A Winter Night in Bucharest

 

A Winter Night in Bucharest*

 

 

A winter night in Bucharest. While reading Sebastian, I repeatedly lifted my eyes from the pages of the book to look at the sky concealed by a leaden-hued cloak. Millions of snow-flakes were drifting about in endless silvery streams. Neither the Greater Bear nor Vega were visible, however I knew that they were shining as always, in the clear, blue sky of Calcutta. I had spent numberless nights looking at the Greater Bear! Isn't it strange, after all, to find out that the same constellation prompted a writer from a far-off country to write such a fascinating play? Everything – the inspiration, the atmosphere, the characters in The Nameless Star was extremely familiar to me, so that I had the feeling I was reading in translation an Indian play. Undoubtedly, Mihail Sebastian is a writer of universal appeal, a fact that was confirmed by the great success the play, adapted by me into Bengali, scored with audiences. The actors themselves were deeply moved.

Such a communication demonstrates the numerous spiritual affinities between the Romanian and Indian peoples. For otherwise, our literatures would not betray so many similarities in so many respects, a fact that holds good particularly in the case of Bengali literature. Our beautiful landscape has inspired ballads and folk songs of a matchless, extraordinary wealth. No folk musician from Bengal has experienced the joy of playing his flute in mountains like those of Eminescu and Sadoveanu’s Moldavia; however, the eternal green and wide expanses of the Ganges were able to inspire a poetry boasting an equal truthfulness and purity.

The fact is significant that in our countries, folklore remains the cradle of literature, and in both cases poetry preceded written prose. Frequently, the best criteria for assessing prose writing are still established by comparing them with the values of poetry: we examine the sonority, poetical resourcefulness, metaphors, nature and love.

This probably accounts for the remarkable echo, among the readers in Calcutta, of the Bengali rendering of Eminescu's poems. In Eminescu's work we find that harmonious blending of love, nature and philosophy, characteristic, for example, of the poetical creation of Rabindranath Tagore, elements assimilated by the Romanian poet from Buddhist Philosophy and Kalidasa's verse. 

 

*Didi - Amita Bhose , Romanian Review. No.1, 1976, pp.56-58