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Annals of “Dunărea de Jos” University of GALAŢI
Fascicle XIII, New Series.
Issue 28, XVI (XXVII), 2009
pp. 66-71
EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGES.
A SORESCU-LARKIN INTERCULTURAL CASE
Daniela Ţuchel
66
Language
and
Literature
1. Introduction
Postmodern man needs ‘metaknowledge’ – knowledge acquired through the
inferential mode. The following is a free transposition of Nora Iuga’s (2005) statement at the
Neptun International Festival (“Zile şi Nopţi de Literatură”) in September 2005. She says: let
us think of the stubbornness of a writer in search of a perfect match between written
expression and the form of the thought not yet taught to speak out. Just imagine the
economy. Anything useless would be left out, every ‘noise’ would be retired, every ‘că’,
‘cum’, ‘care’, ‘căci’, ‘acum’, ‘atunci’, and so forth. We might be floating, continually ellipting
and spinning out a language pierced like a lace. Readers would be enabled to pull through a
coloured string off their own silence. It could be unimaginably beautiful! (“Dar ce să facă un
scriitor care se încăpăţînează să scrie, nu cum se vorbeşte, ci cum se gîndeşte: să scrii ca întrun
amor perfect cînd forma scrisă a gîndului s-ar suprapune total peste forma gîndului care
n-a învăţat încă să vorbească. Vă daţi seama ce economie s-ar face? Am elimina tot ce e de
prisos, am scoate la pensie toţi paraziţii care ne bruiază emisia, pe ‘că’ şi pe ‘cum’ şi pe ‘care’
şi pe ‘căci’ şi pe ‘acum’ şi pe ‘atunci’ şi cîte altele; am pluti într-o elipsă continuă – o limbă cu
găurele ca o dantelă prin care orice cititor îşi poate trasa panglica colorată a propriei tăceri.
Nici nu vă daţi seama cît ar putea fi de frumos!”)
The present paper has left behind history and traces contemporary stories and
identities born out of compactness and not expansion, out of lacunar economy and not of
periphrastic, reiterated, appositely or appositionally functional pieces.
By means of the parallel addressed in this article, we will try to manage a “site” in the
spirit of Christopher Tindale from whom we quote (2004: 3):
“As a ‘site’, the argumentative situation is a nongeographical space, located in and
created by discourse. We inhabit such spaces with different facility, some of us with ease,
others with discomfort. Yet they are crucial to our self-understanding and our
understanding of others.”
So much for the operation preliminary to understanding and interpreting space. In
time, the basic operation suggested by the text of the two poems reproduced below is
syncopation in a cognitive sense. That means to say that the experience reduces the number of
events in the temporal string. Marin Sorescu chooses to represent one’s last biographical
stage by the emergence of the spider’s web, of the bodily weakness and of the soul’s
separation – an evolutionary development compressed to three moments of observation.
Philip Larkin has a time-line of two longer and one shorter mid-positioned spans recording
processes: of darkness setting in, of a sheet slowly drawn over and of hands loaded down.
These notable process occurrences are compressed by syncopation. Now let us consider the