Studii româneşti în MAREA BRITANIE

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

      Rezumat

Profesorul Dennis Deletant face în acest studiu un scurt istoric al studiilor româneşti în Marea Britanie, de la origini până în prezent. Sunt punctate primele traduceri şi antologii din literatura română, momentele în care anumite evenimente istorice au făcut ca interesul pentru România să crească, dar şi devotamentul cu care, de-a lungul timpului, o serie de personalităţi, români şi britanici deopotrivă, s-au străduit să întreţină acest interes şi să extindă instrumentele şi resursele necesare în acest sens. Emblematic este cazul lui Ion Ghica, primul ambasador român în Regatul Unit, care lucrează alături de Murray şi Stanley, doi dintre britanicii îndrăgostiţi de literatura română, să extindă colecţia de carte românească de la British Museum Library.

Bazele instituţionale ale studiilor româneşti se pun abia în 1915, în contextul Primului Război Mondial, prin fundarea Şcolii de Studii Slavonice şi Est-Europene. Printre profesorii acestei şcoli se numără Marcu Beza, Henry Wickham, Victor Cornea, Grigore Nandriş, Eric Tappe, şi mai târziu, profesorul Deletant.

Programul de schimburi culturale încheiat cu România în 1964 a fost de natură să consolideze statutul studiilor româneşti în Anglia, dar el a încetat, din păcate în 1996.

Deşi SSEES a fost principalul nucleu al studiilor româneşti în Marea Britanie, profesorul Deletant nu uită să menţioneze contribuţiile esenţiale ale altor colegi la promovarea domeniului: profesorul Glanville Price la University of Aberystwyth, profesorul Paul Russell-Gebbett la Queen’s University, Belfast, profesorul Martin Maiden, mai întâi la Cambridge şi acum la Oxford, profesorul Frank Barnett la Trinity College, profesorul Dennis Green la Cambridge, profesorul James Mullen la Birmingham University, dar şi alţii care, deşi angajaţi în alte discipline, au fost interesaţi şi de studiile româneşti.

Prin fuziunea SSEES cu University College London, în 1999, se poate spune că studiile româneşti se bucură de un statut mai bun dar şi de facilităţi de informare fără precedent.

Romanian studies do not have a long pedigree in the United Kingdom. [1] The earliest example of British interest in Romanian letters is a Romanian poem in English translation, and the first scholarly account of the Romanian language by a Briton – probably a Scot – can be found in M.A. Bruce-Whyte’s Histoire des languages romanes et de leur littérature, published in Paris in 1841. The work was translated into French and published in France because the author was resident there and, according to Bruce-Whyte, the subject interested the French more than the English. In his chapter ‘Analyse de la langue valaque’, Bruce-Whyte gives a Romanian poem (with a verse translation in English and prose version in French) which he claims came from the mouth of a shepherd. It was in fact a poem written by an 18^th-century Wallachian nobleman, Ienachiţă Văcărescu and entitled ‘Amărâta turturea’ (The Moping Dove).

A stimulus to the British public’s interest in the peoples and culture of south-eastern Europe was given by the Crimean War. Writers were quick to satisfy the demand for background information, and accounts of journeys made to the area were rapidly printed. It was at this time that Romanian literature received attention through the anthologies of E.C. Grenville Murray and Henry Stanley, both published in 1854. Grenville Murray was an illegitimate son of the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, and he combined a diplomatic career with freelance journalism. He describes in his anthology Doine, or the National Songs and Legends of Roumania, how in the summer of 1853 he was convalescing on the island of Prinkipo and passed the time translating Romanian folk-ballads. The anthology contains prose versions of 33 poems, 18 of which are from the collection of folk-poetry gathered by Vasile Alecsandri and published in 1852 and 1853 in Paris. The collection has an appendix with six ‘national’ airs of Romania arranged for the piano.

More ambitious in scope is Henry Stanley’s Rouman Anthology, containing the Romanian text of 45 poems with 16 English versions. Eight of the Romanian poems are folk-ballads from Alecsandri’s collection; the remainder includes 17 original poems by Alecsandri, 9 by Dimitrie Bolintineanu, and 4 by Grigore Alexandrescu. The book, finely printed with vignettes and ornamental borders based on Byzantine manuscript decoration, was, in the words of Stanley’s father, ‘too dear and too little adapted for the general taste here to have much circulation’.

Further attention on Romania and south-eastern Europe was focused by the Russo-Turkish War and its consequence, the creation of the Kingdom of Romania in 1881. In that year Mrs E.B. Mawer, the wife of an English physician long-established in Bucharest, published a small book Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends. A certain Mr H.A. Jackson, who had gone out to the port of Galaţi in 1848 to work as a clerk and had stayed for several years, started a series of lectures on Romanian history and literature, the first of which, privately printed at Lower Norwood, is to be found in the British Library. These individual initiatives were soon to be consolidated at the official level. The first ambassador of Romania to the Court of St James, Ion Ghica, who had helped Murray and Stanley to assemble their anthologies, was anxious to expand the British Museum library’s Romanian holdings, as the library’s register of donations shows. Ghica was also in touch with R. Torcianu, the author of the first Romanian grammar published in English, in 1887, under the title The Roumanian Language.

A formal, institutional basis for Romanian studies was first given as a result of the First World War. In 1915, The School of Slavonic and East European Studies was set up in King’s College on the initiative of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Robert Seton-Watson and with the support of the British Government. Masaryk, who later became President of Czechoslovakia, inaugurated the School on 19 October 1915 with a Public Lecture on ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis’. The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was aware that the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary might permit the ‘small nations’ to realize their dream of independence - or, in the case of Romania, to consolidate its territory -, thereby creating new opportunities for trade and a need for expertise if Britain wished to promote its political and economic interests. The Romanians were one of the nations targeted.

A teacher of Romanian is first listed in the Calendar of SSEES of 1919-1920; he was Marcu Beza, a member of the Romanian legation. In 1926-1927, he is bracketed with Henry Wickham Steed under the title ‘Lecturer in Roumanian’. After 1929-1930 Romanian disappears. There were no formal classes in Romanian, although a note announced that lessons could be arranged. However, Beza was industrious. In 1918, he had written a Rumanian Grammar which was published by the Bank of Roumania in London. Two years later, he printed Papers on the Rumanian People and Literature, three of which had been given as lectures at King’s College. When SSEES was given its independence from King’s College, in 1932, Beza, now Roumanian Consul-General in Jerusalem, was listed as a corresponding member.

There followed a decade-long hiatus in the presence of Romanian studies at the School. In 1941, the name of Victor Cornea appears as lecturer in Romanian in SSEES’s General Information for Students but his activity seems to have been brief. When courses for teaching Central and East European languages to service personnel were started in SSEES in 1942, Grigore Nandriş was offered the post of teaching Romanian.[2] The product of Nandriş’s Romanian classes was his Colloquial Romanian, published in 1945, which for more than three decades was the most authoritative manual of the language in English. When a chair of Comparative Slavonic Philology was founded in the University of London in 1947, Nandriş was elected to be the first holder. In 1948, a Lecturership in Romanian Language and Literature was established, to which Eric Tappe was appointed in April.[3]

Nandriş continued to take a close interest in the development of Romanian studies in SSEES. He and Tappe took the initiative, with the support of Dr George Bolsover, Director of SSEES, in securing a special grant from the University Grants Committee in 1952 to acquire the Gaster collection of Romanian printed books – some 3,500 in number – for the School’s library. Their purchase greatly enriched the Romanian section.[4] A second achievement of this tandem was the institution of an Honours degree in Romanian language and literature. Since 1946, Romanian had been offered as a subject in a General degree, but Nandriş in particular was keen to see its status enhanced, as an Honours degree subject.[5] The degree was introduced in 1955. It was not until four years later that the first students enrolled on the course – two in fact – one of whom, Ronald Whitworth, became the School’s secretary-registrar. Between 1959 and 1964, Romanian was only taken as a subsidiary subject, mostly by students doing a degree in Italian at University College. One of these, Michael Impey, went on to become Professor of Italian at the University of Kentucky and was an indefatigable promoter of Romanian studies in the United States.

In 1964 began the succession of degree-registered students of Romanian which has continued uninterrupted to the present day. It was in that year that I began the degree, graduating in 1968 under the guidance of Eric Tappe and Professor R.C. Johnston, holder of the Chair of French and Romance Linguistics at Westfield College, London. In the following year, after tenure of a British Council postgraduate bursary in Bucharest, I was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Romanian language and literature at the School. Professor Johnston’s interest in Romanian led him to propose a Combined degree in French and Romanian, taught jointly at Westfield and SSEES, and the first candidates graduated in 1972. A Combined Degree in Italian and Romanian, with teaching shared by UCL and SSEES, was set up shortly afterwards. A seamless transition of both degrees to UCL took place with the merger of SSEES in 1999.

It was also in 1964 that a major impetus was given to the teaching of Romanian in the UK. Under the terms of a British-Romanian Programme of Cultural Exchanges the Romanian authorities sent a lector to assist in the teaching of Romanian. Based at SSEES, the lector also spent one afternoon a week at Westfield College and at Cambridge respectively. At the same time, the Romanian authorities gave generous support to these three centres by providing books and specialist periodicals. They included dictionaries, Romanian literature in the original and in translation, and studies of history. SSEES alone received, according to my rough calculation, more than 4,000 such items in the period 1964 to 1990. The lectors devoted themselves whole-heartedly and with good humor to their teaching.  Sadly, and ironically given the collapse of Communism in Romania, the provision for providing a lector under the British-Romanian Cultural Agreement was allowed to lapse in 1996, and in 2004 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office decided – short-sightedly in my view – to reduce the invaluable support it had given to talented young scholars and civic-minded professionals from Central Europe – including Romania – by ending the programme of Chevening Teacher-Fellowships tenable at SSEES. An outstanding testimony to the success of the Teacher-Fellowship programme in respect of Romania is Mihai Răzvan Ungureanu, the former Foreign Minister, who was a Chevening Teacher-Fellow at SSEES in the academic year 1996-1997.

SSEES has been the centre of Romanian Studies in the UK since their inception – hence my focus upon it - and is still, as part of UCL, the only British university institution to offer a BA degree course, courses at the MA level, and doctoral supervision in Romanian language and literature. But it would be misleading of me to fail to mention the teaching and research into the Romanian language conducted by Professor Glanville Price at the University of Aberystwyth for more than four decades, by Professor Paul Russell-Gebbett at Queen’s University, Belfast, and by Professor Martin Maiden, first at Cambridge and now at Oxford. A predecessor of Professor Maiden at Oxford, Frank Barnett, taught the language for more than twenty years – in the 1960s and 1970s – at Trinity College, while during the same period Professor Dennis Green at Cambridge encouraged the presence of the Romanian lector who traveled up from London regularly on Wednesday afternoons. Until his recent retirement James Mullen offered Romanian with considerable success as a subsidiary course at Birmingham University. Tom Gallagher, Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, is an acute observer of the contemporary Romanian political scene and produced a major work last year[6], while Alex Drace-Francis, who completed his postgraduate research at SSEES and has been recently appointed to a post in the history department at Liverpool University, is awaiting the publication of his thesis on the development of a national consciousness amongst the Romanians in the early nineteenth century.

New scope for studying Romania and Romanian was opened up by the merger, in 1999, of SSEES with University College London. Placed for the first time in a multi-faculty college in London, Romanian language, literature and history became available ‘in house’ to a large student body. Another ‘first’ was achieved on 19 October, 2005, when SSEES celebrated its 90th anniversary with the inauguration of a new building, in Taviton Street, close to the heart of the UCL campus, and just a few hundred yards from the British Library. For the first time in its history the whole of SSEES was under one roof. The felicitous proximity of SSEES and its library to the British Library offers the student of Romania, in these two institutions combined, access to the largest and richest collection of Romanian books, manuscripts and study-aids in the English-speaking world. Such a resource underpinned the study of Romania in SSEES, from the teaching of the language to the cultivation of literary analysis, and to the critical evaluation of the past and present. For if the purpose of Romanian studies is to understand what makes the Romanians who they are, to test assumptions about them, and to gauge their future, then a critical analysis of their literature and their history is fundamental. This belief has driven the teaching and research of the Romanian section in SSEES, which includes my colleagues Dr Rebecca Haynes and Ramona Gonczol-Davies.