A masterpiece of European prose: Ioana Prvolescu presents her novel Where the Dogs Bark in three languages

Ioana Prvolescu is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of the Romanian Capital. However, she was born in 1960 in Kronstadt – Romanian Brasov, Hungarian coppersmith. If you want to be very precise, then the city was called Orașul Stalin, or Stalin City. Her novel also takes place in this city; In the Romanian original it is called “Inocenții” (The Innocents) – her first work, published with German translation in 2021 (see review in Siebenbrgische Zeitung).

Independent author and presenter Josef Palaz (Nuremberg), who also organized the exhibition “Foreigner: Reliable. Hermannstadt: Kronstadt “Kronstadt” curated and accompanied by Ioana Prvolescu during the reading. The writer read selected passages from the Roman original and, while reading from the German translation, repeatedly transmitted the word to Gertrude Palazs (Nuremberg).

“Women Writers Who Appear in Voiletons New Zurich newspaper or the General Frankfurt Palaz said in his introductory presentation, “Reflections on Iwana B.” This also applies to them: SZ next to FAZ and the NZ Only one of the main German-language daily newspapers, which honored the novel from the famous Vienna Zsolnay-Verlag with a detailed review. The novel “Life Begins on Friday” (“Viaţa ncepe vineri”, 2009) made the author famous beyond the borders of Romania; It is now available in more than ten languages, including English and French translation. She has received numerous awards for her work, most recently in 2018 with the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel Diestimme (“O voce”).

Ioana Prvulescu comes from the great tradition of European prose. The author trained her linguistic sense with her most important representatives – Rainer Maria Rilke, Antoine de Saint-Exupery or Milan Kundera, whose works were translated into Romanian. In response to a question from the medium, Prvolescu said the reader can find an explanation for how she came up with her novel “Where the Dogs Bark in Three Languages” in the book itself and, more precisely, in her autobiography. When she was 21 or 22 years old, she tried to write a novel on the same topic. Today you take a critical look at the work called “The Venetian Mirror”: as a young woman you cannot write a good novel unless you are Thomas Mann. It took me nearly ten years to rediscover the topic. Her mother’s illness shook her own world. Prvulescu sought and found support in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A sentence from Aljoscha Karamazow stuck with her: “If you can take many memories with you to life, you will be saved for the rest of your life.” childhood. They were Prvolescu’s psychological salvation and the starting point for her novel – the only one of her novels written in Kronstadt.

The novel conveys many excellently researched details about the history of Kronstadt, and features accurate descriptions of the sights and types of people in the city. Poetry and Truth: What role do they play in your work, Joseph Palaz asked. According to the author, the novel combines originality and imagination. It is a novel about her childhood. The multifamily house in which the four children live, from whose point of view the events are described, also comes from this childhood. It’s the action scene and its actual main actor. Some of the events that appear in it happened in one way or another. However, the story it tells is a fictional one.

The connotations of the original Roman title “Inocenții”, “the innocents”, according to Joseph Balaz, differ from the connotations of the German translation “Where Dogs Bark in Three Languages”. Depending on the language in which the novel is read, the reader is placed in a different context of reception from the start. Is this different choice of title a conscious publishing strategy? Yes, according to Ioana Prvulescu. The Innocents has appeared repeatedly on the covers of other books in the past. “Where Dogs Bark in Three Languages” (a quote from the novel) sounded more provocative and attracted more attention.

The Roman title highlights the issue of “guilt” or “innocence”. These are problematic terms, especially when it comes to children. Just as we know today that Stalin, Hitler, and Putin were the bad guys, the children of that time also understood how to distinguish between good and evil. The author sees “history” itself as an evil force that makes people guilty or eliminates them. Exceptions to this rule are rare. However, children cannot take responsibility for evil, nor can they be guilty. Children who have been found innocent are now dying in Ukraine. Or they come to other European countries with their parents as refugees. According to Ioana Prvulescu, you often encounter them at Bucharest train station. However, like the children in her novel, they have a limited awareness of the evil that is happening around them.

The German title of the novel Balaz and Provolescu agrees that it conveys its message to multiethnicity, a feature of Transylvania in general and Brasov in particular, where “dogs have been barking in three languages” for many centuries. However, translation is always an interpretation of meaning and a shift in semantic emphasis, and the translator, says Prvolescu, quoting the Israeli writer Amos Oz, is like a musician trying to play a violin concerto on the piano. She feels particularly indebted to the translator of her novel, Georges Esch, who also translated other works of Romanian literature, such as “The Forest of the Hanged Man” (“Pădurea spnzuraților”) by Livio Ripriano, into German. In contrast, Palazs said Eshet succeeded in transmitting the strong visual character of the narrative by switching from Romanian to German and in making the novel accessible to those who would not “bark in three” in another language with little loss of meaning.

Lilia Antipov and Joseph Palaz

You will soon find a short version of the video recording of the reading in the online HDO series “Read the authors!” On: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePUTnR6ShMY&list=PL7RKX9eh_WfQBx2lPfO_9mbjhncNpu-82