CANCELLED!
Due to unforseen circumstances, Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag's conference participation has been cancelled.

Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag returns to the U.S. to join the conference “How Translation Transforms the Humanities"


Convened by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this conference will gather scholars and practitioners to present state-of-the-art research on how the shift of translation theory away from a Eurocentric perspective may impact the various disciplines in the humanities, as well as the ways in which translation itself transforms the humanities. The celebrated Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag joins the conference in its aim to bring substantive research to the practical issues of writing, reading, and publishing translations.

Dumitru Tsepeneag is one of the most innovative Romanian writers of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960 and '70s, he and the poet Leonid Dimov led the country's only literary movement in opposition to the official socialist realism. His literary group was called “the Dream-like movement,” and its ambition was to, “renew surrealism by totally rejecting any kind of automatic writing.” In 1975, while he was in France, his citizenship was revoked by the Ceauşescu regime, and he was forced into exile, after which he started to write in French. He returned to his native language after 1989, but continues to write in his adopted language as well. In the last 3 years Dalkey Archive Press has been publishing a comprehensive collection of Tsepeneag’s work, with already four novels in circulation: Vain Art of the Fugue, The Necessary Marriage, Hotel Europa (translated by Patrick Camiller), and Pigeon Post (translated by Jane Kuntz).


[Photo by Sarah Moon]