In love with Mihai Eminescu's writings, which he
believes belong to everybody not only to the Romanians, South
African theologian, philosopher and poet James Moulder together
with Professor Mariana Nicolae and Ph.D. candidate Ela Nicolae from
ASE Bucharest, launched the Romanian-English bilingual volume
-"47 Poems by Mihai Eminescu". The authors say that the book
is the end result of a soul project.
James Moulder confesses that he has not translated, or
interpreted or paraphrased Mihai Eminescu's poems but "used them to
create my own".
His approach was possible by consulting the previous
translations of Andrei Bantaş, Leon Levitchi and Corneliu Popescu.
Moulder also used various Romanian-English dictionaries and took
lots of time to understand what each of the poems was trying to say
to him personally. So, according to Moulder himself in the book's
introduction and explanation, he put on paper "a string of
words which would never have got into my mind without the help of
Eminescu's words".
The poems are flowing naturally, from page to page, as a
sinusoid river, first in the Romanian language, then in two English
versions. First the Moulder version and then a classical English
translation. Needless to say that Moulder's version is closer to
our sensibility today.
Dr. James Moulder was educated at Rhodes
University in South Africa and Linacre College in the University of
Oxford. His majors were theology and philosophy. He has taught
various business related subjects in MBA programs in Australia,
China, England, Indonesia, New Zealand, Romania, South Africa and
Spain. He retired in 2006 and lives in Melbourne, Australia. His
present research is focused on reading Confucius in business
environments and exploring organizational climates that encourage
and support creative thinking. Moulder is also a poet and currently
writes under the inspiration of Romanian poets, including Eminescu.
He likes to create his own versions of what other people
write.
Notes
Dr. Mariana Nicolae is a Professor of English
and business communication with the Bucharest Academy of Economic
Studies (ASE-Bucharest) and the director of the Master in
International Business Communication programme delivered in
English. Besides teaching, research and academic management, her
current duties involve institutional building, coaching and
mentoring, networking with people and organizations, publishing,
travelling both in-country and abroad to attend conferences and
seminars and organizing (inter)national conferences in Romania. She
was a Fulbright senior scholar in 2005 and participated as an
expert evaluator in the Framework Programme FP7 of the European
Union. She is a founding member of the English-Speaking
Union-Romania, an honorary member of Phi Beta Delta, Gamma Lambda
CSUSB, member of the Romanian Association for American Studies, of
the Association for Women Entrepreneurship Development, and of the
Society for Business Excellence.
Ela Nicolae is a teaching assistant with the
Department of International Business and Economics from the
Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies. She teaches International
Marketing. As a Ph.D. candidate she is preparing her thesis on the
subject of the economic relations between Russia and
Romania.