INTERVIEW
Given to the British Association of
Monaco in December 2004.
(The
following interview-article, published in MONACO
NEWS , the December 2004 issue, was written for the British
Association of Monaco by Miss Lois Bolton, a Canada-born resident of the
Principality, actively publishing in most of the English-language periodicals
of the French Riviera.)
Even
Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg would be hard put to keep up with C. George
Sandulescu. George is Greek by origin, Rumanian by birth, Swedish by
nationality, British by education, European by preference, and Monegasque by
residence. Not surprisingly, given such an oddly mixed heritage, George's
passion is languages: he speaks and writes in ten of them, and he understands
several more.
Languages
had come naturally to an inquiring lad closely connected to the Danube Delta, a major European
traffic hub, where George's grandfather was one of the men in charge of the European
Commission of the Danube
(it was one of Europe’s
absolutely biggest international port authorities at the time, before World War
I ). As a youngster, George could identify twenty languages without
understanding a word of any of them, without having seen them written, or
without knowing anyone who spoke them; as he was a radio-listening addict on
short waves, his ability lay in recognizing the way certain vowels and
consonants were glued together. Which probably makes him one of the few people
able to assimilate and enjoy the aesthetic values of the forty or so languages
used in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, without mind-bending
effort. "I took it to be a universal language book. I am one of the rare
persons who reads Finnegans Wake for the multitude of
languages rather than for the story."
Despite his
precocious grasp of languages, George, as a young man, was torn between
following a career in sciences or a career in the humanities. His ambivalence
was nourished by admiration for his paternal uncle, Georges, a scientist after
whom he was named, and a maternal uncle, Constantin Noica (to whom George owes
his middle name), a well-known philosopher of the language (and a close friend
of Eugene Ionesco, Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade). "The scientists in the
family were making patents, the humanists were publishing books. Uncle George
was able to separate male and female hormones of which the contraceptive pill
is a natural consequence. That procedure is well-known in French University
text-books nowadays under the name of "La Methode Sandulesco pour la
separation des hormones." In the 1930's, British and American
Universities would write to him asking to buy a few grams of progesterone. My
initial intention was to study medicine and endocrinology. One thing is wishful
thinking. Materializing it is quite another
matter."
Like so many children of his generation, George found his life radically
altered by World War II. "I saw with my own eyes the Germans moving in,
and then about four years afterwards, I saw them moving out ! Then I saw the
British and the Americans -- a handful of them -- moving in (for our
house in Bucharest was at a stone's throw from their respective Military
Missions). And I saw the Russians moving in too -- in hordes --, but never saw
them move out again.” After the world conflict, his father dead,
the Sandulescu family moved to Sweden, by which time George had chosen the
humanities over sciences, and English Studies "just because it hadn’t been
forcibly imposed upon me !".
Attempting
to sum up his subsequent career, the novelist Anthony Burgess -- George's
personal friend of long standing -- described George as "a Joycean
Scholar". But the definition is restrictive, as a glance at his website
reveals. George's career specialization in the English language, and the
corresponding English and Irish literatures, has led him to teaching positions
in Swedish, British, Italian and American universities,
as well as to the publication of 20 to 25 books, and more than 100 research
papers. He was also Director of the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco for
twelve solid years, during which time
he organized about half a dozen International Congresses in the
Principality, including the first ever International Conference on Oscar Wilde,
one of George's "gang of four" Irish authors, along with Yeats,
Joyce, and Beckett. "Some 2,000 papers and books and two or three major
congresses are devoted every year to James Joyce, but not much at all to
Oscar Wilde. I always wonder why…"
If asked to
sum up his own career and his professional achievements, George is most likely
to describe himself as a learner—rather
than a teacher—and a bit of a trouble maker: "I like to ask the difficult
questions, particularly the unanswerable ones!". Predictably, one of
the areas he questions is Language. "We are watching languages -- all
languages -- shrinking with every passing day. The
Bible used 16,000 different words (but today’s people simplify it!), and
Shakespeare used twice as many, but the average active speaker of today only
resorts to much less than 5,000 words. And so does a radio or television
announcer. Look at the so-called cultural area, look at the TV newsreaders and
professional public speakers. "Public BARKING, " in George's
own phrase, "strives towards Beckettian Minimalism, in its far more than
stubborn quest for political correctness". For in Shakespeare's time
practically everybody in the pit was largely illiterate. Did Shakespeare care
? “A good writer never writes down
to public taste... The writer's job is to bring people up to another
level. And then, Shakespeare could afford to be anti this and anti
that, and get so easily away with it. But could we still afford to do it today
?"
In the past few years—ever since he had left the Director's job of the Princess Grace Library of Monaco—, the learner and trouble-maker has been moving into other fields, such as Communication Studies; his web site is one of the vehicles. "The phenomenon of communication is like health : when it is fully there, it doesn't exist! You, as an outsider, only know something is wrong when Communication collapses. And then, even wonder why !"
ends
