Sorana Gurian

Sorana Gurian (born Sara Gurfinchel, October 18, 1913[1] – June 10, 1956) was a writer, journalist, and translator who wrote both in Romanian and in French.

Born in the Russian Empire, in Comrat, Bessarabia, she lost both of her parents while still young. After that, she and her two younger sisters, Lia and Isabela, were taken care of by their stepmother.[2] She went to high school in Bender, passing her Baccalauréat exam in 1931, and then studied at the Letters Department of Chernivtsi University and Iași University without graduating.

She became a member of Eugen Lovinescu's Sburătorul literary circle in 1937, after returning from Berck, France, where she had gone for balneotherapeutical treatment of her extrapulmonary tuberculosis. While in France, it seems, she also studied at the Sorbonne.[3] When she returned to Romania, she started publishing articles, first in the "Lumea" magazine in Iași, which were clearly democratic, antinationalist, antifascist and antirevisionist in style.[2]

Feeling the effect of the antisemitic laws, she joined the underground opposition, which the Communists were also a part of. The Gestapo began to take an interest in her in 1942, and she hid for two years in a building basement, surviving with the help of the priest of the French legation and the head of a Catholic girls' boarding school in Bucharest.[4] Under the influence of Vladimir Ghika, she had by then converted from Judaism to Catholicism.[5]

After Romania changed sides on August 23, 1944, thanks to the fact that she knew Communists from her time in the underground opposition, she was named director of Universul.[6] In the first three years after the war, she collaborated with many leftist publications, wrote propagandistic texts and, as she knew Russian, worked as an interpreter for the Allied Commission.[5] But after a while, she was suspected by the Communist authorities of being a French spy, and realizing that the new regime imposed one restriction after another beginning a reign of terror, in 1949, she managed to escape from Romania by entering into a marriage of convenience with an Italian citizen helped by the Italian ambassador. After divorcing her husband, she went to Israel, where she stayed until 1950, and then emigrated to France, settling down in Paris.

She died of cancer in Paris in 1956.[7]

Works
  • Zilele nu se întorc niciodată, Bucharest, 1945
  • Întâmplări dintre amurg şi noapte, Bucharest, 1946
  • Les mailles du filet. Mon journal de Roumanie, Paris, 1950
  • Les jours ne reviennent jamais, Paris, 1952
  • Les amours impitoyables, Paris, 1953
  • Recit d'un combat, Paris, 1956
  • Ochiurile reţelei. Jurnalul meu din Romania, Bucharest, 2002

Translations

She translated works by Alexander Griboyedov, J. B. Priestley, Hans Prager, Franz Ludwig Neher, etc.

gollark: They can actually access external stuff.
gollark: Often I just use computer cases, though.
gollark: Which makes it MILDLY less annoying.
gollark: Being able to program microcontrollers is mildly cool, but it also means I have to wait for an electronics assembler, they can't interact with external components, and they're very irritating to debug (apparently *deliberately?!*). CC computers boot fairly quickly anyway.
gollark: CC workflow for setting up a computer to do things:- (auto)craft computer- place computer- write code/download code onto computer as startupOC workflow:- figure out what cards/other components it needs- queue autocrafting for everything- wait a while while autocrafting runs, and possibly converts some coal into diamonds- pull autocrafted stuff out of ME network, put into computers, be sure to get the right items- find openOS disk, disk drive- install openOS- write/download code- either move code to `boot` or work out how `rc` works

References
  1. 1913 is the year found on her birth certificate, but after arriving in the West, she used to say that she was born in 1917.
  2. Durnea, Victor. "ÎNCEPUTURILE SORANEI GURIAN" (in Romanian). Convorbiri literare. Retrieved October 29, 2014.
  3. Sasu, Aurel (2006). Dictionar biografic al literaturii romana (in Romanian). Pitesti: Editura 45. pp. 702–703.
  4. Durnea, Victor (2003). "Misterioasa viaţă a Soranei Gurian" (in Romanian). Romania literara.
  5. Dimisianu, Gabriel (2002). "Sorana Gurian" (in Romanian). Romania literara.
  6. Popovici, Iulia (2003). "Jurnalul meu din România" (in Romanian). Romania libera.
  7. Oisteanu, Andrei (2010). Narcotice in cultura romana. Polirom.
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