Abstract
This article discusses the Romanian playwright Saviana Stănescu and her continued engagement with the works of Ovid, tracking the feminist methodology which links her varied work. While Ovid’s self-definition against the ‘barbarian others’ he encounters in Tomis is crucial to an understanding of the exile poetry, in a postcolonial world the ideologically loaded nature of the term barbarus must be recognized, and its use and replication in modern translations and receptions interrogated. Characterized by an astute critical awareness and a committed political engagement, Stănescu’s classical receptions draw out the damaging real-world consequences for a people labelled ‘barbarians’. Her work offers a defence of the reviled Black Sea inhabitants of Ovid’s exilic poems by providing a critique of the colonial representations of the ‘barbarians’ therein, and exposing the power mechanisms of ancient and contemporary imperialism alike.
Highlights
In this article I discuss the classical receptions of Romanian playwright Saviana Stănescu and her continued engagement with the works of Ovid, tracking the feminist methodology which links her varied work
In contrast to other communist nations that had abolished the teaching of classics,9 Romania maintained a strong link to its Dacian and Latin past
For a Barbarian Woman shares with Stănescu’s earlier classical receptions a concern with exposing the constructed nature of discourse. It explores the themes of exile and colonialism, and the ‘self’-‘other’ dichotomy imposed by imperialism, through two interwoven narratives set on the shores of the Black Sea
Summary
For a Barbarian Woman is not Stănescu’s first treatment of classical themes. Her 2003 poetry collection Diary of a Clone created a disturbing host of Ovidian women variously metamorphosed under the male gaze: into a loaf of bread (‘greased with butter | and set in the oven’, p. 10); a flower bed (‘Florina burst into bloom | each strand of hair | [...] metamorphosed into a petal’, p. 14); an ‘artesian well’ (‘at the very moment | she gave up the ghost | water gushed from her mouth’, p. 15); a music box (p. 36); a church bell (p. 40); and a medley of animals with fur, scales and feathers (p. 52). ‘Ruxandra’ presents a troubling image of female escape through self-destruction, it suggests a hope of autonomy for women to reclaim and to rewrite their myths This approach was made explicit in Stănescu’s classical project, a 2005 feminist reclaiming of the myth of Oedipus, YokastaS, devised with Richard Schechner, the director of the ground-breaking Dionysus in ’69.26 In YokastaS, ‘sampling’ Euripides, Sophocles and Seneca, Schechner and Stănescu re-tell the myth from Jocasta’s perspective, structuring the play around moments of Jocasta’s life that are the hybridity she celebrates, mediating between the two languages and cultures. ‘TRISTIA I (when Tristia can’t help it anymore and starts writing)’, signals Stănescu’s initial direction and intention to follow the objective of second-wave feminist responses to classical texts: to give a voice to the barbarians Her poems spiral darkly to develop and enact a more nuanced postcolonial analysis of language and power through the character of Tristia, a barbarian woman and poetic embodiment of Ovid’s work in exile.. The ‘me’ feels assertive – just as Ovid’s final word in the Metamorphoses, vivam, asserts authorship - and looks forward to a new beginning; that Tristia has been fully deconstructed, dehumanized, overanalysed by theory and torn apart, Stănescu can start to re-build her and redress the wrongs of previous receptions and create new representations of Romanian (immigrant) women
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