While the Romanian language is increasingly less mastered in vulnerable environments with high dropout rates, and on the other hand, Gen Z youth feel they can express themselves better in English than in Romanian, Sylvain Audet-Găinar’s story is the exact opposite, one of fascination for the Romanian language.

The Frenchman Sylvain Audet loved his wife and her family from Romania so much that, completely of his own free will, he thought it only natural to take the name Găinar, knowing full well the meaning of the word.

A teacher of French as a foreign language, Sylvain lived in Romania for a few years and fell in love with our language. He started writing about Romanian expressions and proverbs and recording clips for social media. He quickly and unexpectedly gained popularity among both Romanians and the French.

“My goal was that when we had a child, I would be able to understand my wife’s language when she spoke to our kid. It was incredibly important to me that there wouldn’t be a disconnect, an imbalance, or even a cultural hierarchy,” the author explains.

Today, their son speaks both French and Romanian equally, and Sylvain Audet-Găinar is working on a Romanian language textbook for French speakers. We met him in Paris, and he told us his story, with the entire conversation taking place exclusively in Romanian.

***

Sylvain was born in a rural area near Lyon. He went to high school in the city, which would change his personal life and map out his path toward a career in linguistics.

“My high school was partnered with a school in Târgu Mureș. So, when I was in the tenth grade, they suggested I become pen pals with someone from Târgu Mureș. For a few years already, I had been very drawn to this country because when I was 9, I watched the 1989 Revolution on TV and it shocked me. Those images really stuck with me, everything seemed so cruel, so strange. I didn’t understand, like, is this what a real revolution looks like? It wasn’t idealized like what we learned about revolutions in school.

So, when I was in the 10th grade and they offered me the chance to write to someone there, I gladly accepted. I received the address of a girl named Maria Găinar. Today, she is my wife.”

“We started writing letters to each other in French, because I didn’t know a single word of Romanian back then. I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of the city. After two years of corresponding, we were supposed to actually meet, the Romanian students were going to visit us, and we were going to go there. But the exchange fell through because we were the only two still writing to each other. The others weren’t.

So I waited a year, started university, and saved up money to pay for a plane ticket to finally see her.

Did you send photos to each other? Did you know what she looked like?

Yes, but back then, photos were very rare and sometimes older. It took time to get a picture taken, or it would get lost. I think in the photo she sent me, she was a few years younger than she was when we actually met.

It wasn’t like the days of WhatsApp, where you send a picture in a second. And when I went, I stayed for a month.

At her place?

Yes, her parents agreed to it. She invited me to come over because of the Solar Eclipse. And that’s pretty much how I entered the Romanian world.

And you fell in love with Maria, basically.

Exactly. I genuinely fell in love with her, but also with her language—the way it sounds, the way it’s hard to quite catch. It feels like such a playful language that it makes you want to learn it, just to reach a level where you can have fun with it too,” Sylvain tells us with a smile on his face at a café in Paris.

Back then, he was a Literature student studying French and comparative literature. To be closer to Maria, he signed up for an Erasmus year at the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest. Later, she got a scholarship in Strasbourg, and they both moved to France.

“I finished my studies there, and she did her PhD there. And we started moving back and forth between the two countries. I worked for the French Embassy in Romania, then in Sibiu, and in Cluj. At some point, I got a position in Bucharest, and our child was born in Bucharest.

I became a French teacher for foreigners. That’s what I did for many years. I was a French lecturer at the ‘Lucian Blaga’ University in Sibiu, but I also taught at the kindergarten of the French High School in Bucharest. I really loved it; I worked there for four years and it was a lot of fun. I liked this job because I worked with very different profiles, with very young children who couldn’t read yet, so I had to come up with very creative games and activities.

And I also worked with adults, sometimes with very little education, even illiterate—that was in Brussels.”

Was Maria your Romanian teacher, or were you self-taught?

“I was partly self-taught, but she also helped me a lot. Maria used to read to me when I was a beginner. I would ask her to read to me in Romanian. She read me the entire Harry Potter series, for example. I learned a ton of words. Though, mind you, not all of them are very easy to use in everyday speech. ‘Cauldron’ (ceaun), for instance, I haven’t really used since then, hahaha. Or ‘owl’ (bufniță).”

When we met Sylvain in Paris, he and his family had just returned from a funeral in Romania. Half-joking, half-serious, he knows exactly what an “alms” means.

He is incredibly attached to our country and his family here, and his interest in the Romanian language naturally evolved toward writing and translation.

“I started translating from Romanian into French, but I got a bit tired of translating other people’s books and figured I’d be better off writing my own books exactly the way I wanted. That’s how I started writing. I was living in Bucharest at the time, and my wife was pregnant. We had just found out we were having a boy. I was at an antique bookstore and stumbled upon a small, anonymous photo.

It moved me deeply to see a picture of a 4 or 5 year old boy whom I knew nothing about, whose life story no one was telling. I was thinking about our own boy and decided I wanted to tell him the history of Romania, and try to give that child in the photo a story of his own.

That’s how I started writing a detective novel. It felt like the most suitable format, given the mystery of it all. And I wanted it to be funny too, because that’s just my personality.

I started reading those chapters out loud, but it was actually a family novel. I would read a chapter every time we went for an ultrasound checkup. Then I started making such good progress that I realized it was becoming a real book, and I actually ended up writing a trilogy.”

The three novels written by Sylvain Audet-Găinar, inspired by the photo found in the antique bookstore, have been translated into Romanian: Tămbălău la București (Ruckus in Bucharest), Țap ispășitor (Scapegoat), and Balamuc la București (Madhouse in Bucharest).

His most recent book, launched right at the Romanian booth at the Paris Book Fair, is a volume about 80 Romanian words, explained in Sylvain’s signature style – “80 mots de Roumanie.”

“The format of this book is very strict. It is a series of 10 volumes, and Romania is the 10th one. You have to choose 80 words from a language, and each word gets a text of 2,500 characters maximum. So it’s a huge stylistic constraint. The publisher told me to make it more about myself. And I had a lot of stories to tell.

For example, I talk about it in the first chapter: when I was 19, I went to Bucharest, transitioning from being a teenager to a man. And I used to go get a shave because I liked being surrounded by Romanian men, to understand culturally how the Romanian way of being a man works.

And from there, I start explaining from my point of view what it means to be a man in Romania. So each word is actually just a pretext.”

Sylvain’s connection to Romania spans over 25 years now. It began in a communist-era apartment in Târgu Mureș and now encompasses a rich linguistic universe, a Romanian-French son, and a community of over 20,000 people who follow the funny clips the author posts on Instagram.

“What were the first things that amazed you about Romania?

The carpets, for example. I found it amazing.

The ones on the walls or on the floor?

Hahaha. On the floor. Then the sheer curtains. The smell in the building’s stairwell. The sound of cars when they put it in reverse. How could I, a country boy from France, look at a communist apartment block in Romania? I talk about this in the book. And actually, the book isn’t just about me. That’s what I found very interesting as a writer, that I was like a vector for an analysis. I try to bring a fair, honest look at Romanians, at Romania, something balanced.”

“How did your family and close friends react to you falling in love with Romania back when you were 19 or 20?

My folks worried when I left for Bucharest for a whole year. It was one thing to go for a month to see your pen pal, and another to be gone for a year. I couldn’t afford to come home often back then, and phone calls were expensive. I would call once every two weeks, and other than that, we wrote letters, I actually kept them.

I have really great parents; they didn’t project their fear onto me. They only told me after I got back: ‘Wow, we’re so glad you’re back, because we were actually scared for a year.’ Either way, I had parents who let me grow up pretty free. They didn’t restrict me too much. That’s the advantage of living in the countryside. You have space, go figure it out. That was pretty much their philosophy on life. And I’m grateful they didn’t box me into a specific way of looking at things. That was my luck. I was also lucky that I met my wife at 19 and that we were actually able to grow up together. We became adults together.”

“Did Romanian literature help you get closer to the Romanian language?

Yes, I read Romanian literature too. At the beginning, I was actually quite ambitious. My first book was Enigma Otiliei (Otilia’s Enigma). I don’t know why, but I found the title very catchy. I regretted my choice after 20 pages, but I pushed through to the end and ended up loving it. I think I didn’t understand 50% of the book, but I loved the atmosphere.

Then I started reading contemporary literature. Lately, I really like Lavinia Braniște. She is super, super talented, and I had the honor of translating her book Camping into French, it’s coming out in September.

And right now, I read a lot of children’s books for our son. We laugh out loud together.

When I look back at the beginning, I know I started writing literature so that my son would have reference books and learn about his culture and history for pleasure. Now he is very proud that he was born in Bucharest, and all my fiction books have the word ‘Bucharest’ on them. It was incredibly important, symbolically, for me, so that it would be something symbolic for him too.”

“But slowly, surely, I realized that what I was saying was also very useful for others. I started making the videos just to entertain myself. Then I realized a whole movement had started. People actually began sharing them with friends and colleagues. Some French people would tell me that, for example, on Monday mornings over coffee, they watch Sylvain’s video to teach their colleagues about the Romanian language. French people in mixed couples.

Or that the videos are important for some Romanian children living in France who hadn’t learned Romanian because they felt it was just an extra, useless language.

Now, every time I meet Romanians in the diaspora, I find out that these videos have, for instance, made kids actually want to speak, to learn strange and funny expressions. And now I feel a sense of responsibility; every time I post a video, I know people will watch closely and feel encouraged. People leave very long comments giving me all kinds of ideas or expressions I’ve never heard of in my life. I read them eagerly, linguistically and humanly speaking, it really feeds me intellectually.”

Sylvain confesses that he does, however, have one regret regarding the Romanian language. From one year to the next, he notices that people’s vocabulary is becoming increasingly limited, whether due to social media consumption or because they don’t read as much as before. In fact, the decline in reading interest is felt even in France, the heart of European culture.

“I’ve been able to observe the way people’s lexicon, their vocabulary, has shrunk. At one point I thought, okay, maybe it’s because I master the language well enough now and I’m just getting bored. Or people have become boring because they don’t use more interesting words anymore.

When I hear someone with a rich vocabulary, I feel so happy, so nourished to hear those rarer words; I feel like they’re giving me a gift. It’s obvious that people don’t read anymore.

I belong to a writers’ union created by Balzac in the 19th century to protect authors’ rights against publishers. And every year we receive a report on the status of writers or readers. Right now, 90% of French readers are women. And there are sociological explanations for this. Reading is not encouraged among men at all. It doesn’t look good to be a man who reads. If you read, you’re already considered too feminine or something like that. And this has long-term consequences for boys. If a boy doesn’t see his father reading, he tends to distance himself from books too.”

Sylvain Audet-Găinar now teaches at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris, where 100 languages are studied, including Romanian. He works with first-year students, teaching them courses in general linguistics and anthropology. In parallel, he has written the first chapters of his Romanian textbook for French speakers and is working on a new fiction book.

He was recently in Bucharest for the launch of his book about Romanian words. In the long run, he doesn’t know if his family will stay settled in France or in Romania, but he is determined to keep developing other people’s interest in the Romanian language.

“Romania is a part of me. I don’t know, I feel at home. When I go there, I’m just like the Romanians, very critical of what’s happening there, I follow the news from there, I just don’t have citizenship to be able to vote. Maybe I’ll get it, who knows. I’ve never really thought about it. I feel like it would be a beautiful symbol. I don’t know how much I actually feel Romanian. In a way, I think I became one without meaning to. It happened naturally, to the point where it’s just a part of me.”

This article is part of the”French week” series, a project by Cultura la Dubă, supported by BNP Paribas

The post The story of Sylvain Audet-Găinar, the Frenchman in love with the Romanian language: “It’s such a playful language that it makes you want to learn it just so you can have fun with it too.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

RO

“I felt a strong aggression from the outside, I needed to respond and didn’t know how.”

Alexandra Badea’s story has it’s roots in a Romania that forever marked the generations raised under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s didctatorship and their children.

Born in Bucharest in 1980, Alexandra’s path seemed to be similar to that of the entire youth of those times.

“In the 90’s there was a tendency to assure a child’s future. There were a few ways: Medicine School, Law School, Economics Academy, Polytechnic.” Her parents insisted that she chose one of those paths.

But their daughter had discovered the fascinating universe of theater and felt the need to express through art feelings that she couldn’t express through mathematics.

“Going to school in the Central School in Bucharest, I would see through the window what was happening in the back yard of the Bulandra Theater – Icoanei Garden. I would watch them unload the sets, actors rehearsing.

At one point I skipped school with a friend and actually went inside the theater, during rehearsals, we made friends with the dressers, who gave us the tour of the theater, went inside the actors’ cabins, the costume workshops and I was fascinated with the theater outside of the hall, the one back stage.”

That was the first contact with the theater for a teenager who had never seen a show.

“The first show that I went to was “Procust’s Bed”, directed by Cătălina Buzoianu. I liked the novel and it was in my graduation exam’s curriculum.

That was a very powerful encounter for me, an aesthetical shock and a show that I ended up seeing at least ten times during two years of high school.

That is how I startet going to many of Cătălina Buzoianu’s shows. At one point, I said something stupid to myself: if she can do this, so can I.”

She was always told that she wasn’t talented in writing or any other artistic field and she started to believe it. Directing seemed, nevertheless, a way of bringing together talented people who could express in a show, what she couldn’t otherwise.

“Since tenth grade I felt the need to speak about some things that I felt, like anger, sadness, strong emotions that hurt me. They were a type of response to the aggressive environment in which I was living, both in school and in society.

I thought that I could express through images and words what I felt, to let out all the anger I had inside.

When I said that I wanted to go to journalism, I was discouraged. I could do journalism with anything, but I should graduate from somewhere serious before that. Then I said photography. “What are you going to do at Plastic Arts? you don’t have any talent at drawing.”

This notion of talent kept coming back, that I now reject, I don’t know what talent is.

In France, they don’t talk about talent. I often do workshops with students from theater schools and if I were to mention talent, to say that one is more talented than the other, I think they’d kick me out. The notion does not exist.

They talk about skills, authenticity, singularity and work, not about talent. Theater schools in France are trying to form artists, not just actors that execute something. Artists that express a personality, that have the courage to express a point of view – I think that this should be more stressed in Romanian theater schools.

Us, in the East, tie talent to something very religious, something given, with which you are born. I disagree. If we were to talk about talent, I think it is something you can educate.

I see it as a muscle you keep training through everything that you see, through discussions, films, life experiences.”

As per the deal she made with her father, Alexandra had to get into the Academy of Economic Studies first, in order to get permission to try getting into theater direction, at UNATC. That’s how she got both an economics diploma, and a director’s diploma.

20 years later, Alexandra is today one of the most appreciated emerging theater directors in France, but also Romania. The true way of expression that led her into the French cultural elite was playwriting.

After the two universities graduated in Romania, she mastered in “Theater aesthetics and theory” in Sorbonne and settled, without intention, in Paris.

She directed her first shows on small stages in Paris, with little budget and friends rehearsing without pay.

“I did a show – Family Stories – we played it several times. I didn’t understand the system. It was very hard.

In France there are no ensembles, the director has a company, it applies to state subventions and searches for co-producers in institutionalized theatres, where there are only technicians and administrative staff working. The artistic staff is project-based”

“In France, a director does one show per year, if not one in 2-3 years. 70% of his activity is administrative.”

In total, there have been 10 years of efforts until now, in which she has not made a living out of theater. She did stories for RFI, worked with children in schools, taught theater or earned scholarships.

In the meantime, she was invited by several Romanian theaters to do shows based on plays already written. But she felt that something was missing.

“I felt like an outsider in Romania. In France, people would ask me about my accent.

My wish was to write about what I felt and I couldn’t find a play that expressed what I wanted.”

“And it happened during a visit in Romania, in that strange time between Christmas and New Year’s. It was a highly autobiographical text, a collage of scenes, monologues, lists of instructions.

It was speaking on the impossibility to adapt to a society or the other. The impossibility to assimilate the rules of society, imposed in the family.”

The text became her first play, Mode D’Emploi, (Instructions Manual), that she later sent, by mail, to a famous publishing house in France – Arche Editeur.

Only a year later she heard back.

“They called to say that they wanted to meet me and to ask if I had any other texts. They said that they wanted to publish me.

When I left the meeting, I was doubtful, I thought that they would change their minds, much like many were saying that they would come to see my shows and never showed up.”

In 2009, her first three plays – Mode D’Emploi, Controle d’identité, about the refugees that came in France in 2005, during Nicolas Sarkozy’s time, and Burnout, about working conditions in companies – were published in a single volume by Arche Editeur, made into shows by various directors all over France.

“It was a relief. My life totally changed. Theaters started opening their doors.”

And this was only the beginning. The young woman who was constantly told in school that she didn’t have talent in writing, received in 2013 The Grand Prize for Dramatic Writing, offered by the French Ministry of Culture, for the play Comminution, published at Arche Editeur.

“Nobody expected me winning this award. That includes me. I was in Mexico, I didn’t even attend the awards ceremony. “

Comminution is an X-ray of French society and was the result of a year’s work of research, during which Alexandra interviewed numerous immigrants from a small town on the outskirts of Lyon.

“Research is an essential step. I am interested in the way the wounds of history still have repercussions on today’s generations.

I met the first Algerian workers that settled here, they are living in precarious conditions, working for very little, sacrificing their lives to support those back home.

I met the wives of the workers that came here in the ’70’s, all they did was raise children, and now, at 60 years old, they were taking these language lessons, trying to learn French.”

“I understood globalization and how a decision taken here can affect the lives of people all over the world.”

The play was translated to English, German, Romanian, Portuguese and has become her most performed play.

She then wrote two novels (Zone d’amour prioritaire, 2014; Tu marches au bord du monde, 2020) and film scripts, also directing her first short films.

“I realized that my writing rhythm is faster then the rhythm of doing a show. I feel the best when I’m writing, I feel free, without administrative obstacles.”

Her own uncertain status in a foreign country, the tense relationship with her home country, but also her interest for history’s untold stories, birthed a courageous writer, noticed as a political theater author in France, on themes of corporations, globalization, colonization and surveillance.

And Alexandra Badea’s desire to tell these kind of stories grew even more since 2013, when she became a French citizen.

“It was a naturalization ceremony in which we were told that from then on, we must commit to this country’s history, with it’s glory moments and her shady zones.”

“And that perhaps, at some point, in case of war, you will have to take arms against your own country.”

That was the time she decided to read more about colonization and post-colonization. And through her art, she has brought to light scenes that were less known from France’s history.

Wajdi Mouawad, a well-known director who did George Enescu’s Oedipus opera in 2021, gave her the immense chance to do a show at one of the 5 national theaters in France – The La Colline Theatre in Paris, which he also manages.

And Alexandra Badea chose to stage a trilogy inspired by France’s history. While working on this project, she took many walks through The Père Lachaise Cemetery, right next to The La Colline Theatre.

“The first part is about a massacre of Senegalese soldiers, who came to France in World War 2, and actually liberated some territories. At the end of the war, France owed them their war payment, they were given a part and promised the rest when they returned to their home countries.

When they got back home and asked for their rights, they were shot, it was a massacre. Their numbers and even their names remain unknown, they were buried in a commune grave.

Everyone was astounded, the story had been unknown.”

The second part had it’s premiere at the prestigious Avignon Theater Festival, bringing to light an instance of several Algerians that were thrown into the Senne after asking for their rights, and in the third one she spoke about children of immigrants, brought to repopulate several rural areas of France.

The trilogy has been played even in integral shows and had great success, being played in numerous shows.

We found Alexandra, the high school student who snook into the Bulandra Theater, backstage of one of the most important theaters in France, this time as a French director, with Romanian origins.

A few steps from the theater, in the window of a bookshop, there are some of her awarded books.

But, beyond awards, Alexandra Badea’s shows and plays mean much more than prestige. They are the voice of society’s invisible people.

In Romania she wrote about the Pogrom in Iasi, in the play Perfect Composed, played at The Radu Stanca National Theater in Sibiu.

She is also equally interested in trans-generational psychology, how information is transmitted from one generation to the next and how we manage to let it go. That is what she will address in her future show – Exile – that will have it’s premiere this autumn at the Bucharest National Theater.

“We were taught to survive by not speaking our minds, by adapting, sneaking, sacrificing some things.

I don’t know if it’s a Romanian problem, maybe it’s universal, but in Romania it hurt more.”

I have wanted to write something on this theme for a while now. I want to talk about exile and the relation-ship with Romania, about anger and love, which we all feel, the desire to leave, the desire to come back, the impossibility to adapt here. But also about inheritance – education, obstacles from our families and from school.”

Alexandra Badea is settled in Paris for almost 20 years and, at least for the moment, she can not imagine living somewhere else.

I don’t see myself as an immigrant. It was an experience on which I stopped. But I’m moving, I’m not in one place.”

“I feed off cultural influences, I live in a neighborhood close to Gare de l’Est, there are African barber shops, there is a place called Little Turkey, then there is the Asian area. When I’m in Bucharest, I miss this mixture, especially in the artistic plane.

Paris is one of the few places in the world where you can almost anything being made in the world – in matters of film, theater, art shows – like an independent film from Guatemala or Cameroon.

I feed off this as a human being, not even as an artist. I need this energy. Paris is a source of energy.

She is a Knight of Arts and Letters in France, the country that has opened the doors to a universal culture for her, but she constantly comes back to her home country, with which she is trying to reconcile through theater.

“I want to speak to the Romanian audience as well. It is important, even vital to me.”

“I can’t explain why. I don’t know if I am needed, but I have this need to make something in Romania.

I said to myself that if I told untold stories from France’s history, I have to talk about the untold stories from Romania’s history.”

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Alexandra Badea, writer and director: “I am interested in the way the wounds of history still have repercussions on today’s generations.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Versiune în ROMÂNĂ

“I, for one, did not have access to professional theatre, I had access to world theatre. The circus would come to town and I would be fascinated by the fair, the clowns, by film, by countryside traditions, weddings, christenings, which for me were a kind of performance.

I believe that’s how I fell in love with theatre.”

In the heart of beautiful Bucovina, which he now calls “the centre of his world”, a teenager was discovering the charm of art as a means of spiritual salvation during the communist regime.

He would spend days on end at the cinema and library in Rădăuți and discover that the universe can be completely different from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania.

The books of Sartre, Camus or Proust brought him closer to the French language and culture, but ultimately, the writings of Caragiale and Beckett were the revelations that would change the course his entire life.

“When I first read Beckett, I was astonished by the novelty of how he put the literary text on the page. That is when I realised that play writing is a different kind of literature, not in the form of poetry or prose, but rather in the form of lines. And I absolutely loved it.”

After reading plays, he started yearning to see them on stage. And since there were no theatres in Rădăuți, he got on a train and stopped where he knew he would find what he was looking for.

“When I was in high school, I ran away from home to go to the theatre in Bucharest. Every holiday after that, I would go to the theatre in Bucharest. I would go on my own and stay at one of my classmates’ grandmother.”

Today Matei Vișniec is one of the world’s leading playwrights, and his plays are performed in dozens of countries at the biggest festivals.

Last year the President of France awarded him the title of Knight of the National Order of Merit, and in 2018 the French Ministry of Culture awarded him the title of Knight of Arts and Letters.

He often says that Romania has given him roots, while France has given him wings. And his wings started growing in 1987, when he first set foot in Paris’ Gare de l’Est.  

“My dad came to Bucharest and put me on a train. I didn’t think I would manage to cross the border. I could hardly believe this dream of mine was coming true.

I only had enough money to get to Vienna by train. I was allowed to exchange 100 dollars and bought a ticket to Vienna. There, two former colleagues of mine helped me get to Paris.”

His lucky departure came after an invitation that he received from a European intellectual aid foundation, which also offered him a scholarship of 5,000 francs for a month in the French capital.

He was also lucky enough to receive his visa at a time when Romania was at risk of losing the Most Favoured Nation clause from the US, which is why the communist regime gave many intellectuals the right to leave in order to prove to the Americans that the Romanians were free.

“Once I arrived in Paris, the first place I went to was Radio Free Europe, where the leading figures of the Romanian exile were – Monica Lovinescu, Virgil Ierunca, Paul Goma. A few days later, I applied for political asylum.”

In Paris, he came across a Romanian diaspora made up solely of intellectuals. He was offered a place in a migrant dorm where he had to share a room with 8 other people, and he was a happy man.

“I had a scholarship of 5,000 francs and couldn’t keep the money at the dorm. Virgil Ierunca kept them for me at his place. We would meet once a week and he would give me 100-200 francs.

I had my morning and my evening meals provided, I also a bed, a desk, but we had to leave the hostel at 8:30 in the morning to go looking for work. We were only allowed to come back after 18:30.

I felt great there, I would go out on the Esplanade des Invalides and feel like a king. I would go straight to the library and spend the entire day reading, at lunch time I would go down and grab a sandwich for a couple of francs, and then I would head back to the library.

I had access to books, newspapers, films, music, it was fabulous. I spent all day long there.”

Within a few days, another Romanian introduced him to the daughter of Eugène Ionesco, Marie-France Ionesco, and this is how he came to step inside the Ionesco household.

“When I set foot in Eugen Ionesco’s house, I felt as if I were in a temple. I kept looking at the books, the furniture, the chairs in there.”

Marie-France Ionesco gifted him with invitations to the performances of The Bald Soprano and The Chairs. That was the first time that the young Vișniec saw Ionesco’s plays.  

“I was astounded. It was a kind of bourgeois theatre, but with a text which shone through its lack of conventionality.”

He did not meet the great playwright because he was in Switzerland at the time. Instead, he went to a conference held by Emil Cioran.

“I did meet Cioran, but I did not insist on getting close to him, he was already quite old. And these people had already given me so many extraordinary things that I could not longer ask anything else from them.”

After all, Vișniec had his own way to go. He started with the plays he had already written in Romania, but which he had not dared to bring along for fear that they would be confiscated.

“I asked my dad to send the plays as letters, about 5 pages per letter. They would begin with “Dear Matei” and then continue with my own texts. I received a lot of plays this way, by mail.”

He began translating them into French and some French friends helped proofread them. Then, the first play he wrote in French ended up in the hands of some French actors, thus paving the way to small, independent theatres in Paris. Those were the first to understand, appreciate and stage his plays.

In the meantime, he also received two job offers – one from Radio Free Europe Munich and one from BBC London. And he was curious to see what British theatre was like. In 1988, he set off to the United Kingdom as a journalist, reporting on international news and what was happening in Romania under Ceușescu’s abusive regime. As he did not want to run into problems with the Securitate (Secret police), he published his texts under the pseudonym Andrei Sireteanu

“Ceaușescu had turned into a total madman and the international press was writing a lot about him.”  

He had a 4-year contract with the BBC, but left after less than a year, as he could not find his place as a playwright in England.

“My plays were more avant-garde, more fantastic, more absurd, they were different from the realist theatre that appeals to the English. I was perceived as an alien. So I thought that that was not the best country for me. Within 6 months I realised that my chances were simply not there.

England is a country that has evolved outside of the European avant-garde, it is an island in all possible ways. With an extraordinary theatre, but I felt better in Paris.”

He returned to Paris in October 1989 and started a PhD. In December of the same year, Romania’s communist regime fell, and Matei Vișniec was no longer a political refugee, but a free man.

He received an offer to return to Romania as director of the State Theatre in Constanta. However, he knew that his plays had already found their place in France.

“Something fabulous happened. In 1991, my plays started being performed at the Avignon Theatre Festival. I would have 2-3 plays, 5-6 performances there.”

For thirty years he continued to write plays in French, and poems and novels in Romanian.

“The French language helped me write plays and short prose, because I wrote more shortly, more concisely, with fewer words, but many effects.”

For the past 25 years, many of his writings have seen the light of day at the Contrescarpe Café, where he spends every one of his mornings. Located in an intimate square in a central area of Paris, near his house, the typically Parisian café offers him peace and inspiration. In fact, that is also the place where he arranged for us to meet.

“When I came to Paris, I would often go to the Sorbonne Library and then wander the streets. This is how I stumbled upon this square. I would buy a cup of coffe for 1.50 francs and sit here and read.

As it happened, when my daughter was born 25 years ago I moved to this neighborhood. I feel good here because I also see the ghosts of the writers who were here before.

This is where Hemingway lived, this is where he wrote his first novel. There was also a cabaret in his area that he probably went to quite often. All of the taverns that you see here were probably frequented by Hemingway.

The novel I am about to publish has been written here. It is called A Century of Fog and is about 800 pages long.

Vague Theatre was written here too. Others as well. I don’t get disturbed by the people sitting here, quite the contrary. And when I leave the café at about 12:30, I see the students who come here to grab a sandwich, which reminds me of the times when I was a student myself.”

Hemingway’s home is just a few steps away from the café. A few buildings farther, it is followed by the place where the philosopher René Descartes lived. Vișniec then shows us the house from which the French-Romanian philosopher Benjamin Fondane was picked up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, the concentration camp where he was gassed to death.

It is an entire universe fraught with history, one which Matei Visniec has left his own mark on as well. In the same neighborhood, he also shows us Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden where he has found inspiration too.

“Let me show you my rats!”

In a pen we see a few kangaroo rats, a rare species that is neither rat nor kangaroo, but looks similar to both. The unique feature of this species is that they are only animals that can survive without drinking water.  

“They are the most bizarre animals, yet they can provide fabulous moments of tenderness between mother and baby. Einstein used to say that if rats weighed 30 kilograms, they could rule the world. Well, look, here are the 30-kilo rats.”

This is how rats started cropping up in Matei Vișniec’s writings – “The King, The Rat and the King’s Fool”, “The Rat King”, but most of all, “The Preventive Disorder”, which examine human value in relation with rat value.

Since 2016, a new theatre founded in Suceava by the local municipality bears the name of Matei Vișniec. The playwright comes to Romania on a regular basis in order to visit his family, participate in the Sibiu Theatre Festival or hold conferences.

Unfortunately, his visits to Romania do not always bring him joy. One of his sorrows is that many libraries throughout the country have been closed or rendered destitute. Even the library in Rădăuți, the one which brought him closer to culture, was recently in the midst of an unfortunate situation in which the local authorities decided to cut down on the budget allocated to this cultural institution.

“It is a shame that the Library of Rădăuți was richer and more accessible to the public during the communist regime. It was located in the city centre, now it is upstairs, so you have to go look for it, because its place on the ground floor was taken by a shop.

Libraries shouldn’t be left in the lurch, but rather reimagined, reorganised, and the librarians should be prepared for a new strategy meant to attract readers.  

In France, for example, there has been a festival called “Let’s read out lout” for 20 years now, and every year, about 20.000 people participate voluntarily. What do they do? They visit schools and other institutions and read out lout, which is a completely different experience from simply telling a child that they should read. A miracle occurs. This is just one example of how you can pull children away from their mobile phones.

Libraries should also become a place to socialise. Not to mention that in France, they are no longer called bibliothèques, but rather mediathèques, because they offer films, music and other activities.

If you educate a child only through images, the mechanisms for concept-making and concept-based reflection disappear. When you read a story, you imagine whatever you want.

If 2 million children watch Snow White, a film produced by Hollywood, 2 million children will have the same picture of Snow White.

If 2 million children read Snow White, there will be 2 million different perspectives on it. That is the difference between letting oneself be indoctrinated by Hollywood as opposed to reading and letting one’s mind wander.”

France continues to be a model of a society that breathes culture as well as a country which is “generous to foreigners”, as the Romanian playwright describes it. Now, for the first time in history, the Avignon Theatre Festival has a foreign director – a Portuguese.

In Romania, not only are no foreign directors invited, but the Romanian ones sometimes remain in office for 20 years, so there is little chance of reconstruction at the moment.

“Here this happens only if a director builds his own theatre, financed with public resources, but they can stay in office for life if they are the ones to have laid the foundations.

By comparison, national theatres change their directors constantly, once every four years or with the possibility of extension for another four years. The way I see it, the great tragedy for Romanian theatre is not that a person remains in office for years on end.

The real drama is that new theatres, independent theatres funded by public money are not being created.

Small halls, with 100 seats, offer the most wonderful opportunities to launch new authors. My plays were only performed in small theatres at first. In a big hall, the investment is bigger. Until they decide to stage something, the directors ask themselves dozens of times if they will be successful or not and schedule your play in 3 years.

Whereas in small theatres there is tremendous mobility. You meet a director today, you give him a piece of writing, he likes it, and two months later he has staged it.

There should be a law to subsidise private artistic initiatives and also a sponsorship law, so that these people can get money from companies.”

Having left his home country 34 years ago, Matei Vișniec is now a French citizen but has also remained a Romanian one. Through his texts, however, he is universal.

He dreams of a EU plan that can save the millions of Romanians working abroad “in humiliating conditions” and provide them with the chance to return home and find work.

In his book “Cabaret of Words”, he speaks remarkably about the meaning of the word return.

“When I go on a journey, I take a single word with me in my suitcase: the word return.  

When I see you leave, I slip a single word into your coat pocket: the word return. (…)

When you return and tell me “I have returned”, it is not you I kiss right away. Before you, I kiss the word return.

When I am asked “But do you sometimes return to see your parents?”, I say “yes, that is the only place where the word return grows” (…)

When I die, I will give my soul in exchange for one single word: the word return.”

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

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