TRANSLATORS' FOREWORD

Ion Creangă (1837-1889), one of the outstanding Romanian classics, was born in the village of Humuleşti, in northern Moldavia, a mountainous region inhabited by a population of ancient descent.

In 1859 he graduated from the Jassy seminary and took orders. He soon found himself in difficulties with the church authorities for frequenting the theatre, shooting rooks and having his hair cut in the ordinary style, so he gave up wearing the cloth and registered at a teachers' training school, eventually becoming a teacher. But the clerical authorities intervened and he was expelled from the teaching profession.

In 1874 his case was reviewed and he went back to teaching. He joined the literary circle called "Junimea", where his "peasant witticisms" were much relished, and established a close and lasting friendship with the greatest of Romanian poets, Mihai Eminescu.

In 1875 he began to publish stories and tales in the "Convorbiri literare" periodical. Between 1880-1882 the first three parts of Memories of My Boyhood appeared, while the last part was to be published posthumously.

The spell of the Memories of My Boyhood lies in its picture of village life and traditional customs, and in its recording of Moldavian speech patterns in the last century. Family life, childish pranks, methods of school-teaching, church festivals, carolling on festive days, country fairs, the beauty of the countryside—everything is brought back with a quiet nostalgia, tempered by wisdom and humour.

Like Swift or Mark Twain, Creangă is more than a story-teller for children or simply a humorist. His work is a human and social document of the ways of thinking and the life of a Romanian village in the nineteenth century. It may seem of restricted interest, owing to the local peasant setting, as well as to the language in which it was written; it carries nevertheless all the joy and pathos of a book of universal significance. Creangă's Memories symbolically picture the destiny of every child walking the path toward maturity and experience. The work inaugurates an original formula in the art of memoir writing, and represents a monument of high spirits and verbal abundance. A jovial verbal torrent, a kind of lexical spree, generously flushes this rhapsody of perennial childhood.

In Creangă's Tales the level of normal human relationships (conflicts between husband and wife, the gap between generations, the sad fortunes of stepchildren, maternal devotion) coexists and occasionally collides with a mythical level where right and wrong are embodied in people, animals, birds or insects, possessing supernatural powers and interfering in human affairs. The heroes step lightly out of daily reality into the fabulous, helped by kindly spirits (Holy Friday or Holy Sunday), by animals with magic powers, defying monsters and giants. Beyond the boundaries of rationality, in dream-land, Creangă's heroes act and talk simply, with peasant humour and commonsense. This juxtaposition of strata, evident at the linguistic level, is mainly observable in Dănilă Prepeleac, The Tale of Stan the Sorely-Tried, Ivan and his Bag, in which the common people speak the idiomatic language of mortals, when addressing either God, Saint Peter or Old Nick. It appears, too, in The Tale of Harap Alb, as well as in Făt-Frumos, The Mare's Son, only the phenomenon is here reversed: magically endowed creatures converse in everyday speech thus reinforcing, by means of language, a sensation of osmosis between the natural and the supernatural, between the real and the fantastic.

In translating a writer expressing himself in popular and local speech, presented even to the Romanian reader with an ample glossary, the use of an English dialect might have been considered. It seemed, however, a false solution because it would have exaggerated the difference between Creangă's language and popular Romanian speech. We therefore decided on a translation into English that would make use of archaisms and dialectal words.

Creangă's local and peasant language poses serious and diverse problems to the translator.

Among the lexical problems, special mention should be made of Creangă's use of numerous terms related to rural life and activities (such as names of tools belonging to a primitive agricultural system or to handicrafts), to coinage, weights and measures, to church service, religious rites, superstitions or social standing. We have done our best to find English equivalents, occasionally making use of an archaism or dialectal word. The native terms with no equivalent in English have been maintained as such or explained in footnotes.

The numerous proverbs and sayings often have exact English equivalents, though transferring the idea on a different plane. Those that were typically local have been necessarily translated, to preserve their original freshness. Some sayings enhanced by onomatopoeia and rhythm have been our chief trouble in rendering their sense or nonsense.

Typical syntactic structures have been equally difficult to transpose.

Semantic and syntactic equivalences, however, are a matter of linguistic competence, patience, and imagination, of sensitiveness to the text and its music. Our major concern has been to render the rhythm of Creangă's oral speech, the tone of a story sedate and nostalgic or spritely and full of fun.

In general, we have tried to preserve the spirit of the Romanian text, to give a translation easily accessible to the reader who cannot enjoy Creangă's incomparable art and tongue in the original.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The translators wish to express their gratitude to Rodica Tiniş for welcome suggestions and help in editorial work.