„Primiți felicitările mele și aprecierea mea recunoscătoare!”. Eugene OʼNeill către Petru Comarnescu

“My Congratulations to You – and My Grateful Appreciation”. Letters from Eugene OʼNeill to Petru Comarnescu

Autor / Author: Iulian Pruteanu-Isăcescu
Limba / Language: Romanian
Număr / Issue: 2023
Cuvinte cheie / Keywords: Eugene OʼNeill, Petru Comarnescu, theatre, plays, translations

Rezumat / Summary: In the Archive of the Iași National Museum of Romanian Literature – the “History of Romanian Theatre” Collection there are three typewritten letters signed by Eugene OʼNeill (1888-1953), the American playwright, that were sent to Petru Comarnescu (1905-1970), the translator into Romanian of some of OʼNeill’s plays. The three letters were written between the years 1938 and 1939 and were purchased by the museum in 1978, from the writer Mircea Filip (1939-2015), one of the editors of Comarnescu’s work. Eugene Gladstone OʼNeill has remained in theatre’s history for his acclaimed plays, such as: Beyond the Horizon, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, Long Dayʼs Journey into Night. The last is considered to be one of the best American plays of the 20th century, having posthumously won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Petru Comarnescu was a prolific publicist in the interwar period, but lost his job when the Communist regime was installed in Romania. He collaborated at the Russian-Romanian Dictionary between 1952 and 1954. He published a lot of works focused on art. He proficiently translated from English (Eugene OʼNeill, T.E. Lawrence, Daniel Defoe, Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Robert E. Sherwood, J.B. Priestley, G.B. Shaw, Howard Fast) and Russian (Lev Tolstoi, N. Gorceakov, Nikolai Cernîșevski, G.I. Uspenski, O. Ciornii, L. Laghin, Ilya Ehrenburg). The three letters in English and their translations into Romanian, translations by Petru Comarnescu, are presented in this article, alongside a fourth letter, written in 1945.

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