an abstraction, and
material life is worse?
While the general feeling is
melancholic, the novel is at times funny, particularly the old jokes told
against ‘The Genius of the Carpathians’ by Mitu poking fun at the regime (we
learn that Ceaşcă – cup – was a nickname given to Ceaușescu), but Emilia
represents a definite sense of nostalgia, a Romanian version of ostalgie, for
ways that may have been bad, but in some ways have been replaced by ways not
much better and often worse. There must
be many Emilias in Romania, and elsewhere in the old communist countries,
having to find a new way under a system they had been taught to despise. The revolution did not benefit
everybody. Some lost what they knew, with
nothing as good substituted.
The weirdness of the Ceaușescu
period is captured in a projected visit to town, causing stressful days of
cleaning, polishing and repairing, down to hiding black cows because they do
not project an ‘optimistic’ tone, lacquering the hooves of the others to make
them look like the cows in pictures books, and replacing small crops by the
roadside with bigger ones from a research plot to impress the dignitaries. This is a fantasy provided to show the
General Secretary everything is fine, but cocooning the elite in an illusion
that life is good for ordinary people and therefore their policies are
correct. In the event the factory is on
standby for the presidential party to arrive for an inspection, but they leave
town without visiting it.
There is nothing preachy in this novel;
instead it is a subtle examination of Romania during and after the Ceaușescu
regime. It comes down to a matter of
utility: which produced the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the
communist badly-planned system pre-1989 or the free market post-1989? On this showing it is not as easy to
determine as one might think. What I can
say is that Emilia is not alone and her views are not only shared by
pensioners, as recently I heard positive things said by a young Romanian about
Ceaușescu, and modern Romanian governance compared unfavourably to his regime.
Update 5 February 2022:
On 28 January 2022, a number of translations
of the same short section of Sînt o babă
comunistă, pages 85-90 of the edition published by
Editura Polirom, appeared in issue 220 of Translation Café (‘eZine of
Modern Texts in Translation’). Translation Café is a publication of the
Literary Translation Master's Programme of the English Department at the
University of Bucharest.
The project was coordinated by
Prof. Nadina Vișan, according to whom the novel was used as an opportunity to explore
issues the students are too young to have experienced themselves and only know
through stories told by parents and grandparents. The result of the discussion was the decision
by the nineteen students on the programme to translate separately a few pages (the
beginning of chapter ten, pp.63-67 in Alistair Ian Blyth’s 2017 translation).
There are a couple of points about
the Translation Café exercise worth
noting. First, a very minor one, it
gives the original date of publication as 2010, but the publishing information
in Blythe’s Dalkey Archive Press translation states 2011 as the year of Lungu’s
copyright, and that does seem to be the year it was first published.
Secondly, Translation Café has changed the book’s Romanian title. It appeared as Sînt o babă comunistă, but here it is called Sunt o babă comunistă – the title of the 2013 film adaptation as
well. This would appear to be a subtle,
but significant, alteration. From what I
gather, sînt became sunt in the
early 1990s, so using the former version would highlight Emilia’s nostalgia and
sense she was out of steps with current times.
It seems an odd editorial choice to change the title when Lungu would
have used it for a specific artistic purpose.
As a means of comparing and
discussing how a set of words can bear multiple interpretations, a comparative approach
makes a useful educational tool for the translators. It is also a reminder to the reader that a
particular translation can never be regarded as definitive: to the non-native
speaker it reads like the only version possible, but it contains unseen
compromises. Placed in different hands,
the result of other choices can make the end product feel markedly different.
This process of selection can be seen in the titles the translators have chosen. While Prof Vișan, who includes her own effort, has translated it as Old, Communist and Proud of It, the students’ efforts are mostly permutations of I’m a Communist/Commie Hag/Bag, often with old thrown in. Perhaps they had I’m an Old Communist Hag, the English-language title of the film adaptation in mind (showing how hard it can be to break free of one’s predecessors), though hag and bag carry negative associations that do not seem appropriate to Emilia. Blyth’s title is probably still the crispest, even if not literal, though MA student Cristina Șuică’s I’m a Commie Old Trout is the more amusing.
