I.D. Sârbu and the power to transform a camp barrack into a university lecture hall
I.D. Sârbu’s sense of humour was the source of many a frown. He told stories, he invented, he laughed. He graded his effects with erudition, transforming soldierly jokes into subtle morals, with the knowledge of a winegrower who ennobles wine. Sometimes he’d pour water into the wine. He praised gossip as a literary genre, like the hymn, the ode or even the epic, which, at least in his case, was similar in size and richness of episodes. The good-natured cleverness was eventually transformed into self-irony. He told us how, in the Cluj of his youth, he used to meet the […]