If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Can you describe the mood of Tecuci as you feel/see it?

Nearly thirty-five years have passed since I have left the tiny town of Tecuci. The place itself has turned into a town of the mind, and maybe the best way I can describe it is by sharing a little bit from a longer manuscript, Waking Up in Tecuci, that I wrote in 2013 when I returned there with my family for a visit:

The stray dogs that have become a feature of Romania after the Revolution begin to howl at about four in the morning in the Central Park, where once upon a time my sister and I camped with children from our village school. We stayed in bunk beds in tiny log cabins, too excited to be homesick. A whole week of “city” paradise: us, our rope-skipping and sidewalk games, communist party songs and conspicuous head lice, all hopping among little pathways between chestnuts and oaks that led to the fences from where we watched the buzzing streets and honking cars. Officials from the jam factory brought us cherries for snacks, some kind of “donation,” and we picked through them with our dirty hands. Most of them were rotten: we couldn’t be persuaded to eat them. We were used to climbing our own trees and eating the perfect ones—smooth, dark red skin, firm and juicy to the bite.  Even as kids we felt so sorry for people who lived in towns and cities, because they missed the best part of life: fresh food straight from the garden.

The howling dogs move closer to the fence surrounding the hotel where Loredana, Catalin, and I spend the night, again in the same room, up late talking and laughing. Tecuci. Heaven. But also the town of my parents’ government-imposed divorce. The place where I spent adolescence tormented by all kinds of betrayal; “Cornelia,” now surfacing from the secret police files, a friend who worked as an informer on me. Which one was she? I hardly had any friends: it shouldn’t be difficult to guess. Had I eaten savarina with this girl, gone with her to the café across from school? Walked in the Central Park with her, maybe, to pass the hour whenever I missed the bus? The town of a certain boy and his snowdrops, whose fidelity the files haven’t yet challenged, and I pray never will.

What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city?

There are so many heartbreaking memories that rise to the surface now, when I write this, as a lump in my throat. The most important one is the memory of watching my parents divorce—forced by the secret police—because my father was a political dissident. The city felt like a place of shame and powerlessness. I have written so much about this, yet no amount of writing and rewriting helps. My father handcuffed; people chanting his name under the courthouse windows; then the chains on his bare feet, his chained hands; my mother, dignified and yet tormented with pain; us children in some kind of haze; the judge turning away crying; the people in the courtroom whispering about us.

What is the most extraordinary detail, one that goes unnoticed by most, of the city?

Once upon a time it was the smell of linden trees. I hope the trees survived the post-communist remake. Everything about that smell brings back a sense of the place itself: you could almost pack the whole town into a whiff of linden flowers dropping from cymes—cream-colored fireworks. The ordinariness of life borrowed that burst of fragrance for what seems now like an eternal season.

What writer(s) from here should we read?

Calistrat Hogas, though I am not sure he appears in any translations.

Is there a place here you return to often?

I have not returned since 2013, but when I was there, I went to visit my high school, which carries so many memories. In the town center there is this bakery/patisserie, right outside of the park: everything is still made from fresh ingredients right inside the store and it beats some of the fanciest desserts I’ve had.

Is there an iconic literary place we should know?

The local library.

Are there hidden cities within this city that have intrigued or seduced you?

The parks—all of them—and the train stations had a life of their own that still bring memories decades after I left. They have to do with comings and goings, with furtive encounters that I watched as a teenager. In a sense, they were places of escape, or “pretend-escape.” I have very strong memories from when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and wanting desperately to escape. We were under house surveillance because my father was a political dissident, and I was followed by the secret police everywhere: there was always someone following me. I played escape games in my mind over and over again. The city of moving shadows was the hidden city in plain sight. I still have this fear mixed with fascination about it: how it was possible to live like that, and somehow survive.

Where does passion live here?

I remember that people had fierce attachments: to friends, to family, to lovers. And I remember stories of people chasing each other with hatchets and knives when betrayal was involved. People made love in the watermelon fields outside the town and in their gardens. Benches under chestnut trees, the linden trees, the apple trees were places for a whole lot of dreaming of a life no one could have had for real.

Then there was passion for cooking, the perfectly rolled vine leaves and the perfect cozonac, the Easter bread. In my memory the city is a kaleidoscope: now an image of flowers at the funeral shops, now the fear of unnamed shadows following me, now the tantalizing smell of the bakeries where there was never enough bread, now the linden and the chestnut trees. Post-communism, the city belonged to stray dogs.

What is the title of one of your works about Tecuci and what inspired it exactly?

My first collection of poems, Crossing the Carpathians.

Inspired by Levi, “Outside Tecuci does an outside exist?” 

It’s like this. The city lives inside like a ligament in the body that remains unnoticed until it is torn. Everything is outside of it, the body moves around happily, unaware of what makes the movement possible. The Tecuci inside of me remained hidden and forgotten till my father died in 2022 and someone there wrote an extraordinary and moving obituary, where in some ways he was lamented as a son of the town—which he literally was. For months I hobbled on one foot while the ligament of memory hurt every time I tried to step on both feet.

Carmen Bugan is the author of nine books including poetry, memoir, and criticism. Bugan’s monograph, Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013/Routledge, 2020), received international praise. Her most recent book of essays on politics and poetics, Poetry and the Language of Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2021), was named “an essential book for writers” by Poets and Writers. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador/Graywolf, 2012), was the winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, a finalist for the George Orwell Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was serialized as the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Bugan’s recent poetry collections include Lilies from America (Shearsman, 2019), which received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; Time Being (Shearsman, 2022), and Tristia (Shearsman, January 2025).