Manuscript by writer Hortensia Papadat Bengescu retraced

Today's feature looks at Hortensia Papadat Bengescu's lost novel “The Stranger.

Christine Leșcu, 13.07.2013, 14:50

Born in 1876, Romanian prose writer Hortensia Papadat Bengescu made her editorial debut in 1919. Despite her late start, the writer soon became one of the promoters of modernism in Romanian literature. Three of her novels that follow the destiny of several generations of the Halippa family — “Fecioarele despletite”- “The Disheveled Maidens”, “Concert din muzica de Bach”- “A Concert of Bach’s Music” and “Drum ascuns”- “The Hidden Road” are considered her most successful books. Hortensia Papadat Bengescu wanted to end the cycle about the Halippa family with a novel entitled “Straina” — “The Stranger”. “The Stranger” started with the troubled period when communists came to power in Romania.

According to Hortensia Papadat Bengescu she handed in the manuscript to a publishing house, but according to her subsequent statements the novel actually reached a different publishing house. At present, the archives of both publishers are impossible to recover in order to save the novel or parts of it. Fragments from the novel had actually appeared in various journals during Hortensia Papadat Bengescu’s life. After her death, her family managed to have several other pages published. Recently the novel “The Stranger” has been published in its entirety as part of the integral issue of Hortensia Papadat Bengescu’s novels by the National Foundation for Science and Art. For 7 years Gabriela Omat spent years editing the novel “The Stranger”. It should’ve taken 6 months to edit, but it actually took much longer. Gabriela Omat tells us why:

Gabriela Omat: “Mrs. Elena Docsanescu, a friend of the last descendent of Hortensia Papadat Bengescu stored manuscripts of the writer among which several pages from the novel “The Stranger” and also pages related to the novel. When I contacted her and went to see the manuscript myself I had a great surprise. I was presented with a big cube-shaped box, filled to the brim with all sorts of materials, copybooks, sheets of paper copied and recopied in several versions, various notes, copybook cuts, notebook pages. Pieces of text were written even on the back of copybook covers. I initially estimated 2 or 3 years’ work to get all the pieces together but it lasted 7 whole years. Besides several copybooks with covers in which you expected to find a coherent text, the other text pieces were dispersed, being written on any kind of paper the writer could find.”

However, this hard work to put the text together and recover the novel was not without emotional incidents.

Gabriela Omat: “The adventure continued with the emergence of an apocrypha. I was about to finish the editing of the novel when a second-hand bookshop announced me that someone had sold them a manuscript titled “The Stranger. A Novel”. At first sight it was obvious to me that thatwas not the writing style of Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, however the novel had been contaminated by the minute study of Hortensia’s writing style. I discovered that was the writing of editor Stamatiadi, the grandson of Hortensia Papadat Bengescu, who tried to reconstitute the novel. He put many years’ work into that endeavor meant to provide the integral edition of the Halippa family cycle, but it seems that he eventually abandoned the project. I used part of these texts and marked them as apocrypha where narrative links were missing.”

Editor Gabriela Omat came up with two versions for the re-construction of the novel in an approximate form. She called the first version “A hypothesis for re-constitution” and the second version “An alternative novel”. Consequently Gabriela Omat has come closest to Hortensia Papadat Bengescu’s intentions in finishing the Halippa cycle.

Gabriela Omat: “This is what she wanted, to end the cycle with a final novel focusing on the Halippas. She had started to prepare the novel with some draft copybooks in which she wrote all sorts of scenarios about the characters’ destinies. In her writings there appears, at a certain moment, a woman character who visits various villages with the intent of buying a house. It’s obviously a transfer of her own attitude of observer and writer.”

Hortensia Papadat Bengescu died in 1955, rejected by the Communist regime that had imposed a different type of aesthetics, which the author could not embrace. If the incomplete manuscripts which she seemingly handed in to the two publishing houses are recovered, it will be interesting to compare them with the version of the novel “The Stranger” edited by Gabriela Omat.