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Support for this publication has been provided by a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute's Translation and Publication Support program.

by Sorana Gurian

translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh
cover and frontispiece by Karel Teige

Sorana Gurian (1913-56) debuted in 1946 with an autobiographical novel (later translated into French) and
the collection of short fiction, Episodes Between Twilight
and Darkness. Exploring corporeality, desire, and sexuality from the female perspective, Gurian employs many of the devices associated with modernism: inner monologue; shifting tenses, perspectives, and voices; dream sequences. Her women unapologetically exercise their agency through
casual hookups,professional independence, illicit activities (she was thought to be a French spy), and even suicide while transgressing traditional gender roles and marital propriety. This so incensed the male critics of the day that they vented their moral outrage by labeling the collection “vulgar,” “scandalous,” “decadent,” thereby consigning Gurian’s work
to oblivion for many decades, even though she had been prominent among interwar Romanian modernists and editor
of a major periodical. In the last year of her life, bedridden in Paris and losing her battle against cancer, she was visited by Czesław Miłosz, who came away so impressed he had to ruefully remark: “The name of Sorana Gurian will not be preserved in the chronicles of humanity.” It is to translator Gabi Reigh’s great credit that she took this remark as a summons.

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