Conferences

On Sunday, 4th November, from 11.00 a.m., the NTB Small Hall shall host the
conference Homer’s Inner Eye. How Do the Blind Write, Read and Compose
held by Radu Sergiu Ruba.

About the Conference
Homer was an author with a concrete historical life. He truly lived somewhere and sang throughout the metropolitan and colonial Hellas. He was not a myth during lifetime, but he became a myth. The proof of his real existence is situated in one of the two sagas which are attributed to him. The conference thus starts with this revelation.
Afterwards, transition is made to Homer’s visual memory, to the quasi-mimetic take-over of the ambient concreteness in his verses and his imaginary. Hence, the blind with a visual memory and the ones without such a memory. The relation between writing and language. The shaping function of language, language as an attribute of God, not the image however.
The human civilization is unconceivable without a writing code. The mimetic or symbolic codes – pictograms, ideograms, hieroglyphs. The literal codes. The Braille code and the proof that the human being, in his/her depth, holds communicational codifying functions independent from the sight. The Homer constellation, the anthology of blind writers of Romania and the synthesis of the human voice. The electronic voice of the computer, the first human dimension synthesized so far.
The man educated and shaped as a superior being only through language and writing systems. The three great figures which have marked and built the specificity of the life of the blind worldwide: Homer, Louis Braille and Ray Kurzweil. Radu Sergiu Ruba

About Radu Sergiu Ruba

He was born on October 14 th , 1954 in Ardud, Satu Mare County. He started his education in the neighbouring village Răteşti, pursuing it until the baccalaureate at the Institute for the Blind in Cluj, interval during which, around the age of 11, he completely lost his eyesight which had never been perfect. He followed an education of foreign languages, French and English, at the Bucharest University. He worked as a French teacher in the pre-university system, as a lecturer within the programme Cambridge Standard English al British Council of the capital, as an inspector in the Ministry of Education, responsible for the education of pupils and students with sight deficiencies. In this capacity, he founded four dedicated schools, two high-schools and two balneo-physiotherapy post-secondary schools which are still functioning nowadays. He was also an advisor to the ministry of work on issues of disability, contributing to the adoption of administrative measures and legal acts.

He belonged for 25 years to the management of the Blind Association of Romania, its president for nine years and also to the management of the relevant European Union. From the responsibility functions of the national organization, he succeeded in opening, together with the manager of the Metropolitan Library of Bucharest, Florin Rotaru, a branch for the blind which functioned as an audio book production centre, he equipped his organization with a Braille electronic printing shop, capable of printing countrywide, he determined the digitalization of all audio books from the
association’s library, he contributed to the improvement or sight rescue of dozens of patients within a great ophthalmology project and, by raising around 800 thousand euros, he launched the building of a rehabilitation centre for the people who lose their eyesight as adults.

Since 1992, he produces a weekly show, on the Radio România Actualităţi station. He is also the author of shows broadcast by Radio Free Europe and Radio Europa FM. He made his editorial debut in 1983, at Cartea Românească, with a volume of verse followed by further five.
R. S. Ruba also achieved selections of his materials of press, essays, articles, interviews, grouped in three volumes, including, the one with historiographic character, A Thousand Years in a Hundred and One Enigmas, written together with his spouse, Nicoleta. As a supreme literary duty towards the existential experience community he belongs to, he compiled two editions of the Homer Constellation, an Anthology of the Blind Writers of Romania, with a first appearance in 1996, and the second, much revised and enriched, in 2017.
Arriving late to the prose, but dealing with it especially lately, he published the volume of stories The Smuggling of Memory and the novels The Demon of Confession in 2004, re-edited in 2009 and A Summer Which Does Not Set, in 2014.
This book, autobiographical to a great extent, has been awarded several distinctions, including the Ion Creangă award of the Romanian Academy in 2016. The novel was translated into English and Italian, whereas a translation into Hungarian is underway. R. S. Ruba represented Romania this year, both with prose and with poetry, at the European Literature Night Festival of Lisbon.
The author also received further literary and cultural distinctions, in general: the award of the French Foreign Affairs’ Ministry at the World Short Story Festival, the Frontiera Poesis award, the award of the Gheorghe Ursu Foundation, the award of the Bucharest Writers’ Guild, of the Convorbiri Literare magazine and of the Jewish Braille Institute of America. He was awarded by the President of Romania the Cultural Merit Order to the rank of Knight in the year 2008.

Radu Sergiu Ruba’s poems, short stories and essays have been translated into French, English, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese. In his turn, the writer translated into French authors such as Michel Tournier, Gilles Lipovetsky, Olivier Rolin, Nicolas Ancion and Corinne Desarzens.

Translated by Simona Nichiteanu