Found in Translation: The Two Lives of E. M. Cioran; or How Can One Be a Comparatist?

Abstract

Comment peut-on etre persan? asks a startled Parisian in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes when confronted with the spectacle of two Persian visitors in the City of Light. How can one be a Persian? The question is echoed, but poignantly reversed, by E. M. Cioran in his La tentation d'exister [The temptation to exist] of 1956. Comment peut-on etre roumain? [How can one be a Romanian?] he asks, frustrated in his struggles to make his way in that same capital of world culture. Montesquieu's question is a challenge to perceived marginality from a position of self-assured identity and cultural centrality. In Cioran's question, marginality challenges itself, but only from the center, without any assurance of its own cultural identity. To it I would add, as a student of Cioran, my own question: How can one be a comparatist? By asking it, I mean to challenge some of the career norms in the practice of comparative literature in Ameri can academia today. For I find I cannot focus exclusively (objectively) on my object of study?Cioran and his two lives?without including the facts of my own life as a Romanian living in the United States. The experiences of the researching subject (myself) are an integral part of my quest for that object. In translating Cioran's process of translating himself from Romanian into French, I realized I had opened up not simply a new biographical project, but discovered a new autobiographical self as well, bringing the Romanian Cioran into English as I was brought from Romania to America. But who exactly is E. M. Cioran? On one level, the answer is easy. He is the Romanian-born French philosopher Emil Cioran, author of Precis de decomposition (1949; Handbook of decomposition), La tentation d'exister (1956), De L inconvenient d'etre ne (1973; On the Inconvenience of being born), La