Panait Istrati (1884-1935), known as the Gorky of the Balkans, a fervent communist in his youth, was among the first intellectuals to publicly denounce Stalinism. The son of a Romanian laundress and a Greek smuggler he never met, he was a precocious reader and a tireless wanderer. A friend of the writers Romain Rolland (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1915) and Nikos Kazantzakis (a perennial Nobel Prize nominee), he wrote in French and was followed in Republican Catalonia. Anna Casassas, who has already translated some of his works, now signs the translation. When the sun rises (Cal Carré publishing house), a book dated 1934, a year before his death, alone and isolated in a Bucharest sanatorium. He was 50 years old and had long been suffering from tuberculosis.
Adrià, the novel's protagonist, is a alter ego The author's youthful work. How many Adriàs are running around the world today, hustling, doing low-paying jobs, hopping from country to country, aspiring to an ever-elusive well-being? If at the beginning of the 20th century it was already difficult to move and survive, it's even more so now: nations are closing borders, curiosity has given way to fear, and digital control works against adventurous anonymity. Freedoms are shrinking for nomadic and amorous spirits.
It's 1906. At 22, Adrià Zograffi, drawn by the promise of a luminous Mediterranean, leaves home and sets sail for Alexandria. His friends tell him he has the makings of a writer and that he can aspire to more than sending stories to the press. Lacking imagination, he needs experiences. Braila, his hometown on the banks of the Danube, has become too small for him. Restless and dreamy, without a passport and with empty pockets, he relies on his skill as a house painter and on his friend Mikhail, who works at the Royal Hotel in Cairo.
On the boat bound for Egypt, he meets Mussa, a 60-year-old painter, a polyglot (Turkish, Romanian, Indian, Spanish) and decidedly unorthodox Jew searching for his daughter Sarah. Mussa will become a father figure to Adrià, though his "sharing his father" transcends any "social theory." Adrià—such are the advantages of fiction—already possesses the wisdom of the old Panait Istrati, disillusioned with communism. He later explains: "I'm happy to be in Egypt, to be free, to eat every day, if possible, and even to go without food if I feel like it, if there are days when freedom is more necessary to me than bread. (I would curse a socialist society that prevented me from living as I pleased)."
Having come from the frozen winter, they are greeted in Alexandria by the warmth of the Mediterranean. Life smiles upon them, but in that way. I won't tell you about their adventures and misadventures, which are many and colorful amidst an existence that is undeniably voluptuous. They always choose freedom, of course. They are always short of cash, of shillings: they usually spend the last of their money smoking and drinking. Adrià, despite acknowledging the obvious ("humanity is often lamentable. I already thought so. Now I know it a little better"), never loses hope of finding his own little paradise.
From Egypt they go to Syria, where they remain in the hands of a wealthy, sincere patron, a pragmatic rogue, a charmer who knows how to play on the oddities and weaknesses of human nature (especially the sexual ones): "There is only one true honesty, and it is practical." Adrià lets himself be led by both this master and Mussa's temperamental swings, but he does not renounce his religion, which is freedom without material tolls: "Man should own nothing, and then he will own everything." Nor does he renounce his right not to feel bound: "Often, the most authentic kinship and the most authentic homeland are at the antipodes of the place where we come into the world and where we live as strangers."
Freedom and love, these are the two laws of his creed. "Because the object of love is unimportant, it is love that is everything." Even if it is love for the day that is born each day, for the silence of dawn when the sun... of two poor, starving men, Adrià and Mussa. (When the sun rises It is part of the diptych Mediterranean by Panait Istrati. The second part, Outbreak of (Only, the editor Antònia Carré-Pons plans to publish it later.)
