The Society for Romanian Studies announces the winner of the Third Biennial SRS Book Prize for 2015: Sean Cotter’s Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (Rochester, 2014). The book prize committee, consisting of Holly Case (Cornell, History, Chair), James Augerot (University of Washington, Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Vladimir Solonari (University of Central Florida, History) solicited nominations for the best book published in English in any field of Romanian studies (including Moldova) in the humanities or social sciences.
The books this year were of very high quality. In the end, Sean Cotter’s book stood out as an exceptional example of rigorous scholarship and original argument. The book wonders “Under what conditions could literary translation move to the center of the national imagination?” To do so, he makes the “minor” status of Romanian culture into an interpretive mechanism, largely through following the careers of Lucian Blaga, Constantin Noica, and Emil Cioran in the aftermath of the Second World War. Being minor is not merely a matter of size or scale, but a matter of nature and type, a “translated nation,” as he calls it. The Soviet occupation prompted Cotter’s protagonists to “rethink the country in minor terms.” Tracing literary debates, personal dilemmas, and translations of their work and ideas both within and beyond Romania, Cotter shows that the essence of “minor” cultures can be read through careful analysis of translation practices.
The committee also recognizes Moshe Idel’s Mircea Eliade: From Magic to Myth (Peter Lang, 2013) with an honorable mention. Idel presents Eliade in an admiring light, yet does not hesitate to include the various blemishes in the wide-ranging career of one of the best-known Romanian writers of the twentieth Century.