"I don't know how to write. Sometimes I can write, but if I know, I don't know." This is what the Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu (Bucharest, 1956), candidate, year after year, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature wrote in his diary in December 2017. The publisher Lleonard Muntaner has just published Dietaris 1990-2017 (selection and translation by Xavier Montoliu, with a foreword by Sam Abrams), based on the four volumes that the writer published in his country and which had not been translated before - except for one of the four volumes that are part of it, which was translated into Swedish in 2011.
One of the constants in the diary is the doubt about writing, along with the awareness of where he wants to go literary.
No real writer feels completely safe, one is not sure if tomorrow or never he will be able to write again, that is the condition of the artist: a professional knows that he must learn a job and do it, but an artist does not you're never sure. If I had to compare my diary with those of other, much more famous writers, I would do it with those of Franz Kafka, with whom I see similarities such as the constant tribulation and anxiety about literature. Also, like him, many of our books begin in diaries. He did not distinguish between stories, novels or diary pages, he wrote everything in the same notebooks. I do if it does not do the same, all my writing emerges from the diaries. Sometimes I imagine what I write as a tree: the diary is the trunk and the branches are the other books. For me it is very important to write every day.
How to go to the gym?
Yes, with the newspaper I keep the tension, without this muscle tension I would fall, I wouldn't be able to stand up straight. The writer should write every day to support himself. When I don't feel very inspired to write a story or a novel, I journal and keep the connection alive. I may not write literary for months, but in the diary I do.
When you started publishing them in your country, did the way you write them change?
No, I started publishing them when I was aware of their literary value and that they were well enough written, like any of my books.
That's why he hasn't published the ones before 1990?
Yes, and I will never publish them, because they were the typical intimate journals.
One of the slogans he writes: meditate, imagine, write and exist.
For me, existence, after all, is the sum of all this.
The newspapers are like a laboratory, where we not only see him writing, but also planning his own career, how he thinks about the books he has to write and publish each year...
My rational side is important to be able to organize and manage my work, and this has helped me a lot, it gives me perspective on the things I do.
He writes that he hasn't matured much since he was 27.
If I close my eyes and don't look in the mirror, I see myself as I was around that age. It is the age when I really felt myself, and I have preserved the vision I had. I am a 27 year old lost in my body.
Does a moment come when the writer lives looking back?
We all change throughout life, but it is important to improve. To be happy is to change positively with wisdom, which I always try to do. I don't always get away with it, of course, but I've gotten better with age.
For a time he believed that he would never have "access to international success", and now he is regularly translated into more than twenty languages.
He believed that no one cared about a Romanian writer from the middle of nowhere, from an unknown culture with an unknown literary life. In fact, now it is more difficult for me to be considered in my own country than abroad, because in the world of letters the more successful you are abroad the less you have in your own country, people do not like that others triumph.
And you still think you can't write?
It's normal to want to write more and better, I compete with myself. I will always be the Solenoid or Blinder writer, and I would be very unhappy if I thought they were better than the writer I am now. I always try to do different things and progress, and my latest novel, Theodoros (published two years ago in Romania, in September will be published by Impedimenta in Spanish) is a step forward.
Every year he is considered a candidate to win the Nobel Prize. capfica?
It is an honor that I am considered worthy of the prize, but receiving it is like a lottery, I could become the greatest writer to have ever received it, and that is why I do not think about it. If it happens, then great, and if not, too.
Thanks to the diaries we can access his dreams, very important in his literature.
I have a complex relationship with dreams. Because of my romantic nature, they have always fascinated me, to the point that not only have I been writing them all in my diaries for more than fifty years now, and there are hundreds of them, but I am also interested in the scientific part, the process of sleeping and dreaming, and I have studied it a lot: I know better than many writers what they mean and what is the connection between real life and night life, with them we can enter another reality. It's fascinating this double life we have, a communal one and a totally private and intimate one.
As a writer today he spends half his life traveling the world. Does it stress you out or does it leave you time to write?
I love to travel, and in recent years I have traveled so much that I spend more time abroad than in my own country, and I have discovered Latin America, where I have traveled to almost every country and I find it fascinating. Travel gives me a lot, and I've gotten used to this life of roads and airports. And I'm happy because I haven't stopped writing, on the contrary, it stimulates and inspires me. The periods when I am at home, when I write at my desk I feel most inspired. It's a good combination.
When this published diary begins, he is a poet, but gradually prose gains ground.
I have never had the feeling of having abandoned poetry, I consider myself a poet even today. A poet is born, you cannot say that one day you are a poet and from now on no longer. If you are not born a poet, you are not a poet from the beginning, and this has nothing to do with writing books of verse or poems, but a certain state of mind, a way of seeing the world, so my literary attitude, even in the novels, it is purely poetic. Yes, I have abandoned a certain way of writing poetry from when I was young. To somehow protest against the archetypal beatnik poems of my youth, I started writing a long postmodern history of Romanian poetry, which is the book El Levante (Impedimenta, 2015), with more than 7,000 verses. It was very prosaic poetry comparable to what is written today, but I didn't like it, so I put the manuscript in a shoebox and forgot about it for twenty years. A few years ago I published it, and to my surprise the poets of today consider me a precursor!
The covid made him write poems again.
Three years ago I published another collection of poems written in a very extreme way during the pandemic. It expresses all the pain of living in those dangerous times. No images or metaphors, nothing, just a cry, a cry of pain. It is a hundred short, one-page poems, published under the title of Never Ask for Help.
He explained that at that time he had suicidal thoughts...
I hadn't had it until the last six or seven years, because of the depression I've suffered. I think I got away with it, because we have to move forward, even if bad things happen to you.
