Imre Jozsef Balazs1; 1 Babes-Bolyai University, Romania
Discussion
Within the Romanian avant-garde, many important authors became translingual at some point of their career. Some poets like Tristan Tzara or Ilarie Voronca switched to French in connection with their emigration in the interwar period. There are some other, lesser known examples like Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, Max Blecher, who switched to French during the 1930s and 1940s, while still living in Romania at that time. My paper examines the contexts of code-switching in the case of all these authors, and connects their different strategies to social and political contexts, highlighting their attempts to gain critical distance to their own national culture through these gestures.
