INTERVIEW E. M. Cioran & Jason Weiss https://www.itinerariesofahummingbird.com/e-m-cioran.html

Portions of this interview were first published in the Los Angeles Times (October 5, 1984); the entire text appeared in Grand Street (New York) 5:3 (Spring 1986), and later in my book Writing at Risk: interviews in Paris with uncommon writers (Iowa, 1991), now out of print.  More recently, the interview was translated into Italian by Pierpaolo Trillini and edited by Antonio Di Gennaro as a small book under Cioran’s name as L’Intellettuale senza patria (Milano: Mimesis, 2014).

ARTICLE in https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/e-m-cioran/

Cioran sat out the Second World War in Paris. In its aftermath, he approached the famous publishing house, Gallimard, with his first work in French, A Short History of Decay, published in 1949. Writing in French was he said, ‘like writing a love letter with a dictionary’.  

The book became a bestseller, the first in a series of devastatingly wicked and dark texts composed mainly of aphorisms and tart short essays. Each title comes as a provocation or a punch: Syllogisms of Bitterness, The Temptation to Exist and his masterpiece: The Trouble with Being Born.

MOI: I bring french into my english as a structural ghost —

Insomnia | An interview with Emil Cioran, 1984 http://www.cocosse-journal.org/2020/07/the-insomnia-interview-with-emil-cioran.html

“Read day and night, devour books – these sleeping pills – not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

BOOKS

Romanian[edit]

• Pe culmile disperării (translated “On the Heights of Despair“), Editura “Fundația pentru Literatură și Artă”, Bucharest 1934
• Cartea amăgirilor (“The Book of Delusions”), Bucharest 1936
• Schimbarea la față a României (“The Transfiguration of Romania”), Bucharest 1936
• Lacrimi și Sfinți (“Tears and Saints”), “Editura autorului” 1937
• Îndreptar pătimaș (“The Passionate Handbook”), Humanitas, Bucharest 1991

French[edit]

All of Cioran’s major works in French have been translated into English by Richard Howard.

• Précis de décomposition (“A Short History of Decay“), Gallimard 1949
• Syllogismes de l’amertume (tr. “All Gall Is Divided“), Gallimard 1952
• La Tentation d’exister (“The Temptation to Exist”), Gallimard 1956 | English edition: ISBN 978-0-226-10675-5
• Histoire et utopie (“History and Utopia“), Gallimard 1960
• La Chute dans le temps (“The Fall into Time”), Gallimard 1964
• Le Mauvais démiurge (literally The Evil Demiurge; tr. “The New Gods”), Gallimard 1969
• De l’inconvénient d’être né (“The Trouble with Being Born“), Gallimard 1973
• Écartèlement (tr. “Drawn and Quartered”), Gallimard 1979
• Exercices d’admiration 1986, and Aveux et anathèmes 1987 (tr. and grouped as “Anathemas and Admirations”)
• Œuvres (Collected works), Gallimard-Quatro 1995
• Mon pays/Țara mea (“My country”, written in French, the book was first published in Romania in a bilingual volume), Humanitas, Bucharest, 1996
• Cahiers 1957–1972 (“Notebooks”), Gallimard 1997
• Des larmes et des saints, L’Herne | English edition: ISBN 978-0-226-10672-4
• Sur les cimes du désespoir, L’Herne, | English edition: ISBN 978-0-226-10670-0
• Le Crépuscule des pensées, L’Herne,
• Jadis et naguère, L’Herne
• Valéry face à ses idoles, L’Herne, 1970, 2006
• De la France, L’Herne, 2009
• Transfiguration de la Roumanie, L’Herne, 2009
• Cahier Cioran, L’Herne, 2009 (Several unpublished documents, letters and photographs).

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