Discussion | Local and Universal, Traditional and Modernist: Ion Pillat and the Art of Translation

The interbellum age - a time of great artistic turmoil in Central and Eastern Europe and in Romania in particular - was dominated by two antimonies. The debate between traditionalism and modernism that had started at the turn of the 20th century continued to dominate the aesthetic agenda of Romania in the interwar period. Traditionalism meant truthfulness to an autochthonous view of identity, valorizing what Virgil Nemoianu termed the “tamed Romanticism” of local culture. In contrast, modernism was oriented to Western universal models of change and progress; being modern meant being “simultaneous” with Western culture.

In this intricate and aesthetically contradictory landscape, Ion Pillat’s vast oeuvre of translation exemplifies the complexity of South-Eastern European culture. A devotee of local and traditionalist poetry, Pillat at the same time American poetry (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edna St.Vincent Millay, Robert Frost), German poetry (from F.W. Klopstock and J.W. Goethe, Fr. Hölderlin through R.M. Rilke). He admired the Italian Paolo Buzzi and Spanish poets Ruben Dario, Antonio Machado, and J.R. Jimenez. His French translations, which include almost complete volumes by Charles Baudelaire and Francis Jammes, are a panopticum of French poetry starting with thePléiade and ending with Symbolism and Modernism.

Participants in the event: Virgil Nemoianu, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, a specialist in the history of ideas and aesthetic theory, author of, among others: The Taming of Romanticism (1984), A Theory of the Secondary (1989),The Triumph of Imperfection (2006), Postmodernism and Cultural Identities. Conflicts and Coexistence (2010); Alexandru Munteanu - filmmaker, author of documentaries about Ion Pillat and the Pillat family. The event will include the projection of a documentary film.