Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu (the Harriman Institute’s 2024 Writer in Residence) views good writing as an act of channeling. “It’s not you who writes your poetry or prose,” he said during a Harriman-hosted literary evening with his translator Sean Cotter and Harriman Director Valentina Izmirlieva. “It’s your mind, which is much bigger than you will ever be. The collective mind, not only Freud’s but Jung’s.”

Cărtărescu, a striking figure with thick black eyebrows, dark eyes, and an aquiline nose, taught a course, “Postmodernism vs. Tyranny: A Romanian Literary Revolution,” during his four-week Harriman residency. It included an examination of the plight of Romanian writers living under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s oppressive regime during the final decades of communism.

Cărtărescu was among them—a leader of Romania’s “1980s Generation,” also known as the “blue jeans generation,” a literary movement that drew inspiration from America’s Beat poets. “We wanted to be like them. We wanted to have courage. We wanted to be anti-system. We wanted to be free,” he said. “Conserving and preserving freedom of mind was the most important for us, because we lived in a prison.”

Then, Communism collapsed in Romania. In 1990, when Cărtărescu was 34, he left the country for the first time to visit New York. “I was parachuted from a destroyed country, a completely destroyed country, to the middle of the Big Apple,” he said. And the culture shock nearly destroyed him. “I became conscious that my whole life before [had] vanished away. It didn’t matter anymore. But at the same time, I could not adapt to a new world.”

Cărtărescu continues to write from Romania but says: “It is not a path I would wish for you. Why would you read and buy somebody from the middle of nowhere? . . . If I had been an Italian writer, I would be much further along than I am now.”

Objectively speaking, though, Cărtărescu is doing phenomenally well abroad. In addition to his 2015 Leipzig Book Award for Blinding, an excerpt of which is published in this issue, his novel Solenoid (translated by Cotter) won the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. It was also included on the New Yorker’s list of best books in 2022. But Cărtărescu has published another 40 books, only five of which have been translated into English.

The Harriman’s Writer in Residence program, launched by graduate students in 2013, has brought six of the region’s best contemporary authors to Columbia, introducing them to a wider U.S. audience through public events like the one with Cărtărescu. They range from 2023 International Booker Prize winner, Bulgarian writer Giorgi Gospodinov (2022), to the late Yugoslav-Croatian and Dutch writer Dubravka Ugrešić (2015). Izmirlieva, who has made it her mission to institutionalize the program during her directorship, hopes it will bring many more.

Cărtărescu said he particularly enjoyed teaching at the Harriman. “I had the opportunity to talk about what I love most in this world, to talk about poetry, and they also pay me for it. If they didn’t pay me for it, I was ready to pay them for this pleasure,” he said. ◆

Featured photo: Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu. Photograph by Silviu Guiman