I don’t quite remember when I first started to feel in America the same stress, the same knot in the stomach, I felt in Romania whenever I had to express a point of view that I knew was going to be controversial or contested. An opinion, a position that might attract negative attention and open me up for criticism from a wide range of stakeholders, from employers to friends and random people to family. For in America, there are, contrary to what an outsider might perceive, numerous topics that are taboo and whose very mention can get one in trouble. Not with the law, of course, as the case would be with true and legalized censorship, but with those around, with society. And that can impact a person’s safety, career and even livelihood. But I’m getting ahead of myself… And I am also sensing that some of my readers might be unduly and too quickly overjoyed by my lines here… Those I must warn that I’m not really saying what you think I’m saying.
Having grown up within a paradigm in which saying what you truly believed was almost never a good idea, the sentiment of freedom I experienced in the early 1990s after the fall of the dictatorship in Romania was truly unique. And sadly, it now seems like I will not be able to find that feeling again. And most shockingly for me, not even in America.
If I am to look back at when I started to feel that you couldn’t quite express yourself openly in Romania, I think it would have to be around the fall of 1995. Earlier that year, I had started to publish short magazine reviews and opinion pieces in what was then the most prestigious cultural weekly in the country, România literară. I felt proud of my achievement and thought that if I made it into the pages of such a prestigious magazine, then truly the sky must be the limit for what I could achieve in the future. Towards the end of that summer, I submitted a rather caustic piece to the magazine about an instance of vandalism that I had witnessed in my hometown, where I was spending the summer break. The newly installed bust of an interwar thinker and philosopher from our town had been sprayed with paint and several bicycle tires had been wrapped around it. As it so happens, the bust was in front of the main building of the town library, where I spent quite a bit of time, and I couldn’t help but encountering the results of that act of vandalism.
The piece was published in România literară with minor edits, and, to my surprise, it triggered a wave of negative and critical reactions in the town newspaper, reactions that ranged from mild head shakes to vitriolic ad hominem attacks aimed at my ethnic heritage as a Hungarian, at my family not having deep roots in the town, and having moved to the southern city from northern Transylvania, and so on and so forth. The signatories were local poets, teachers, and other public figures, from what I can remember. Three separate editions of the local newspaper dedicated a full newspaper page to my impious article accusing me of not understanding the value of the province as cultural margin. I was twenty and it suddenly felt that the entire cultural elite of my hometown had decided to erase me, to eliminate me altogether from public life. I did not regret my article at the time, although I did regret writing about an act of vandalism against the memory of a thinker who, as we learned later, was the inspiration behind Romania’s interwar fascist movement. More than the attacks in the local media, I was shocked by the fact that one of the senior editors of România literară who happened to be himself from my hometown, called me at his desk one day in the fall, and told me that I should have been at least more diplomatic in my criticism, and that if he had been in the office at the time when I submitted my text, he would have edited it heavily and perhaps not even have published it altogether.
His reaction—more than the combined efforts of the local cultural and intellectual elites to take me down and defend the pride of the cultural margin and even more perhaps than my mother’s tears of shame that I had made myself and my entire family the target of sustained public attacks—truly shook me to the core. I had right then and there, in the offices of România literară, my first taste of what it must have been like for many of the writers and journalists who had continued to be active since before the 1989 revolution and the political regime change, to constantly watch what they said, so that they would not fall prey to the state censors and have their publications taken off the market or, even worse, tried for crimes against the social order or for inciting to disorderly conduct. Having been just a child during those last years of the dictatorship, I did not have to deal with censorship beyond the self-imposed one that parents were teaching children at the time: “You can never talk to anyone outside about what we say in the house” and other such advice. So, while I knew well what it meant not to say anything critically outside the house, I did not expect to encounter the need to censor or even tone down my valid (in my mind, at least) critique of an act of vandalism.
Sadly, it was going to be also at România literară that I later encountered a true act of censorship, coming from the same senior editors, and which led in turn to my decision to quit the publication altogether. It was sometime in 1998 when one of the major cultural magazines of the time, Secolul 20, dedicated an entire issue to Japan and Japanese literature. By then, I was almost the in-house “expert” for cultural magazine reviews at România literară and, as a budding expert in Japan as well, it made perfect sense for me to be the one to write the review on the Secolul 20 issue on Japan. Further, I had also contributed to one of the literary translations included in the issue. I had already published a couple of short stories translations from the work of writers like Kawabata and Akutagawa, but in this case, I had worked with one of my university professors to translate about thirty pages of a Japanese play signed by writer and literary historian Katō Shūichi. So, I was understandably excited to see the magazine with the translation included and write about the trove of materials about Japan coming out in Romanian.
Shockingly, when the magazine came out, the translated play listed my professor and the magazine editor-in-chief, a celebrated postwar Romanian poet, as translators. I could not believe my eyes. My name was only mentioned in a footnote with a message of gratitude for having helped with the publication of the play in “optimal conditions”. Magazine in hand, I rushed to the office of Secolul 20, which was only a few doors down from those of România literară. I asked the secretary to see the editor-in-chief, hoping to ask for an explanation. I was told that he was not there and that he would be gone for several days. I also asked her how it was possible that he was listed as the “translator” of a piece from Japanese. Could he, perchance, be speaking Japanese? I inquired almost mockingly, knowing very well that the poet did not have any knowledge of the language that I have already dedicated several years to learning. The person behind the desk answered that he did not, but that she knew for a fact that he had to do a lot of editing on the final version of the translation and make it “sound natural in Romanian”, hence it made perfect sense that he should be listed as one of the translators.
I had no way of knowing what kind of edits the famous poet had made on the half of the play that had been translated by the professor, but I went straight home and compared the published text with my own handwritten notes and the final version I had turned in for publication. There were barely any edits on my half of the translation. I felt furious at the injustice that had been committed against me, so betrayed and angry that such a thing was even possible and proceeded immediately to write my review. Despite the injustice that had been done against me, I made a point of writing a positive review and of expressing my enthusiasm that Secolul 20 had published an issue dedicated entirely to Japan. I did, however, end my article by expressing surprise at the fact that the celebrated man of letters who was the editor-in-chief had mastered Japanese so well that he could now translate a relatively difficult literary text with references to late 17th century characters and events. I then sarcastically congratulated him for the well-done translation and wished him luck in his future Japanese literature translation endeavors.
I did not know what to expect, but when I was called by another senior editor, the one in charge of the review pages, to talk about my review, I knew that something wasn’t right. I took all my notes with me, hoping to show her that I had done the translation myself and that there was no amount of editing that justified the translation being stolen from me. I met not with one, but three of the senior editors, including the editor-in-chief. They all agreed with me that the poet had not translated the Japanese play and asked me to change my review. I told them that that was completely unfair and that we were encouraging an act of intellectual theft. I refused to change my review. We can’t publish it like this, the editor-in-chief declared. No, one of the others agreed. We can’t do that to the poet. He’s our friend. If we publish this, it will kill him.
I couldn’t believe my ears. I stood there, in front of three major names of contemporary Romanian literature, in absolute disbelief. They were not going to publish my review. They were going to cover this thing up and let the poet get away with claiming a translation he never did from a language he had no idea about. I left România literară the next month and rarely published there after that.
Two years after my departure from România literară, I embarked upon my American adventure. And although I wasn’t leaving my home country to emigrate for good, experiences like those above were part of what I did want to leave behind. Imposture, intellectual theft, academic nepotism, and the impossibility of publicly exposing them were not what I hoped to find ahead in the country of all possibilities, where the hardworking and the meritorious succeeded. Or so the myth went. But, more than anything, I really no longer wanted to feel censored, to carry around that knot, that rock in the stomach. Either with self-imposed censorship or with censorship imposed from outside, by others against me. In my mind, that wasn’t freedom. So, there was no way that there would be “censorship” of any kind in the “land of the free.” And for a good while, there did not seem to be. Or, at least, I didn’t experience it. As I would learn quite a bit later, censorship in America is much more insidious than what I had experienced before. (to be continued)