Interview in Orizont , November 2019

The Balkans, America, and back, Cornelia Golna

Cornelia Golna is a writer and translator who lives in the Netherlands. She was born in Bucharest. Her mother was Romanian, and her father a Vlach from Greece who came to Romania in the period between the two world wars. Her parents managed to leave Romania in the 1950s, when Cornelia was seven months old. The family spent four years in a Greece afflicted by the post-war crisis, after which they immigrated to the US. There Cornelia obtained a master’s degree in the Classics from the University of Illinois. After her Master’s, she left for Europe with the intention of rediscovering her countries of origin, Romania and Greece. She lived in Romania toward the end of the 1970s, where she relearned her mother tongue, and met her future husband, Dutch translator and writer, Jan Willem Bos. Her novel, City of Man’s Desire, A Novel of Constantinople came out in 2004, and her second novel, Tainted Heroes , came out in 2017, both published in Holland by Go-Bos Press. The first novel was translated into Greek and Turkish, in Thessaloniki/Athens and Istanbul respectively, and enjoyed great success especially in Greece, where it remained on the best-sellers list for several months in 2007. Tainted Heroes was translated into Romanian by Mircea Bucurescu and published by Eikon Publishers in May 2019.

Cornelia Golna has translated works of literature and literary criticism from Romanian, Dutch, and French.

Sorin Ciutacu: I would like to say first of all that I am happy this interview will reach the Romanian public and wish to take this opportunity to welcome the publication of your second novel, Tainted Heroes in Romanian, under the title Eroi pătați . Thus, the Balkan theme is present here too, a theme you treated in your first novel, City of Man’s Desire . In Tainted Heroes , the action takes place in Macedonia in the years 1903-1908, the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, just as you placed the action in City of Man’s Desire in Istanbul in the year 1908. The time and place of the action in Tainted Heroes coincides with your intention of recuperating and saving the memory of the main character, Agathon Galan, who is modeled on your paternal grandfather, a Vlach political leader caught in the current of the political intrigues of those years. What is the genesis of the novel Tainted Heroes ? The book is the result of a project you conceived to recreate, in fictional form, a part of your family’s fortunes. You wrote a beautiful novel, classical in structure and form, filled with narratorial empathy, sincerity, and authenticity. I recommend it warmly to all Romanian readers.

Cornelia Golna: For as far back as I can remember, I have lived under a dead man’s shadow, that of my grandfather. I knew about this grandfather, my father’s father, from the time I was small: A Vlach who was shot in front of the Greek consulate in Monastir – Bitola today, in North Macedonia: the great wrong done to my family. But who was he? I didn’t know. Nor was it clear to me why he was killed. My quest began with a great number of questions to which I did not know if I could find answers. For the Golna family, the death of my grandfather was a defining event, one that would change its destiny. Indeed, had he lived, his older sons would not have gone to America at so young an age to try to find a way to survive, and my father, his youngest son, would not have gone to Romania. And I would probably not even exist! My grandfather’s story is connected to a historical moment, not only of a region but of a people, its traditions and its memory. It is as if his fate prefigured the great changes in the history of the majority of Vlachs after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of national states in the Balkans. When these states came into being, and the borders surrounding them, economic conditions and their way of life changed for the Vlachs; for the shepherds who practiced transhumance, but also for the muleteers, those who transported goods, and for the merchants, it became harder, more complicated to practice their trades. The Vlach towns began to empty. Many Vlachs left the places where they were born, they lost their identity: they began to forget their language, became integrated in the new nation states, such as Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. A large group moved to Romania, a country that offered them hospitality and acceptance, when other states demanded that they change their nationality, their language, their history.

Now please give us a short summary of the political situation in Macedonia in the period 1903-1908, caught as it was in the power struggle among the Balkan powers (Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece), to give the Romanian reader an idea of the motivations behind the actions and decisions taken by the character Agathon Galan.

In the period 1903-1908, Macedonia, an Ottoman province with its mixture of Slavic, Albanian, Turkish, Vlach, and Greek populations, was practically a theater of war. The Ottoman authorities were weak and corrupt, a situation that encouraged neighboring states, especially Bulgaria and Greece, to intervene, indirectly at first, through guerilla fighters, both locals and volunteers, whose ambition it was, ultimately, to conquer the province for their respective countries. The Vlachs, who lived scattered in the mountains and had no neighboring regional power to protect their interests, were divided too, between pro-Romanians and pro-Greeks, that is, between those who supported Romanian schools and identity and those who sided with the Greeks. Romania pled the case more than once at the Sublime Port of the Vlachs’ right to be recognized as a distinct people, without, however, being in a position to impose its views.

What is the rapport in the book between fiction and the realities of the period? I know that your novel is extremely well documented, that in your travels and in your readings you were able to discover many things about the place Moushata (modeled on your grandfather’s birthplace), about the region of Macedonia, and about the fates of the historical characters.

Without giving away all that happens in the novel, I can say that in a way, the situation then could be compared to what happened in Yugoslavia some quarter century ago – people and communities that had lived together in harmony and peace alongside each other for decades and even hundreds of years, suddenly found themselves in different camps. Not everything I wrote in the novel, however, is based upon uncontroverted fact. One example: Agathon becomes implicated in the politics of the times following the occupation of his town by rebels during the Ilinden Uprising in 1903, a preponderantly Slavic movement whose ideal was an independent multiethnic Macedonian federation. The moment and events fit perfectly, but their effect on the character Agathon is purely speculation on my part.

And this is how the novel starts, with speculation – Ilinden triggers the actions of the main character and all that is to follow. Indeed, I did very much research – I have a great respect for history and for facts. But in between facts there is also room for imagination – through the question, “why?” Why does a man make one decision and not another, and what will the consequences be of that decision? This is where literature, subjectivity, fiction come in.

I’d like to ask you now to tell us something about the real person behind Agathon Galan, your grandfather, and to describe the character’s dynamics, as he appears in his relations with other characters in the family and in the area. Would you describe him as a partially tragic character?

In a way, my grandfather is my creation on paper. I did not know him, as he died in 1908, half a century before I was born. Nor did my father know him, as he was only three months old when my grandfather died. It was for this reason that I gave him a fictional name, Agathon Galan. The person of my grandfather is lost in the mists of time. The most I could do was imagine how he was. I gathered all the facts I could about him – they weren’t many – and I used the few anecdotes that were still told about him in the family. I studied the history of the times in which he lived, and I created an amalgam, so to speak. I had two big questions: why did he choose to side with the Greeks, and why was he killed in front of the Greek consulate in Monastir? And there was another thing. At first I did not really understand what his relationship was with the Vlachs who sent their children to the Romanian schools (from around the middle of the 19th century, there were Romanian schools in Macedonia, financed by the Romanian state, to increase the consciousness of the Vlachs that they spoke a Romance language; the introduction of these Romanian schools instigated a great hatred between the Vlachs who traditionally continued to send their children to the Greek schools and those who opted for the new, Romanian, schools).

By chance, I ran across a document in which it is written that at one point my grandfather sent at least one son to the Romanian school. This fact added to the complexity of my character’s personality (as well as to the book’s complexity). If we add that my grandfather rented an estate in the valley, that he had close contact with the Slavic (or Bulgarian, as they were called at that time) people that worked on the estate, and that he was a polyglot, that, in addition to the Vlach language, he spoke Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, and, probably, Albanian, then we begin to understand something about the world in which he lived. But that world was changing rapidly. The national ideal was growing among all the peoples of the Balkans, including the Vlachs. I asked myself another question: how easy or how hard is it for a person, a product of a certain way of life, of a mixed world, as his world was, to become a “new” man, with new loyalties and aspirations? How hard or how easy is it for a person to change with the times, to adapt, to understand what is coming, what the future will be?

You asked if I saw my grandfather – or his avatar, Agathon – as a tragic figure. Yes. I understood relatively quickly that the material I had, the events, the happenings, found their place easily within the structure of a tragedy. As I said, Agathon takes a decision, an action, which will lead him inexorably toward his fate. When I realized this, it became clear to me what direction the story would take. In fact, I wrote a tragedy in the form of a novel.

What creative plans do you have for the future? Will Macedonia become the topic for a third novel?

I’m thinking about a third novel. I may possibly place it again in Macedonia, at least the beginning of the story, but in a different epoch, one much earlier, the Hellenistic, the period after the conquests of Alexander the Great. We’ll see!

Reactions to Tainted Heroes

Tainted Heroes

Cristina Manole in Observator cultural , 08.11.2019

I had not heard of Cornelia Golna until the publication of Eroi pătați [Tainted Heroes], (Eikon Publishing, 2019, translated from English by Mircea Bucurescu), which, to put it honestly, profoundly impressed me. Because of its subject – a vast panorama of the world and history of the Vlachs of the Balkans – and because of the precision of the writing and the organization of the vast material of the narrative. Beyond the history of a family, the wanderings through time and space of a people with a clear identity – but always questioned, also as to its own destiny – beyond the terrible clashes that marked the path of a people subjected to hostilities of all kinds. The author – raised and educated in the United States, the child of a mixed Romanian-Vlach marriage – follows in the footsteps of her ancestors. And creates a Vlach saga, something much needed. Despite all the rigorous research such as that of Cicerone Poghirc, Matilda Caragiu Marioteanu (a distinguished linguist, the sister of the exceptional actor Toma Caragiu) or of others like them, we did not until now have such an epic fresco – of over 500 pages – about what the Vlachs (or however we wish to refer to them, Machedoni, in Romania, or Vlahos in Greece) have meant and their huge role/contribution – little known/recognized – to Romanian history. To the Balkans in general. A community that brought forth prestigious names – from Andrei Șaguna to Hagi Moscu, from the learned Papahagi family to names in sport such as Hagi and Halep today, etc. was not and cannot be a minority in its own home. Much to say/state/remember. I don’t want to tell what happens in the novel. I don’t want to comment on the epic structure, filled with cultural-historic material, which is well and coherently organized in the narrative context. With dozens of characters that mirror the human landscape of the Balkans and of the many nations that have been added to Europe’s map. I don’t know what echo this complex novel will have. Adriana Bittel, who is as careful a reader as she is a talented writer, praised it with good reason – but it deserves all the attention of the Romanian cultural world.

Review

by

Prof. Ecaterina Neacșu

Preamble

I met Cornelia Golna, the author of Tainted Heroes, (recently published [in Romanian], as Eroi Pătați at Eikon Publishing in Bucharest, translated from English by Mircea Bucurescu) last year at the launch of her husband, Jan Willem Bos’s translation [into Dutch] of Mihail Sebastian’s De două mii de ani [For two thousand years]. We didn’t actually meet, as we did not cross the boundaries of protocol imposed by the occasion. A delicate person whose smile caught my eye. I had the feeling that it betrayed an emotionality characteristic of sensitive people unused to excessive praise or to that sort of courteousness that claims for itself a different sort of relationship than that required by the values to which it is associated. For that reason, as I read her novel, Tainted Heroes , I was glad to see that I was not wrong, but more importantly, that we got to know each other. I’m an old-fashioned reader. I read, I go back if I haven’t understood something, and, at my respectable age, I continue to make notes on what I read. As an experienced reader, but one who has not lost her ability to absorb new things without prejudice, either moral or esthetic, let me say at the outset: this novel reignited in me, as I read, a sense of searching in the realm of the epic, a calm emotion in meeting with poetry, and a questioning attitude, at times rhetorical, which forced me somehow to reconsider – not so much historical time transformed into fictional time, but man subjected to the times in which he lives. This/that time that flows differently for each of us, and the way in which we relate to it, that is, to our fate, always different from that of others, yet always similar. I find myself asking – as I turn the pages of a book – out of what spiritual need was it born, and especially, if the author has also included me, the generic reader, in her more or less generous list of those she is writing for. And this question arises at the very moment that I read the title:

TAINTED HEROES

An oxymoron, the combination Tainted Heroes foreshadows a spiritual structure that is gradually built up throughout the entire work, constructing the main character through a narrative method of combining and alternating strata, accumulating details from each situation in which he appears, but especially from his interactions with the other characters, irrespective of the position in which they finds themselves: for or against the central character. Agathon Galan, because he is the character in question, is a typical Vlach, as Cornelia Golna, the novel’s author, sees and portrays him. In Chapter 36, for example, the portrait so constructed fills in the edges and asserts itself as an emblematic image, supplanting the image of the hero living in a troubled period of Vlach history, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a time in which Albanians, Vlachs, Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbs form groups and alliances to further the ambitions they have to seize the possessions the Turks will leave behind once they are forced to abandon the land:

“The line of male dancers, accompanied by the musicians and shadowed by the female line, reached the middle of the flat terrain. The crowd watched as the leader of the dance ceded his privileged position to a new soloist. Agathon Galan took his place at the head of the line. Taking the hand of the second dancer, he stood poised, then raised his free hand to the sky, ready to fly. People watched as he led the dancers, his lithe body advancing majestically, never losing the rhythm of the music. He jumped, kicked his feet, traced half circles in the air; then dropping to his knee, he touched the ground; again he sprang up; then for a time, his feet joined in the steps of the other dancers until, moved by an inner urge, he jumped again and crouched and touched the ground and turned and rose to his feet and traced another half circle in the air. Throughout, his expression remained unmoving, inscrutable, like that of a statue.” (p.326)

This dynamic portrait, with an easily identifiable cinematic component, reminds one of Nikos Kazantzakis’ fiery heroes, a comparison not at all coincidental, taking into account Greek culture and civilization, the image of which permeates the entire novel as a model and spiritual reference point. Although it resembles a realistic novel, often including naturalistic elements, Cornelia Golna’s Tainted Heroes is better compared to an epos, having Homer’s epic poems as a model. The image of Homer’s Odyssey at the head Myron’s bed as he lies dying is only one argument that demonstrates the author’s intention to illustrate the brilliant cultural source that motivates the heroic acts of her characters. The name given to the last-born child in Agathon Galan’s family, Odysseus, who, like his brothers, will follow the road to exile, is as symbolic as it is relevant in how it transforms real events in this novelistic process. Based on exemplariness and the spirit of sacrifice, its epic character is of vital significance, surpassing even the narration, the story itself, which, most often acts as a pretext, in order to shine a light on the generic image of Agathon Galan, the Vlach bearer of glory.

As in a family chronicle, both interior and exterior relationships are brought into focus through a superpositioning of narrative layers, the combining of which rather resembles a sliding from one atmosphere into another, which then transforms into a stream of changing emotions, thus enriching and nuancing the narrative. Old Agathon sleeps in the shade of the pear tree, which is as old as he – “His last friend, in a way. All his human friends were gone.” – watched over by his great-grandson, Theodore. So begins the story of a family from Moushata in Macedonia, in the year 1903, a family among whose members the relationships are defined not only by their common family tree but also by the fundamental values which they share: love, truth, honor, and dignity, all sustained by the common source, which is the thirst for liberty. Old Agathon is a symbolic character, taken from an expressionist mold. Almost incorporeal, he is the carrier of secret messages, like battle cries, which, gathering all his strength, he transmits at broken intervals. Symbolically too, he ensures continuity from one generation to the next and passes on the call to protect the ancient values. The function of connecting the metaphysical void to a reality startled from its bed, which, for example, in the drama Master Manole by Lucian Blaga, is entrusted to Găman, is, in the novel Tainted Heroes , conferred to Old Agathon; here the talent for portrayal becomes immediately apparent in Cornelia Golna’s writing.

Artful too is the romantic approach by which the author establishes the symbolic relationship between man and nature. Nature is spiritualized, reminiscent of the romantic vision, and works well in combination with other esthetic qualities. The image of the oak, through substitution, expresses the precarious balance of the Vlach community of Moushata, whose leader is the unvanquished Agathon Galan:

“Ahead of him, at the turn in the road, was the old oak. It stood there clinging to the side of the cliff. If you looked down as you passed, you could see its roots; they had become exposed this spring after the hard rains. Agathon had known the oak all his life. It was a landmark indicating to the traveler that he was about an hour away from Moushata. But now it was losing its foothold. If it did not lose its grip completely, or a blast of mountain wind did not send it crashing down, it might last another year or two. Then it would go dry, turn gray. The thought saddened him – such a powerful tree, tall and solid and with a glorious crown – that such a specimen would have ended up on this ill-suited spot. Never before had he stopped to consider its precarious life. It was an unsettling idea. For years, it had flourished here oblivious to the danger that had always existed.” (p.19)

The novel comprises an impressive succession of actions, most of them confrontations. Rival groups, petty interests, brutality, endless pain, people who sacrifice themselves or are sacrificed, most are guilty without guilt. They are tableaux vivants, generally in black and white, over which, often without warning, blood spurts, with differentiated symbolism, from a sacrificial act to accidental death, violent every time, overwhelming, tormenting. The death of the pharmacist Philip Kapetanopoulos, for example, who willingly joined the resistance group so he could wash clean the shame suffered by his comrades, but especially the last moments of his life, create a descriptive image that has the delicacy of a drop of dew on a leaf already yellowed, but also the sharpness of a knife glistening in the sun:

“He awoke a third time. In the distance, the sky seemed on fire. A red sunset, he thought dreamily. It colored the atmosphere, made the world rose-tinted. In this light, you could almost see the air molecules whirling in a frenzied dance. Once, when he was a child, his mother said to him, “Look, Philip, the world has turned pink!” He remembered they were walking along the quay of the river, and with the wondering eyes of a five-year-old, he marveled at the effects of this odd illumination as it filled the sky, filtered through the leaves of the poplars, even tinged the cobblestones. His mother laughed and picked him up in her arms. “Sometimes, God gives you a gift – just like that!” she said. “Do you see, Philip?” She pointed at the red clouds burgeoning in the sky.

“A sigh escaped him, and his body relaxed. He lay still. From his eyes, which were fixed on the bloody horizon, a trickle of moisture escaped and made its way down along each side of his face.” (pp.158-159)

Thematically speaking, it would be easier to identify themes that are not developed throughout Cornelia Golna’s novel. We are dealing here with thematic complexity, in which death and hate hold central positions. If we separate them again, into black and white chromatics, into the binomial of love and hate, hate asserts itself as the constant theme, almost omnipresent. Relevant in this context is the dialogue between Agathon Galan and Myron:

“What sort of man would lower himself to poisoning another man?”

“A man filled with hate,” said Myron, “consumed by it.” (p.362)

To counterbalance things, love, a theme seemingly not developed in the novel, reveals itself from behind a delicate, emotional cover. The Vlach men of Moushata love their wives, and the wives experience their authority in its loving and moral guise. In their last night of love, preceding that of death, Sophia intensely relives her life with Agathon, allowing time to expand under the pressure of the countable moments they have left together:

“Sophia gazed at the man who had determined the course of her life. She hardly remembered life without him. She had been a girl when she married, a girl of thirteen, and he a man of twenty. At their wedding, she hadn’t dared to meet his eyes and only gazed surreptitiously, when she thought he wasn’t looking, at this youth, tall and beautiful, who was to make a woman of her; she, a woman, who only days before had put away her dolls! She had learned to love him quickly, but she never truly lost her awe of him.

“Sophia turned to the crib. Odysseus slept on, oblivious to his parents’ earlier exchange. She rose quietly from the bed and put out the lamp. Then she crawled back under the quilt, seeking the warmth of her husband’s body.” (p.399)

Through such economy, through essentializing, the author expresses with naturalness her affiliation to a people she describes in detail and with skill. With love and with pride. With modesty and true admiration. With a chasteness transmitted genetically from one generation to another. The narrative voice identifies itself now too with the auctorial, disclosing the author’s intention to give a sense of truth to every recounted fact.

The initial question, connected to the spiritual need that determined Cornelia Golna to write Tainted Heroes has become by the end of the novel a true riddle, one which I, as a reader with the particularities I mentioned at the beginning, tried to solve through this analysis. I would only add that in the subtext of this novel I decoded a conviction of the author’s, one which I share completely: only a great love expressed for one’s antecedents, for one’s identity, for oneself, can counterbalance hate.