Media Library
LANGUAGE ARCHIPELAGO III
Minorities, languages and representations in Romania
Language Archipelagos • 2021-06-15, 6:00 PM
Together with Radu Vancu, Claudiu Komartin and Teodora Coman, Romanian poets who are also citizen activists prominent for their political writing, the Romanian-German writer Ernest Wichner looks into the question of the state of minority languages (including Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romani and Russian) in Romania before and after 1990 in view of the conservative nationalist tendencies in politics and society.
Reading & discussion with the poets Radu Vancu (ROU) | Claudiu Komartin (ROU) | Teodora Coman (ROU) | Hosted by: Ernest Wichner, writer (ROU/DEU)
How is the visibility of minority languages distributed when they have to assert themselves as languages in poetry in the field of Romanian literature? How do minority languages stand in the tug-of-war between linguistic nationalism and patriotism and the deconstruction of the idea of the nation state? What effect does the (officially encouraged) loss of language have on poets’ own writing? How should a society and liberal politics intervene to save minority languages, however small they may be, from vanishing?
Reading and discussion in Romanian with German subtitles.
Project leader: Alexandru Bulucz
Language Archipelago III: Minorities, languages and representations in Romania acknowledges the kind support of the translator network Traduki, the Romanian Culture Institute Berlin and the Goethe Institute Bucharest.
