Vlachica

Who are the Vlachs? For the first time, Mirela Roznoveanu has put Europe's original people—her people—on the map. Living for millennia hidden high in the Balkan and Dalmatian mountains, above the shifting tides of empires, the Vlachs, or Armâns, have fiercely guarded the unity in variety of their ancient way of life. Their long silence breaks at last, overflowing with mythology, history, landscape, folklore, food, customs, clothing, music, magical realism, intrigue, passion, cruelty, poetry, tragedy, and comedy. Vlachica is a force of nature—total immersion in a rich, lost world.

Since 1971, the International Congress for Neo-Latin Studies has been organised every three years in various cities in Europe and North America. In August 2009, Uppsala in Sweden was the venue of the fourteenth Neo-Latin conference, held by the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies. The proceedings of the Uppsala conference have been collected in this volume under the motto Litteras et artes nobis traditas excolere Reception and Innovation. Ninety-nine individual and five plenary papers spanning the period from the Renaissance to the present offer a variety of themes covering a range of genres such as history, literature, philology, art history, and religion. The contributions will be of relevance not only for scholarly readers, but also for an interested non-professional audience.

Who are the Vlachs? For the first time, Mirela Roznoveanu has put Europe's original people--her people--on the map. Living for millennia hidden high in the Balkan and Dalmatian mountains, above the shifting tides of empires, the Vlachs, or Armâns, have fiercely guarded the unity in variety of their ancient way of life. Their long silence breaks at last, overflowing with mythology, history, landscape, folklore, food, customs, clothing, music, magical realism, intrigue, passion, cruelty, poetry, tragedy, and comedy. Vlachica is a force of nature--total immersion in a rich, lost world.

As well as presenting articles on Neo-Latin topics, the annual journal Humanistica Lovaniensia is a major source for critical editions of Neo-Latin texts with translations and commentaries. Please visit www.lup.be for the full table of contents.

What is the human being duty and what is the source of my restlessness, of my metaphysical impatience? Could it be that exile has made me a woman of no fixed abode? These questions are coming from a woman with hybrid origins who lived in a communist dictatorship country; fought injustice and censorship and was punished by the secret police; was involved in Romania’s 1989 Revolution; witnessed the post-communist nomenclature and secret police stealing back the country; wrote the history of the world fiction, a comparative study in Romanian; at the age of 44 she left both her home and her language behind and settled into the US and into English as she saw herself as an exile not just from her country but from her mother tongue too; founded GlobaLex, an iconic research tool, at the NYU School of Law Hauser Global Program; and has collected multiple honors in Romania and in the US, including Romania’s Officer of the National Order for Faithful Service. She uses her European literary references as an enhancement for her range of American tonalities. The daughter of Hrisula Limona, a woman belonging to an ancient Armân/Vlach clan from the Pindus Mountains, and Iancu Roznowski, of Polish descent, whose ancestors once lived at the Imperial Court of Habsburgs in Vienna, Mirela Roznoveanu was born on April 10, 1947 in the Kingdom of Romania. A few months later (December 1947) the Communists forced Romania’s King to abdicate and the country surrendered to the Communist USSR. Mirela lives in many languages at once and multiple expressions of literary forms. She is a cosmopolitan writer. Her slogan is “I am curious therefore I am”. For Mirela forgetting is an impossible task and she turns this inability into memorable stories. Her knowledge of philosophy, fiction writing, literary criticism and theory is endlessly rich. Mirela is not only a literary critic, novelist, and a poet but also a journalist and an intellectual with an incisive intelligence and a great sense of social justice. Epic Stories gathers for the first time under the same covers all Mirela Roznoveanu’s literary voices from poetry and literary criticism to journalism, fiction, and travel writing. The reader becomes a witness and a participant into the making of a new life in exile and of the transformation of a foreign language into one that becomes part of the writer’s native language.