Radio România Internațional

Tag: translations

  • February 2, 2023 UPDATE

    February 2, 2023 UPDATE

    Visit — The Romanian President Klaus Iohannis was received, on Thursday, by his Azeri counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, in Baku. The Romanian president is paying a two-day official visit to Azerbaijan. The Romanian delegation includes the Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu, the Energy Minister Virgil Popescu, the director of the Romanian Intelligence Service – SRI, Eduard Hellvig and other presidential advisers. The two presidents discussed the development of bilateral cooperation in areas such as energy, transport, trade, investments, digitization, agriculture, education and culture. Also, the two assessed the stage of implementation of regional interconnection projects, such as the submarine transmission cable for electricity, and they also addressed the initiation of similar projects in the digital field. On Friday, the two national companies, Romgaz and Socar, will sign a new contract for the delivery of natural gas for the period April 1, 2023 and April 1, 2024. Thus, according to Ilham Aliyev, all opportunities in Romania will be used for the export of Azeri gas to other European markets. Also on Friday, Klaus Iohannis will open, together with Ilham Aliyev, the Ministerial Meeting of the Consultative Council of the Southern Gas Corridor, which will be attended by the European Commissioner for Energy, Kadri Simson.



    Sofia — Ensuring the security of the EUs external borders and the effective management of the migration phenomenon can only be achieved through a coordinated effort at the national and European level, the Romanian Interior Minister, Lucian Bode, said on Thursday in Sofia. He added that Romania is a security provider at the European level, and the protection of the EUs external borders is a priority. Lucian Bode participated in the ministerial conference “Efficient management of the external borders of the EU”. On the sidelines of the meeting, the Romanian official had a bilateral meeting with his Bulgarian counterpart, Ivan Demerdzhiev. On this occasion, the two deepened the bilateral consultations started on the occasion of the JHA informal Council in Stockholm, which took place last week, regarding the acceleration of the accession process of Romania and Bulgaria to the Schengen area. We remind you that on December 8, 2022, at the JHA council in Brussels, Romania was not admitted to the free travel area due to the opposition of Austria and the Netherlands. The Austrians voted against, and the Dutch decided to accept Romanias accession, but not Bulgarias, the two countries being analyzed on a common file.



    ICR — The Romanian Cultural Institute allocates 1 million lei (about 200 thousand Euros) this year for the translation of Romanian books abroad, through two funding programs. These are addressed to publishers from outside Romania and aim to facilitate access to Romanian culture, by supporting translations from Romanian authors and publications dedicated to Romanian culture and civilization. The files can be submitted, for the first time, exclusively online, by email, until March 8. They will be evaluated by a commission of independent experts.



    EU — The EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, announced in Kyiv that the EU countries would train another 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers, thus doubling the size of an ongoing program. He made this statement during a conversation with the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Denis Shmihal. Some of the soldiers will be prepared to use equipment including modern German tanks Leopard 2. Josep Borrell also said that Brussels will make available to Kyiv 25 million Euros to support the demining efforts of the countrys territory. “The protection of civilians and their livelihoods is a priority,” he underlined. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, and important European commissioners arrived in Kyiv on Thursday, to hold a joint meeting with the Ukrainian Government, on the eve of the EU – Ukraine summit due on February 3. The former Soviet republic applied to join the EU in February 2022, being granted the candidate country status in June 2022.



    OMV – The largest energy company in southeastern Europe – OMV Petrom – recorded, last year, a net profit of over 10 billion lei (over 2 billion Euros), by 260% higher than the previous year. According to the data of the Bucharest Stock Exchange, the companys contribution to the state budget, through taxes and dividends, reached a record level of 20 billion lei (about 4 billion Euros). The company plans investments of 6 billion lei (about 1.2 billion Euros), with the Neptun Deep project in the Black Sea at the center of the strategy. OMV Petrom has recently announced that it will not pay the solidarity tax of 60% on oil companies profits, imposed by the Bucharest Government, because, the group claims, it does not fall within its application criteria. The European Commission found the company is right, but the National Agency for Fiscal Administration – ANAF announced that it will continue the checks and discussions with the European Commission in order to clarify the situation. (LS)

  • Works by Louise Glück to be part of the ANANSI collection

    Works by Louise Glück to be part of the ANANSI collection

    At a very difficult time for the book market, when numerous publishing houses have downsized or even seized book printing due to a dramatic drop in sales, Pandora M Publishing House, part of TREI editorial group, is working on a collection of translations from universal literature. The collection, entitled ANANSI. World Fiction is being coordinated by Bogdan-Alexandru Stanescu, a writer and one of the most appreciated Romanian editors, with a 15-year experience in the field of literary translation. The new collection that bears the name of Anansi, the African god of stories, is made up of five series, namely, one dedicated to contemporary literature, one dedicated to the 20th century classics, one of literary essays, one of memoirs and one dedicated to poetry. Among the writers who form part of this collection are the Syrian Samar Yazbek, a fervent critic of the Assad regime, the Swedish Linda Boström Knausgård, the American writer, poet and literary critic Ben Lerner, a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Ahmet Altan, one of the most read Turkish writers and an outstanding journalist, all of them translated into Romanian for the first time.



    Bogdan Alexandru Stanescu tells us more about the ANANSI collection: Many editors dream of something like this, wish to coordinate such collection, but they often fail to find the support they need. The fact that the first six titles of the collection are sold out is a surprise for me as well. The novelty and quality of the titles surely mattered, as well as the graphics, the covers signed by Andrei Gamart. I would call this a rather subjective collection. I included authors that I like a lot and whom I wanted to see translated into Romanian. I could not bear the thought that Jose Luis Peixoto, one of the greatest contemporary Portuguese writers, dubbed by critics the new Saramago, has not been fully translated into Romanian. I remember that at a certain point there was a Facebook group that tried to convince publishing houses to further translate his books. And still, this didn’t happen. So it’s not a coincidence that Jose Luis Peixoto was included in the first wave of the Anansi collection with his book ’Autobiography ’, translated by Simina Popa, and for me this is a dream come true. Also, it was hard for me to understand why Martin Amis, one of the most influential and innovative voices of British contemporary literature was not being translated. In the case of Paul Auster, I must admit this is my favourite of all his books – ’Moon Palace’, translated by Michaela Niculescu. I believe the role of a publishing house is also to educate the taste of readers. I do not think is right not to have masterpieces in our libraries because they were translated and published 20 years ago and reediting is seen as not having any sense. Unfortunately, many people in the book industry do not understand the value of reediting. Its purpose is to keep on the market and among the readers’options, a number of masterpieces. This is how the reediting of ’I, Claudius’, a historical novel by Robert Graves, translated by Silvian Iosifescu, is justified.



    The most awaited come back in Romanian poetry, this is how literary critic Mihai Iovanel describes the poetry book of Ruxandra Novac, published as part of the Anansi collection : Ruxandra Novac is, in a way, the reason behind the Anansi Blues poetry series. I say this because when we decided to publish this poetry book, entitled ’Alwarda’, the collection was almost fully sketched. It was when we decided to publish Ruxandra Novac’s volume that we thought of a series devoted entirely to poetry. Starting this year, we will publish the work of the 2020 Nobel Prize winner in literature, Louise Gluck. When the award was announced, many people said on social networks that they had never heard of her, although she has been a heavy name of the American poetry in the last 50 years. I promise more people will hear of Louise Gluck in Romania as well.



    Also part of the Anansi collection are volumes that won the world’s most important literature prizes in 2020, such as L’Anomalie, that brought French writer Hervé Le Tellier the Goncourt Prize, the book of Maggie O’Farrell, that brought her the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the novel The Discomfort of Evening, by Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, awarded with The International Booker Prize, and also Shuggie Bain, the debut novel of the Scottish writer Douglas Stuart, that won the The Booker Prize 2020.