Iolanda Malamen in dialogue with Ardian-Christian Kuciuk
Bucharest, September 2008
Bucharest, September 2008
Iolanda Malamen: Ardian-Christian Kuciuk, God has given you a second literary homeland: Romania. So, as it could be said, “the sweet burden” of two languages in which you can write different things. I find that fascinating.
Ardian-Christian Kuciuk: I must say that these two homelands, in time, became more textual than literary. For me, the fascination lies more for the gift required to maintain a real equilibrium between the sweetness of the burden and burden of the sweetness.
- You have reinvented yourself in a new culture. Was that, though, a trauma?
- It was more than a reinvention, it was like climbing a mountain backwards. Before writing directly in Romanian “The year in which the swan was invented” in the graceful year of 1996, for instance, I believed that I would not write in another language except Albanian, ever again. Maybe it was a trauma for the other, although my behavior had no stains of abnormality. It was the natural rise of a literary opera to the level at which you can produce global literature, along with the more local the languages that you write in become.