Stefan Stoenescu, Ithaca, N.Y.
Independent Scholar
The Romanian city of Sibiu was elected Cultural Capital of Europe for 2007, an honor and recognition shared with the city of Luxembourg. This event also marked Romania’s admission as a full member in the European Union. For centuries Sibiu, also known as Hermannstadt, was one of the larger seven Saxon towns in the historical province of Transylvania. During the communist era its German population decreased systematically by migrating to the Federal Republic of Germany. The medieval town they left behind still bears the stamp of its past glory, especially after the facelift it underwent quite recently as a result of its former inhabitants’ growing interest to revisit their native places and invest in them or even, in some instances, to move back and rebuild their shattered lives due to their displacement. Also internationally known figures as Charles of Windsor, Prince of Wales has shown a marked interest in conserving the architectural identity of this city, one of the oldest and best preserved in Europe.
Dumitru Chioaru was in the prime of his life in 2004, when his outstanding volume The Life and Opinions of Professor Mouse was published. A section in the volume forms a monographic sequence or cycle of 23 poems, in which the speaker reminiscences about the various places and people, their mores generated by the metamorphoses undergone by the cityscape and its dwellers, during the fastest-paced, most dramatic and violent twentieth century. The voice of the poet is calm and measured, his stance self-effacing, slightly ironical and melancholy, or simply pensive. The mood is tinged with nostalgia. Dumitru Chioaru deserves to be known in the context of our debate. We the participants in the dialogue may become inspired by his contemplative and meditative stance. That is why, I felt the urge to translate his Sibiu cycle into English and to linger over some of its insights and complexities, extolling the interrelatedness between the diverse ethnical backgrounds of the people involved and their cultural habitats which have been generated by the nature of early and later modern European history.