Barbu Solacolu

Barbu Solacolu (March 17, 1897 – October 30, 1976) was a Romanian poet, translator, civil servant and social scientist. Born into a prosperous and intellectual family, he became a late affiliate of the Symbolist movement, bringing to it his own leftist sympathies and agrarianism. Despite spending the early stages of World War I among non-interventionists such as Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești and Ioan Slavici, he eventually served with distinctions as a cavalry commander, and also participated in the Hungarian–Romanian War. Solacolu trained as an economist in Weimar Germany, returning to serve the Romanian state as a civil servant. He had a marginal presence in national politics, first with the Democratic Nationalist Party, as a disciple of Nicolae Iorga, and then as a leading member of the Agrarian Union Party. He was noted in local academia for his essays on Revisionist Marxism.

During World War II, Solacolu presided upon the National Association of Chemical Industries, which handled contracts with Nazi Germany. He was pushed out of politics in the late 1940s with the inauguration of Romania's communist regime, spending the 1950s and '60s as a translator; his main contributions in that field were Romanian renditions from William Shakespeare, some of which made it into the definitive edition put out by Leon Levițchi. In old age, Solacolu, who had met some of Romania's leading personalities, made a celebrated return as a memorist, and was interviewed by oral historians.

Biography Early life Solacolu once specified that his birth date was March 17, 1897 (Old Style: March 5), against sources which have March 18. His exact place of birth was a family townhouse on Astronomului Street 6, in Bucharest. Barbu was the son of Victor Solacolu, a magistrate, and Victoria (née Petrescu), daughter of military doctor (and Romanian Land Forces General) Zaharia Petrescu. Before marrying Solacolu, Victoria had been his secretary; her sister, Alina, was the wife of zoologist Grigore Antipa. Victor was the scion of a prosperous merchant family, of Bulgarian heritage, whose members where, by his own account, "many, so very many", virtually none of them having left Bucharest in his own lifetime. The latter had built his fortune around the Solacoglu Inn. Other relatives include chemist Șerban C. Solacolu, engineer Paul Solacolu, and publicist Ion Solacolu. Solacolu was also published, with his full name, by Constantin Banu's Flacăra in 1912—he noted that he had used the "then-fashionable" amphibrach, and that the same issue also featured the debut of a poet he viewed as more accomplished than him, namely D. Iacobescu.

In collaboration with Al. Westfried, Solacolu translated and published from Maeterlinck's Serres chaudes. Scholar Remus Zăstroiu revisited this as an outstanding contribution, given its "surprising zeal".

With time, Solacolu turned to a more bucolic style, which, according to reviewers such as Șerban Cioculescu and Virgil Gheorghiu, anticipated better known contributions by Ion Pillat. Gheorghiu praised Solacolu for his poetic concision and preciseness, which also characterized his contribution as a translator. Zăstroiu notes the diversity of critical assessments, with critics seeing Solocaolu as either a traditionalist in line with Ștefan Octavian Iosif or a modern poet à la George Bacovia. Zăstroiu validates both these assessments: in his definition, Solacolu managed to bring together "Symbolist accessories" such as the "aquatic mystery" into a "rural landscape that is not at all engulfed in nostalgia for the past". Solacolu was drafted into the Land Forces, upon Romania's entry into war. Part of his family remained in Bucharest, which soon fell to the Germans. Barbu followed the army on its northeastern retreat, went to the Iași military school, and eventually participated in the Budapest Campaign as a second lieutenant in the cavalry.

Entering politics The war did not interrupt Solacolu's literary work, with samples taken up by Convorbiri Literare in 1915, and by Letopiseți in 1918–1919. though nominally issued by Convorbiri Literare, it was in fact self-published. It was noted as a poetic commentary and introduction to that writer's style and themes, but also as a "critical analysis" of life in Soviet Russia. He would then publish similar monographs on Henri de Saint-Simon (1925) and Werner Sombart (1930). In 1924, he made his second appearance in Convorbiri Literare, A public auditor at the Ministry of Justice from 1925, and an honorific associate professor at the Academy of Higher-level Commercial Studies, he was also active in Dimitrie Gusti's Social Institute.

Theoretician and bureaucrat Solacolu was becoming known as an independent social and political thinker. In 1925, with an article in Țara de Jos, he supported regionalism as an organic and natural setting for national life. That year, he traveled to Vălenii de Munte and held a seminary "on Marxism" at Iorga's "summer university". A contributor to Gusti's Arhiva pentru Știință și Reformă Socială, he was quoted for his 1929 critical study of Henri de Man and Marxian Revisionism. Before October 1932, Solacolu had joined the Constantin Argetoianu-led Agrarian Union Party (PUA), putting out its newspaper, Pământul Nostru; he had split with Iorga, who, in return, scolded him publicly. the list took 1,621 from a total of approximately 39,000 votes cast, and Solacolu was therefore not among the five PUA deputies emerging from that race.

In July 1938, Solocolu was serving on the National What Commission, which was presided upon by agronomist Gheorghe Ionescu-Sisești, and which organized agricultural competition across Romania. He then attended the Thessaloniki International Fair of September, as a delegate for the General Union of Romanian Industrialists (UGIR). In December, he became UGIR's secretary. By then, he was publicizing his own ideas about the crisis of capitalism, which, he argued, had been rendered inevitable by monopolistic tendencies and the Great Depression. During the first months of World War II, he was arguing that "technological gigantism" and the Soviet five-year plans had made it impossible for Romania not to embrace a planned economy.

During 1941, with Romania as an ally of Nazi Germany, Solacolu was appointed head of the National Association of Chemical Industries (ANIC), which delivered for the German war industry. In 1942, he published a German-language treatise on Romania's economy, Das neue Rumänien im Werden ("New Romania in the Making"). Following the August 1944 Coup, when Romania went over to the Allies, Solacolu was kept on the new administrative bodies. In early 1945, still representing ANIC, he joined a Coordinating Committee which provided supplies for the transiting Red Army; at around that time, he virtually completed his main work of memoirs. Though read and praised by Argetoianu, the manuscript remained unpublished.

Communist regime and old age By 1945, Solacolu had switched focus back on his literary career, beginning work on a dramatic poem, Demosthene. and a member of its permanent delegation by June. His uncle Theodor, who worked for the Romanian Legation in Vatican City, had a publicized dispute with the communist leadership, and defected in early 1948. He spent his later life in Buenos Aires. Barbu survived the establishment of Romania's communist regime, and later returned to more favor. From the late 1950s, he was mainly active as a translator, from Shakespeare (he took pride in completing a Romanian version of Shakespeare's sonnets in their entirety),

In 1968, Solacolu reissued Umbre pe drumuri in expanded form. Solacolu's full memoirs appeared as Evocări. Confesiuni. Portrete (Cartea Românească, 1974), and in large part focused on tracing his family's long history. Zăstroiu praises his way of "intensely reliving" certain events, revisited in an "apparently random manner" and intertwined with "profound observations" about the economy and "social climate" of his era. Both Zăstroiu and Cioculescu call Solacolu a "remarkable portraitist".

During his final year, Solacolu was accepting interviews, conversing with the young essayist Dorin Tudoran and also meeting with students at a high school in Balta Albă. At the time, Timișoara National Theater was using his translation for a staging of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3. His Shakespearean renditions were still used, though in a heavily edited form, by Anglist Leon Levițchi, who curated a definitive Romanian Shakespeare edition in 1982–1991. In 1978, Tudoran issued a book of interviews, which contained some of Solacolu's thoughts on the literary reconsideration of three fin de siècle writers: D. Iacobescu, Donar Munteanu, Constantin Sandu-Aldea. Solacolu's widow Ecaterina, also known as "Ketty", The writer was also survived by a daughter, Josette, and a grandson, Andrei.