Now, I was already craving the air-conditioned rooms of the library building with its musty smells. I have always found libraries mysterious and full of promise, hiding treasures on their shelves. Back in Timisoara, the public and school libraries (“bibliotecile”) almost never had the books you were looking for. You could browse, if you had a good relationship with the librarian, but mostly you would fill out a request and then maybe they happened to have the book. The real libraries were built at home, one hard-to-find book at the time. Books in glass fronted bookcases, books in packages, wrapped in paper and lined up against the walls, in the little storage room, under the pull-out sofa, carefully catalogued in a folder so you could find them when you needed them.

Since my first on-foot trip to the Livermore library, at the risk of getting sun stroke, I have used the library system in every American suburb I’ve lived in. Some have been better stocked than others, situated in older or more modern buildings, but they all housed the musty smell of books that seems to be the same no matter the location. Browsing the shelves in person is a favorite pastime of mine, and it has led me to some very unexpected authors and titles. Some of my favorite books I’ve discovered by randomly walking the aisles in the library, perusing titles and author names, partially pulling out volumes to look at more closely and trusting my intuition. Others I have been led to by starting off with a physical copy and then searching the catalog following that invisible thread from author to author to similar books, led just by gut feeling and what looks interesting.

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently found several Romanian authors in translation in the King County Library System, titles that might or might not come up when searching the library catalog by keywords related to Romania. Just in time for fall and winter, here is a selection of titles that brings a bit of Romanian spirit into the home from the library shelves.

About our local Eastside Library System: The King County Library System has 50 library branches stretching across King County and is one of the largest and busiest library systems in the country.

I grew up and became an adult entirely in Romanian. I experienced most of my firsts in Romanian: first steps, first words, first hurts, first days at school, first friends, first loves, first disappointments, first jobs, first ambitions. Romanian was the language through which I learnt the world.

Then, at twenty-four, as a fully formed Romanian, I moved to live in English.

At first, the change was straightforward. I quickly discovered that I did not know English, or rather that what I thought was English did not work in Glasgow. But I had little choice except to learn. I used it to read, write and study. I used it with colleagues, with remarkably patient bus drivers, with shop assistants and kind strangers in the street when I got lost.

Yet I continued living much of my personal life in Romanian. In those early years abroad, I gravitated towards other Romanians who were also new to English and to Glasgow. Most of my close friends were Romanian. My family was in Romania. My boyfriend was in Romania. When I spoke about research, students, teaching and presentations, I did so in English. When I spoke about feelings, memories, homesickness, laughter or heartbreak, I did so in Romanian.

For several years, I inhabited two separate linguistic worlds. English was for work. Romanian was for life.

And without realising it at first, I lived these worlds differently.

Romanian had taught me that everything in the world is alive. Objects, ideas, emotions and occupations all carry gender. A child is masculine. Most feelings are feminine. Work itself, lucru, is neutral: masculine when singular, feminine when plural, which somehow feels entirely appropriate. Romanian quietly suggests that things have character, personality, perhaps even agency.

Speaking Romanian meant living in a world populated by living things.

English works differently. Things are neutral. Feelings lose their femininity and become “it”, the same as a table or Percy the dog. The world feels less personal, less chaotic, less human, and more neatly organised into categories.

Romanian had also taught me that context matters. We often know who is acting without naming them. Entire conversations happen through implication and shared understanding. The difference between iubesc and iubeşti sits in the ending, not the beginning. English, by contrast, insists on clarity. Someone must always be the subject. Love is love, but “I love” is very different from “you love”. At work, I learned to specify who was doing what, who was responsible and who was accountable.

Clarity and precision governed my English-speaking life. Ambiguity and shared understanding belonged to Romanian.

For a while, I carried these two systems side by side. My professional life existed in English. My emotional life existed in Romanian.

It was, in a sense, a mild form of linguistic schizophrenia. Two versions of the world coexisted within me, neatly compartmentalised. Feelings remained alive and feminine among friends. Teaching slides, research papers and endless committee meetings lived in a more neutral, analytical universe.

But languages are greedy. They do not remain politely confined to the territories assigned to them.

As the years passed, more and more of my life migrated into English. My circle of friends broadened. Many were not native English speakers either, but English became our common language. I married an English speaker. I raised my daughters in English. English became the language of home.

Gradually, Romanian retreated.

Today, I speak Romanian mostly with my mother and my sister. Even with my sister, who also lives abroad, our conversations are no longer entirely Romanian. We speak a slightly absurd diaspora hybrid in which Romanian grammar accommodates English nouns, while English sentences suddenly collapse into Romanian expressions that are impossible to translate.

This is what diaspora sounds like: two languages colliding and blending into something unintelligible to everyone except the people speaking it.

But apart from those conversations, I do not really live in diaspora. I live in English.

And as English escaped the office, it reshaped my life. What once belonged to work spread everywhere else. I send Outlook invitations to my children. I email my husband. I Teams colleagues to arrange drinks. The language of work became the language of everyday existence.

At times, this felt like a loss.

Yet Romanian is surprisingly tenacious. It returns the moment I land “back home”, often with my first conversation at passport control, as if it had been waiting patiently all along.

More surprisingly, Romanian survives within my English. I tell my daughter, now away at university, that I miss her rather than that I love her, because it is her absence that hurts. Missing her feels like the more precise expression of love.

I tell my younger daughter fii cuminte, because after all these years I still have not found an English phrase that means exactly what I mean. Given her limited Romanian, that may explain why she remains stubbornly immune to the instruction.

I name my computer, my car and my phone because they feel close, personal and alive. A thoroughly Romanian habit.

And as colleagues become friends, the language changes. “Best regards” becomes “Best”, then disappears altogether. Formalities fade. Shared understanding takes over. Without noticing it, I begin communicating with them in ways that feel surprisingly Romanian.

Perhaps language does not simply limit what we can say or how we see the world. Perhaps it also preserves what we cannot bear to lose.

Or perhaps “the limits of language” is the wrong theme entirely. Maybe languages are less like borders and more like windows. Each offers a different view of the same world. Living in another language is not about shifting borders, but opening another window to let more light come in.

Or maybe language is a companion. Sometimes a close friend. Sometimes a lover. Sometimes an old relationship that survives mostly in memory. Distances grow, habits change, conversations become less frequent. Yet it remains part of who you are.

The words may become harder to find.

But the worlds they created remain.

The more I thought about this sentence, the truer it seemed. I have lived in Romanian, Finnish and English, and each one of these languages has taught me something the others left unseen.

I began to understand that language shapes our world.

It determines how we see reality, what we notice and what we don’t.

Take snow. Did you know that Finns have hundreds of words to talk about it? Finnish language distinguishes fresh snow from wet snow, falling snow from snow already settled on the ground, a hard crust from a soft surface, a drift from slush. It’s almost like the language itself encourages you to watch, word by word, how snow is changing state.

Brits developed a similar attentiveness to rain. English distinguishes drizzle from mizzle, a shower from a downpour, a cloudburst from a steady rain. Regional dialects become more precise still: Scottish smirr is a fine rain or mist; Cumbrian mizzling describes misty, drizzly rain, while syling means rain pouring heavily. There is spitting, spotting, teeming, pelting and bucketing down. Some words describe the rain itself; others describe how it falls, how long it lasts or what it does to the person caught beneath it. Living inside the English language, one does not simply experience “rain.” It notices whether the rain floats, lingers, arrives sideways, passes quickly or settles in for the day.

I once thought of snow simply as snow and rain as simply rain. Not anymore. Living with new languages I’ve found there are more ways to look at the same world, more ways I can refine and understand the same reality.

It plants images inside ordinary things and tells us what to imagine.

Language can do more than refine the details of the world around us. Sometimes it lays imagination over what we see and gives ordinary things a second life. The physical world and the objects around us might look different depending on the language we use.

In Romanian, a door lock is a broască (a frog) and the burners on a stove are its eyes (ochi de aragaz). English gives the road a shoulder. In Finnish the word for Northern Lights (revontulet) means “fox fires.” In Finnish folklore, the lights were sparks swept into the sky by the tail of a fox running across the snow.

Each word contains an earlier act of imagination: someone looked at metal and saw an animal crouching inside the door; at circles of flame and saw eyes; at the edge of a road and recognized part of a body; at light moving through the winter sky and imagined a fox.

The word preserves that first resemblance forever. It carries it forward, offering it to everyone who speaks the language and each inherited image becomes permission to imagine further.

Living among languages means inheriting several of these ways of seeing.

When the Romanian frog, the English shoulder and the Finnish fox begin to inhabit the same world, who knows what else can happen. Suddenly we can open possibilities and imagine stories that no single language could have offered alone.

It decides what is allowed to remain invisible.

Finnish allows gender to remain invisible. Hän can mean either he or she. If I say “hän on väsynyt” - “hän is tired” - I have told you nothing about the person’s gender. English usually makes me choose. Romanian may demand even more: “este obosit” and “este obosită” reveal gender without needing el or ea. The information sits inside the adjective.

On the other side, English allows the relationship between two people to remain undefined. It gives me “you”, whether I am speaking to a child, a stranger, a close friend or someone in authority. Romanian asks me to choose: “tu” or “dumneavoastră”? Closeness or distance? Familiarity or respect? The decision must often be made before I know what else I want to say.

Each language brings something different into view and leaves something else in the dark. In one, the relationship between two people matters; in another, gender disappears.

The differences become hardest to ignore when I try to carry a word from one language into another. Some words travel easily from one language to another, while others arrive broken, with parts of their meaning missing.

We can explain the meaning of these “untranslatable words”. We can surround them with several other words and can transport all their individual pieces. But what we cannot always preserve is the way those pieces belonged together before the journey.

Dor is the Romanian example everyone mentions, but I am more interested in năzdrăvan. In Romanian folktales, a cal năzdrăvan is a horse endowed with supernatural intelligence. It understands human speech, anticipates danger and advises the hero (usually after eating burning coals).

We also call a child năzdrăvan: clever, troublesome, energetic, endearing and somehow more alive than the rules intended. To translate the word in English, I need to choose. Is the child mischievous, naughty, impish, clever, high-spirited or precocious? Mischievous preserves the trouble but loses some of the admiration. Clever keeps the intelligence but loses the trouble. Naughty introduces disapproval. Precocious sounds almost clinical. Impish comes close, but the old supernatural knowledge has disappeared.

The word cannot be carried across whole. When I translate năzdrăvan, I have to take apart a child who was whole in Romanian.

Finnish divides snow into a multitude of realities but allows gender to remain unspoken. Romanian hides a frog inside a door and preserves a trace of magic inside a mischievous child, yet asks me to name the closeness between two people. English gives rain its many temperaments and the road a shoulder, but allows every relationship to disappear inside a single you.

Each language illuminates something and leaves something else in shadow.

Living among three languages has taught me to move between those areas of light and notice that at the limit of one language, another sometimes sees farther.

English is wonderfully concise, concentrating a great deal of meaning into relatively few words. Other languages, such as Romanian and French, struggle to follow suit, and that struggle goes beyond a translation problem; it’s a clash between worlds in which tenses and modes are meaning-making, and nuances, if not whole concepts, risk slipping through the cracks of imperfect translatability, as I have learned through my work as a translator, and through my philosophical incursions.

To be is arguably clean across the three languages, capturing potential outside of time and space, an abstract seed that’s just as clearly expressed in a fi and être. But the next step is already problematic: been conveys something that is temporally situated, with a concrete sense of completion, and the copulative value demands further qualifications. What is more, the Perfect mode creates what is called a bridging tense, connecting past to present in a way that neither Romanian nor French can manage. Where (am) fost and (j’ai) été are unidimensional, the English branches into (I) was and (I) have been, thus precluding identity between the three languages. Finally, being introduces an additional grammatical category that further complicates any attempt at establishing a strict equivalence. Being is not just a gerund of the verb to be, but also the noun that conceptualizes existence; it captures both process and result, thus illustrating in a most poignant manner the ontological force of the word. In this instance too, the Romanian fiind and the French étant lag behind – the gerund form exists, but the concept underneath it is poorly formulated, and thus weak.

For someone who has spent decades translating worlds into words, these difficulties are hardly surprising. What did come as a surprise was how such challenges arise even when translating – or, rather, attempting to translate – something as fundamental as philosophy. Fundamental and universal, one might say. And yet, even the universality of philosophy appears to be conditional on language, for what other way can there be to convey its contents?

And the be-been-being problem is as relevant in philosophy as anywhere else. When Descartes famously posited Je pense, donc je suis, he was counting on a generous interpretation of to be as to exist, even though the formulation would seem to require a further qualification. English inherited the same incompleteness in its I think, therefore I am. Romanian somehow took the high road and made it explicit: Gândesc, deci exist. A cheeky move for a language that hasn’t contributed much to universal philosophy, one might say. A language that still has a few tricks up its sleeve, as will soon become apparent.

But before we go there, let’s stop for a minute to consider what Descartes’s formulation opens the door to: the concept of a mind endowed with consciousness. It’s safe to assume that all languages have some way to convey this concept, but I’m content to look at how English, French, and Romanian deal with it. English is remarkably particular about it, as the word consciousness maps cleanly onto the concept it represents. French and Romanian require a detour through phenomenology: conscience and conștiință are ambiguous in their bare forms, as they conflate consciousness with conscience. And while it may seem that adding an extra word is merely a question of form – after all, where’s the problem in using conștiință fenomenală or conscience phénoménale? – I would argue that the matter shifts too, if only slightly: adding the qualifier, that is, specifying what kind of conștiință / conscience we’re dealing with might suggest that the relationship between conscience and consciousness is one of subordination, with conștiință fenomenală being a subcategory of conștiință, and conscience phénoménale a subcategory of conscience, respectively. A wrong conclusion, to be sure, but one that further illustrates the depths of confusion that language can engender, even within a monolingual culture. Translation into English saves the day, but it’s a rare exception, rather than the rule.

Differences also exist in how the various phenomena of consciousness are conveyed in the three different languages, and these differences reflect variations in the degree to which such phenomena are conceived of as abstract or somatic. English speaks of that which happens in the mind. French makes it more embodied in its ce qui se passe dans la tête. Romanian, once again, proves more expressive, or more flexible, as it can make sense of both ce-ți trece prin minte and ce-ți trece prin cap. Granted, analytical philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle have examined the connection between mind and head – and dismissed it as illusory – but the fact remains that, at the level of natural languages, even something as fundamental and universal as thinking, and in particular how we think about thinking, is shaped by cultural factors.

Naturally, the above are but a handful of examples. What they all have in common is that they illustrate not just the limits of our individual worlds as defined by the languages underpinning individual cultures, but also the creative potential of translation. When we translate with a keen awareness of the worlds we’re moving between, we create bridges, using what we have in common to integrate what makes us different, thus bringing new worlds into existence. Worlds that we then inhabit, shaping them further and allowing them to shape us.

_{Lucian Ban, photo by Elmer Lemes}

1. Lucian, you’ve performed at Earshot Jazz Festival in Seattle at least twice before. What keeps bringing you back to Seattle, and what makes the festival special?

Actually, I’ve been coming to Seattle quite a few times. The first time was in 2016 with Mat Maneri for our Transylvanian Concert, and then in 2017 I came back with Elevation for Songs From Afar at the Seattle Art Museum, with Billy Hart, Mat, Abraham Burton, Brad Jones and Gavril Țărmure. I was also there in 2023 with Mat’s ASH Quartet.

What I like about Earshot is that they have always been open to different sides of what I do. There is also a very serious listening audience in Seattle. ARCS has been an important partner for me over the years as well. So it feels less like coming to a festival and more like returning to a place where some of these projects have already had a life.

2. Looking at your career, there’s this repeated engagement with Enescu, and now Bartók. What draws you to these major 20th-century composers?

It’s not really because they are major 20th-century composers. What draws me to them is the way their music connects with improvisation and with the folk traditions behind it.

I actually rediscovered Enescu after I came to New York. I was surprised by how much freedom there was inside his music. His writing for the violin is extremely detailed, but that detail comes partly from having internalized the way Romanian folk violinists played—with all their inflections, ornaments and rhythmic freedom. So even when the music is completely written out, there is something very alive and improvisatory inside it.

With Bartók, the connection is even more personal. I grew up in the region where he collected these songs, and only later did I realize the extraordinary depth of what he had documented. He collected thousands of songs, but what fascinates me is not simply the historical importance of the collection. It’s that these songs still have an incredible life in them. They can be transformed, improvised with and taken somewhere completely different without losing their identity.

I don’t see folk music as something primitive or secondary. There is an enormous musical intelligence in it, and both Enescu and Bartók understood that.

3. This project expands jazz into multimedia, with archival photographs, historical recordings and Bartók’s wax-cylinder recordings. Why was it important to go beyond the music itself?

The multimedia piece grew out of a commission and presentation by National Sawdust and the World Music Institute, which premiered in February 2025. As we developed it, we worked closely with the Budapest Bartók Archives and obtained some extraordinary material: rare footage of Transylvanian villagers dancing from the early 20th century, photographs Bartók took himself on his field trips, facsimiles of his transcriptions, and the audio from the original Edison wax-cylinder recordings.

For us, these aren’t simply historical documents illustrating the music. Bartók himself understood that something is lost when living music is reduced to notation. He wrote about the “pulsing life” of peasant music that could not fully be captured on the page. So, it became important to bring some of that original life back into the performance—the voices, the dancers, Bartók’s own gaze and his attempts to capture what he was hearing.

We created a video narrative from this material that Mat and I interact with live. In a way, you have three different moments meeting in the same performance: the people Bartók recorded more than a hundred years ago, Bartók himself, and the two of us responding to that material today. The archival material becomes part of the improvisation, another voice in the dialogue. And every night that dialogue is different.

4. Bartók and Enescu are strongly associated with the violin and piano, but you and Mat use piano and viola. Why the viola? Does it open possibilities that the violin doesn’t?

For me, the viola has a lower, darker sound that is closer to the human voice—or sometimes to a horn—than the violin. And Mat has created one of the most identifiable sounds in modern jazz on a string instrument. All About Jazz once wrote that “Mat Maneri has changed the way the jazz world listens to the violin & viola,” and The Wall Street Journal called him a “jazz viola virtuoso.”

When we first played together, that sound immediately made sense to me. Mat also brings microtonality and techniques from many different musical traditions. So I never thought of the viola as a substitute for the violin. It became part of our own language.

5. You and Mat have been playing together for many years. Did the friendship come because of the music, or did the music become what it is because of the friendship?

I think we became friends because of the music, and then the friendship became part of the music.

We’ve been playing together for seventeen years now. We come from very different places, but we have a similar curiosity and a similar way of listening. After so many years and so many tours, there is a kind of shorthand between us. We can react to each other very quickly without having to explain much.

And I’ve learned a lot about freedom from Mat.

6. Jazz is fundamentally social and collaborative. What do you think makes that kind of dialogue and community possible?

For me, improvisation is fundamentally about listening. We humans improvise in order to survive. And in our music, in jazz, you are making decisions in real time, but those decisions depend on what the other musicians are doing. You have to be willing to give something up, to follow somebody else, or to change direction completely.

I learned that from many people—Alex Harding, Abraham Burton, John Hébert, Billy Hart, Nasheet Waits, Gerald Cleaver, Mat and others. A lot of what we call the jazz tradition is really transmitted from one musician to another. You learn by being around people, playing with them and listening.

7. You founded Elevation and have sustained the ensemble for many years. What has allowed you to build such a lasting ensemble in the homeland of jazz?

I just kept playing with the people I wanted to play with, and maybe even more importantly, musicians that are better than me.

Elevation started in 2006 with Abraham Burton, and John Hébert and Eric McPherson became the core of the quartet. We spent years playing clubs, festivals and touring before people really started paying attention. You cannot really rush that process.

For me, that’s how a band develops a language. You play together for a long time, you learn each other’s instincts, and eventually the music becomes something that couldn’t exist with four different people.

8. How would you describe Elevation’s music? What distinguishes your approach from the traditions and styles that have influenced you?

Elevation is a what is called a classic jazz quartet: saxophone, piano, double bass and drums. I don’t feel the need to put another category on it.

The music comes out of a long history—bebop, post-bop, blues, free jazz, the piano tradition—but all of those things are inside us rather than something we consciously try to reproduce. There is also some Romanian DNA in my writing, but I’m not trying to make Romanian music with a jazz band.

What is important to me is that the musicians retain their own voices. Composition and improvisation are not opposites. The music has a structure, a history and a vocabulary, but it has to remain alive. You know where you come from, but you don’t know exactly where you’re going to arrive.

The Seattle performance of Transylvanian Dance on October 9 at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center, presented by the American Romanian Cultural Society (ARCS) in partnership with the Earshot Jazz Festival and with support from Tulipán Foundation, has opened a timely conversation about the power of the arts to cross borders. The project itself transcends boundaries between folk tradition and contemporary improvisation, Eastern European and global musical traditions, archival history and the present, composition and spontaneous creation. In the same vein, the theme of the 13th edition of the Romanian Film Festival is Beyond Borders. The films selected for this year’s festival likewise transform borders into sites of encounter, exchange, and discovery.

For those of us who acquire it rather than inherit it, language is never simply spoken. To me, learning English felt like earning passage across land that was never mine to begin with. Every sentence was a toll I had to pay in advance, to prove I deserved to keep walking. AI does not ask for that toll. It opens the gate before I have said a word. But an open gate is not the same as solid ground, and now the work is deciding which parts of what lies beyond it will actually hold my weight. The proving did not disappear. It moved from my mouth to my judgment.

Wittgenstein’s claim that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” reads differently depending on who is doing the building. For a native speaker, the limit can feel like the elusive line of the horizon, never quite touched but beautiful to look at in the morning from my back porch as I watch the sun explode into color along the crests of Pikes Peak, one of Colorado’s fourteeners I plan to summit before I die. But the limit of an acquired language rarely feels like a horizon. It feels like a fence, deliberately installed by someone else, and mended by someone else too, long before you ever learned where the gate was.

I grew up speaking Romanian, learning English as the language that would carry me into my American life, and absorbing Farsi, the mother tongue of my child’s father. Each language holds me differently. Romanian represents the house I was born into. I never have to knock at the door to enter it. In Farsi I am a guest who has learned the customs but will always ask before opening a cupboard. In English I did the building myself, plank by plank, and I still remember the smell of sawdust.

When I was learning English, the language arrived through structures I did not design. Teachers corrected my verb tenses in red ink. Textbooks offered model sentences and asked me to approximate them until the approximation became fluency. I fondly remember my fourth grade English teacher, Mrs. Weltman, who asked us to memorize passages from a textbook called Discovery. How could I possibly pronounce the word “cheetah” without a smirk crossing my face? But because of that practice, ridiculous as it felt at eleven years old, I learned how to build a sentence in English the way you learn to build anything: by copying a form until your hands know it without being told. Fluency arrives through submission to an external standard before it can ever be earned through instinct. I could not yet judge whether a sentence was elegant. I could only judge whether it matched what I had been told was correct, because the instrument that tells the difference between elegant and merely correct had not been built in me yet.

AI produces language differently, and the difference runs deeper than it first appears. When I generate a draft with AI to support a training module, the authority does not transfer the way it did through a teacher’s red pen. I bring the research. I bring the sequencing, the sense of what a learner needs at minute three versus minute thirty, and years of watching how adults actually absorb new material, which depends far more on trust and pacing than on correct grammar. AI can hand me twelve versions of a paragraph in the time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee, but it cannot decide which of those twelve respects the people who will eventually sit through the material. That decision requires the instrument I did not yet possess as a child memorizing textbook passages about cheetahs. That instrument has a name. It is called critical thinking.

For thirty years, the only instrument I trusted with English was permission. I waited to be corrected before I trusted a sentence. I waited to be told a word was right before I let myself believe it. Critical thinking asks something different of me. It does not wait to be granted. It is what I apply, deliberately, to every line the AI hands back to me, deciding not whether I am allowed to say something, but whether it is true.

In practice, this means I set my own standards before I ever open a prompt window: what register the material needs, what a Romanian, American, or Iranian reader might hear differently in a given phrase than I intend, where a metaphor will clarify and where it will only fog the glass. Then I read everything that comes back the way a person reads a mountain slope before deciding whether it is safe to cross that morning. Snow that looks packed and stable from a distance can be hollow underneath, waiting. A paragraph can be hollow the same way, smooth on the screen and empty underneath it. Using AI does not remove me from the process. It puts me at the front of the line, deciding which parts of the terrain will hold.

Some things do not survive the crossing between languages, and I no longer count that as a failure. There is a tenderness in Farsi, braided with grief, that English flattens no matter how gently I try to carry it over. There is a Romanian bluntness that lands as harsh in English, though at home it carries its own kind of warmth, the way a hard slap on the back means something different depending on who is standing behind you. I used to read this as proof that my English fell short. Now I read it as proof about language itself. Each one I carry gives me a different angle on the same reality. The full shape only comes into view when I hold all at once.

I want to close with a reference to Wendell Berry, who recently passed away, and whose restraint has shaped how I pay attention. Berry spent his life writing about a single stretch of Kentucky farmland, and in doing so proved that looking closely at one place can open a wider view than travel ever could. One of his poems describes walking into the woods to rest among wild things that do not tax themselves with forethought of grief. I return to that poem when a workflow gets loud, when the draft in front of me is fluent but hollow at the center. The peace Berry describes represents discipline of attending to what is actually there instead of settling for what is merely available, and that discipline decides whether the language I put into the world deserves to stand.

The limits of my language no longer feel fixed the way they did when I was eleven years old, mouthing the word cheetah into a mirror until it stopped sounding foreign. They shift now, depending on which language I am standing in and which tool I am using to think with. But the limit that has always mattered most was never linguistic. It is the limit of my own attention. And that one has always been mine to set.

The aging train rumbled through Romania’s picturesque Prahova Valley for the one-hour jaunt from Sinaia, a mountain resort and former royal retreat, to Brașov, a charming, medieval city in Transylvania. Alpine air mercifully cooled the unairconditioned passenger cars on a warm day.

Twenty-three summers ago, I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer and starting my second of two years in Romania. One of my best friends, Frank, had traveled from Washington, D.C., to visit me and check off yet another country. The day before, we’d taken a train from sweltering Bucharest to Sinaia and nearly died of suffocation, not only from the lack of AC but the full-throated resistance by fellow passengers to crack any windows due to the dreaded curent, a draft caused when two windows are open in the same room, car, bus, train or wherever.

Curent is feared by millions of Romanians, who believe deeply that such a breeze – perceived by Americans and other foreigners as relief – causes headaches, toothaches, back pain, colds and other maladies.

The same situation days earlier on a bus at the Black Sea nearly tangled us in fisticuffs when Frank opened a window and a few Romanian men grew irate.

Peace Corps staff had schooled us on curent, but our immersive language training, mandatory and useful, didn’t offer any magical lingo to deal with it.

Sitting back and admiring the steep, jagged Bucegi Mountains, I prepped Frank on Brașov, one of my favorite Romanian cities. During Peace Corps training a year earlier, in the gritty oil town of Ploiești, I accompanied a few volunteers to Brașov for the first time. As we entered the main square, one remarked, “Wow, I finally feel like I’m in Europe!”

The train churned northward, weaving and bobbing slightly. As we chatted, a middle-aged woman across the aisle with whom we’d had zero interaction, suddenly corrected me.

“Brașov!” she exclaimed, mildly annoyed, enunciating clearly the sound “brah-SHOF.”

Frank and I looked at each other quizzically. It sounded nearly identical to what I’d said, but I tried to appease the woman, who reminded me of actress Bea Arthur and her TV characters, Maude and Dorothy.

“Brașov!” I replied, enthusiastically, striving for correctness. She shook her head in immediate disappointment.

English speakers tend to say, “BRAH-shof” or “brah-SHAHV,” but I thought I had it right. We went back and forth like ping-pong: Brașov-Brașov-Brașov-Brașov. Failing to meet woman’s expectations, I moved on, mimicking her classic, accentuated Romanian shrug. Frank and I still laugh about it.

Fast-forward to today’s Romania, where I live again, this time for the past decade. Recently, I entered a bakery in Timișoara, in a former mini-market space near my former Peace Corps job. The 40-ish clerk is a familiar face and accustomed to my accent, so I thought, even if she’s rarely exuded an ounce of warmth.

I ordered a loaf of bread and three pieces of pumpkin strudel. In Romanian, it’s ştrudel with the ş pronounced with a “sh” sound. I am fluent in Romanian, speaking reasonably well – markedly better than in my Peace Corps days – but with pesky mistakes, as my Romanian wife reminds me, but I know the ş.

The clerk asked me to repeat my order three times.

“Ooo, ştrudel,” she said, dramatically emphasizing the “sh” sound, adding, “Nu v-am înțeles.” “I didn’t understand you.”

Of course, she didn’t.

Most of the time, fortunately, I don’t have such encounters. Sometimes I wonder, what if I lived here not knowing Romanian? Without a shared language, we have nothing.

Nowadays, most Romanians under 40 probably speak English, either fluently or enough to manage. I’ve often admired Romanians’ knack for languages, with many speaking three or four. Being a Romance language helps, while many Romanians have told me they learned English from cartoons and YouTube.

It’s possible for foreigners to live in Romania without speaking Romanian, especially when English is a common tongue, but I couldn’t tolerate living in that bubble.

I’ve done two interviews on TVR, Romania’s state broadcaster – one of them in-studio on live national television and one extended conversation for a profile, plus a live, hourlong radio show in Timișoara that also streamed in video. All three were entirely in Romanian. I barely went back and watched them as not to cringe too much at my stumbling, but I managed to answer the questions without making a total fool of myself.

Would I have communicated differently, perhaps more confidently in English? Indeed. That’s an invisible limit that I’ve yet to overcome, and probably never will. Then there’s body language.

I’ve heard people say how their mannerisms or even personality can change while speaking a foreign language. Not in my case. For instance, Romanian men will talk right in your face, so close you can smell their breath, even putting their arm over your shoulders – and they’re not even mad. It’s endearing, but a personal space violation for an American, though I’ve learned to tolerate it.

The more I speak Romanian, the more I marvel at its beauty. Not quite as melodic as Italian, but similar, with quirky Slavic components and a smattering of Turkish, it’s also crazy clever in its nuanced humor – and especially challenging idioms – while remaining wholly phonetic.

But when I’m with a group of Romanians around a table, and they’re all talking, often over each other, it’s difficult. That’s when the conversation transforms into noise, especially if I’m tired. It can be frustrating, just as when I don’t know a word and miss the overall meaning. Those are the moments when I just want to crawl away and hear English.

Speaking Romanian to a stranger who’s not used to me, I sometimes get a furrowed brow or sigh. Often, though, they’re pleased with my effort and even complimentary. The former are the ones who typically respond in English. But I stick to Romanian, on principle, trying to push my limits.

I think even “Dorothy” from the train would agree.

Liliana Sambotin’s art is brought to life by fragments of colored glass and the light that catches them. Born in Romania and now based in the Pacific Northwest, she came to art by way of computer science and photography. A mixed media workshop in 2020 led her to experiment with colored glass, and what began there grew into the work she now shows under the name GlassArtography.

In this conversation for ARCS Journal, Sanda Berar speaks with Liliana about how photography changed the way she sees, what glass taught her about letting go of control, and how she came to see herself as an artist.

Before the glass

Sanda: Before the camera and the glass, what place did making art have in your life? Is there a memory from growing up in Romania that comes to mind?

Liliana: Growing up in Romania, I didn’t have many opportunities to explore art in a formal sense. I always loved math and science, and they were my strongest subjects in school, but hands-on projects were something I welcomed too, a kind of relaxing counterpart to all that logical thinking. My mother taught me to knit, crochet, and sew, and I went deep into it, eventually attempting to make my own pants and a jacket.

I also remember being pulled toward color, especially color in glass. It was a gray, difficult era, and there wasn’t much brightness in people’s everyday lives. But many homes had bibelouri (small decorative glass trinkets) and I was attracted to touch and hold them. Looking back, I think that fascination with light catching color was already there, long before I ever imagined working with glass myself.

Sanda: You went on to build a career in computer science. What drew you to that field and what did you enjoy about it? Did any of those ways of thinking carry into your art?

Liliana: As I mentioned, math and problem-solving were always my strongest assets, even as a child. In Romania at that time, getting into a university program was essentially a one-shot try: you sat an exam, and you were either in or you weren’t, so the choice mattered. When I applied for Computer Science, I had never actually seen a computer. I just found the idea intriguing. I also knew the program itself would be demanding, and that appealed to me… I’ve always liked being challenged.

I went on to build a career as a software engineer, and what I enjoyed most was the problem-solving itself: untangling something that didn’t work, and figuring out how to make it work. I also got to meet incredibly smart people along the way, and I liked exploring different sides of the industry: development, testing, project management. More than anything, that career taught me that hard work comes with its own satisfaction.

That mindset carried straight into my art. I don’t give up on a piece until the problem is solved… and how many times have I repainted a canvas, over and over, until it finally looked right? It’s the same persistence, just applied to a different kind of problem.

Learning to see differently

Sanda: You’ve written that getting a camera made you see the world from new perspectives. What did you begin noticing through photography that you had previously walked past?

Liliana: Photography is really about light. Once I started, I began looking at light differently, noticing highlights, shadows, the way light shapes something rather than just falling on it. It also pushed me to think outside the box. Every year, for example, I go to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, and I make a point of forcing myself to find a completely different way to photograph a tulip than the year before. Getting into close-ups of objects, flowers, birds etc. felt like discovering a whole new world hiding inside the one I already knew.

Sanda: In 2020, a workshop brought you back to colored glass. Can you take us into that moment? What did you make, and what made you want to keep going?

Liliana: 2020 was hard for everyone, and for me, the pandemic made the distance between my two worlds (the US and Romania) feel bigger than it ever had before. I was looking for new things to try at home, ways to hold onto some sense of sanity. It was also a time when I was deepening my photography: I’d joined a social media group with weekly projects and feedback from other photographers.

Then I found a workshop where you paint a surface, add crushed glass into it, and finish by pouring resin on top. The resin is what brings it all to life: it pulls out the colors and makes the glass truly shine.

Around that same time, my father back in Romania got sick. Keeping my hands busy became a way to cope. I kept making pieces, some with glass, some without. I picked up a few painting books and taught myself more along the way. Art became a kind of therapy.

Becoming an artist

Sanda: Once you began combining painting and glass, how did you find your own way of working? What did those first pieces teach you?

Liliana: I experimented with different subjects at first, but flowers were what stuck with me. Nature has always been my biggest inspiration. Along the way, I became something of a “glass collector.” One of my favorite sources is glassblowers’ broken pieces: they bring incredible color and curve into the work. Because of that curve, cutting the glass isn’t an exact science. It becomes more like a conversation: what I intend to do and what I actually get after cutting don’t always match, and I have to let that redefine my first idea. That curved glass taught me to let go of control a little and to listen to the material instead of forcing my original plan onto it.

Sanda: You’ve spent years helping young people through Destination Imagination program. Has watching them experiment and take creative risks changed the way you approach your own work?

Liliana: Destination Imagination (DI) is a program where teams of kids tackle open-ended creative challenges on their won, with adults guiding but never giving answers, and then present their original solutions at tournaments. I was involved with the program for twelve years as a volunteer team manager, then as a Regional Tournament Director for two more years. Supporting creativity was at the heart of that work, and I learned an enormous amount from it. I witnessed firsthand what open minds can create, what freedom can build, and how bringing ideas together can result in something truly extraordinary.

At the end of every season, I was impressed by the team’s final project. The path to solving DI’s challenges was never easy or straightforward. But with an open mind, creativity, critical thinking, and no fear of trying until you find the right solution, the results were spectacular every time. That was a strong inspiration for me: a reminder to stay open, keep experimenting, and trust the process, even in my own art.

Sanda: Was becoming an artist a gradual change in how you saw yourself, or was there a moment when you first said, “I’m an artist”?

Liliana: It was a gradual move for me. I started out timidly, showing up at local community art walks. I found a lot of support along the way, and I was always seeking out mentors and guidance from people already in the community. As I advanced in this new artistic life (going to more professional shows, making friends who were artists themselves) I started to feel like I belonged to a community of artists.

A big turning point for me was being invited to join a commercial gallery, along with invitations to different shows. That’s when I realized I was being “noticed”. And that’s when it really started to feel real.

Sanda: Is there a piece that feels especially important to you? Could you tell us its story - from the first idea through the decisions you made as you worked on it?

Liliana: “Summer Aroma” is especially important to me. It began with poppies. They were the inspiration for the piece, reminding me of the green hills filled with red poppies that I often saw and admired as a child in Romania.

It was my first gallery-size piece. I had been experimenting a lot with building flowers out of glass, and this was the piece where I finally managed to lift the petals up off the canvas.

It also took the main spot in my house, above the fireplace in the living room. With windows on both sides, I could watch what light did to the glass throughout the day. The piece became a moving, transforming work, with shadows that shifted from morning to evening.

Sanda: Light seems to be part of the work itself: the glass catches it, and the piece can look different throughout the day. What do you hope someone notices when they stand in front of it?

Liliana: My hope is that a person’s first feeling is joy. Beyond that, I hope they notice the light. As in photography, light can completely change how a piece shows itself, so the work looks different depending on when you see it and where you stand.

I also hope they see the fragility and strength that runs through my work. Glass flowers show just that: something delicate in form, made from a material that is sharp and can break.

Sanda: How has living in the Pacific Northwest shaped the colors, subjects, or atmosphere of your work? Do memories of Romania find their way into it too?

Liliana: The Pacific Northwest is a wonderful place to work with glass. We have the inspiration of the famous Dale Chihuly, and nature is everywhere. I live in the Evergreen State, and the green around me is part of my everyday surroundings. Flowers are my main subject, but I occasionally break the pattern and make ocean-inspired pieces.

Romania is in my work too, and nature is what connects the two places. I grew up in a mountain town, surrounded by hills and green landscapes, and the red poppies I admired as a child found their way into Summer Aroma. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I’m surrounded by mountains and greenery again. The places are far apart, but nature speaks to me in both, and that keeps my two worlds close.

Sanda: What was it like to show your art publicly for the first time? Was there a conversation with a viewer that stayed with you?

Liliana: When I started showing my art at our local community art walk, I was scared, and I felt uncomfortable being in that position. My friend Debi was very supportive. For a while she came with me to almost every show, gave me great advice, and kept encouraging me. I still remember how many of my friends showed up at my very first one. It meant so much, and it was such an encouraging start.

Looking ahead

Sanda: What are you curious to try now that you might not have imagined when you first began working with glass?

Liliana: I know the path ahead won’t be a straight one. Between getting more visibility and improving my techniques, I already have a few ideas I want to work on.

One is moving my art outdoors, which means making it weather-proof. I love gardening, and I can see some of my art in the garden in the future. I’m also looking into bigger art shows, and I hope to move more toward gallery-style and gallery-size pieces.

When I first started working with glass, I couldn’t have imagined that I would end up building my own software to keep track of my pieces. Those computer science skills turned out to be useful in ways I never expected.

Sanda: When you think about the next few years, what do you hope to do with your art? What would you like to make possible for yourself?

Liliana: In the next few years, I hope to reach more people with my art. That means getting more visibility, showing in bigger venues, and continuing to grow my technique so I can bring my ideas to life at a larger scale.

More than anything, I hope my work brings joy and a moment of calm to the people who see it, whether in a gallery, in someone’s home, or one day in a garden.

After weeks or months of designing, building, programming, testing, and rebuilding, the robot is finally ready - or as ready as any robot ever feels - to enter the competition.

In the final episode of FTC Explained, Theo takes us inside the FTC competition.

He shows us what happens during the event, how matches unfold, and how teams respond when the robot does not behave quite as expected. Behind every brief appearance on the competition field are many hours of preparation, quick decisions, unexpected problems, and students working together under pressure.

Competition day is about much more than winning. It is the moment when everything the team has learned is put to the test: the design of the robot, the reliability of the code, the ability to solve problems quickly, and, perhaps most importantly, the strength of the team itself.

This episode concludes our four-part ARCS Youth series introducing students to the world of competitive robotics.

Watch the episode on YouTube with English or Romanian subtitles.

English subtitles:

Romanian subtitles:

About FTC Explained

FTC Explained is a beginner‑friendly mini-series created by Theo Balan, a high school student in the Seattle area with a strong interest in robotics and experience in both FTC and FRC. The series is designed for students interested in robotics, engineering, coding, and FIRST Tech Challenge. Episodes introduce how FTC works, how teams build their robots, and what competitions look like behind the scenes. Theo wants his peers to feel comfortable stepping into robotics and he highlights the beginner skills worth learning, from CAD and Java to simple robot building. The videos are available with English and Romanian subtitles.

There are four books on my nightstand and two more I’m listening to. For my birthday, a dear friend gave me another one and I wanted to start it immediately. Yesterday, a newsletter with announcements about couple of concerts arrived in my inbox. I sent a friend the message I send far too often without following through: “What do you think about these ones? Should we go to one of them?”

Somewhere among those books and invitations is a story I wrote about a woman who repairs time. People call her a watchmaker. I wish she was real. I would bring her my watch and ask if she could give me back the hours that keep vanishing without a trace.

Most of those hours go into reading, writing, and painting. Given a free afternoon, I am quite capable of disappearing into a book or staying with a canvas until the light changes.

But if I could ask the watchmaker for more time, I would use it for some of the things I usually put off: a concert late in the evening, a book fair or an art show on the “other” side of the city, a museum exhibition I want to see but I keep postponing.

Or would I?

I have been trying to remember the last time I went to the ballet. A few years ago, I saw most of the season’s performances. Ballet was hardly among my first three choices for a Friday evening, or even among my top three “cultural” ways to spend a Friday evening, but a friend loved it and invited me again and again and I enjoyed spending time with her. At first, I went mostly for our conversations during intermission and after the show. And during those conversations, between our talks about books and poetry (I rarely talked about poetry with anyone else), she would point out a gesture I had missed or the expression on a dancer’s face during a difficult passage. We would talk about the moment when the music changed, and the light changed with it. Slowly, I began to notice these things for myself until one evening I realized I was looking forward to the ballet as much as to our conversations.

Then the pandemic changed the shape of our days. By the time the theaters reopened, and I began going out again, my friend had moved away. I chose concerts, plays, sometimes even opera. Somehow, I never chose ballet.

My love for ballet is still there. What I came to enjoy during those years has not disappeared. But when I began going out again, I found myself choosing what I had always chosen before. Ballet had entered my life through my friend and through the evenings we planned together. Without her, no one was asking me to keep a particular Friday free so we could go together. I kept looking to see which new ballets were coming on stage, then deciding I would go another time. I had made time for it for years, and then, almost without noticing, I stopped and returned to old habits.

I think about that when I hear myself say I have no time.

Sometimes it is true. There are weeks when work, family, and the ordinary business of living take every hour I have. But other times, “I have no time” means I have let the week fill up without deciding what I want to make room for. A concert remains a link in a message. I tell myself I’ll go on the next photo walk, or see the next play or film, when life is quieter. Meanwhile, I can listen to Rachmaninoff on Spotify, read at home, and wait for the movie to arrive on Prime Video.

I do enjoy all of those things.

Still, I wonder what I might never discover if I keep choosing only what I already know I love.

My friend gave me more than an invitation to the ballet. She gave me a reason to leave the house on a Friday evening, someone to share it with, and a way into an art I had overlooked. I wonder how many other things we discover that way, by accepting an invitation. Or by making one.

I look again at the three concerts I sent my friend.

Then I write: “Actually, you know what? Pacific Northwest Ballet is opening its season with Serenade. Would you like to go with me?”

The road is neither steep, nor long, but at the end of it the whole world seems to lie below. Maybe not the ice cap between two stone ledges defining the horizon, but everything else: the beach, the ocean, the grassy field. At the top, the trail is short and almost circular, surrounded by impossible surfaces of granite and basalt experimenting vertical angles towards the black sand.

Puffins show off with short flights looping from the green patches into the abyss and back, waiting for the reaction with a curious eye.

On one side, the rocky exhibit stretches into the ocean, bouncing a couple of times before resting in the water, broken by two majestic openings for the wind to enjoy.

Another parking lot guarded by mean cameras waiting for you to leave without using the payment app… A short walk, and then the parking is forgotten: another waterfall sculpting new colors of stone in a shape we have not seen before, proving that nature invented art before us. As you get closer, water splashes your face and a rainbow splashes your eyes.

The asphalt winds between lunar landscapes of porous boulders with unknown shapes, some seeming to float where light slips underneath them, unreal. Darker, smoother surfaces spooned a little farther contradict the lunar hypothesis; this must be lava… At the horizon, the dark blue waves confirm: still on Earth. After a short ritual through a building of glass, stone, and wood, a wooden board-walk leads to milky-blue waters under mystic steam. Once you dip in, the hot liquid melts your tensions and stress into the light vapor that is gently rising into the heavens. The lagoon is, indeed, blue.

Mornings can be strenuous if the night is not long enough, as the daylight eats away at it the closer you get to the Arctic Circle. Gear goes into the hybrid ready for a new adventure, followed by three vociferous goons never in tune… The cabin tucked between waves of bushes sprinkled with singing birds is left behind.

Winding between valleys, peaks, sea, and sky, the drive is endless but never boring. Charming becomes magic, as the line on the map follows the sea deep into the land, then back out again. As this dance of the elements grows into a symphony for the eye, we are approaching our final destination. With streaks of snow in the distance, the last couple of kilometers get almost treacherous, steep and rocky.

If only the Sun could stay stronger than the clouds…

But the clouds gain ground. The battle is quiet and painful to watch as we wait for the

catharsis…

With half an hour left, the Moon slides between the clouds, eating slices of our star. When half of it is gone, the clouds win, making our trip suddenly seem pointless…

Then the darkness comes, reminding us that we cannot control the miracle, but we can enjoy the show. Long minutes pass; the camera is useless on the tripod…

With magic dimming, we breathe out.

Then the light resurrects, and we breathe in again.

We feel the Flow in our cells, as spectators in nature’s front row.

We look around and rediscover the landscape.

We never saw the sun disappear. We never got the photograph we came for. The unwitnessed miracle is a new kind of miracle.

There is always time for more…

How does a team go from a game challenge and a table covered with parts to a robot that can actually compete?

The process, it turns out, is rarely straightforward. Students begin by studying the season’s challenges and deciding which tasks they want their robot to perform. Then come the sketches, discussions, early prototypes. Many ideas that work perfectly in theory may differently once they are built. Parts are moved, mechanisms are redesigned, and the robot slowly begins to take shape.

In the third episode of FTC Explained, Theo takes us behind the scenes of this process. He explains how teams choose a design, divide the work, build different mechanisms, and test them again and again. Building the robot requires technical knowledge, but also patience, creativity, and the willingness to change direction when something does not work.

For anyone curious about robotics, this episode offers a glimpse of what happens long before a robot enters the competition field and how much learning is hidden inside every working mechanism.

Watch the new episode on YouTube with English or Romanian subtitles.

English subtitles:

Romanian subtitles:

About FTC Explained

FTC Explained is a beginner‑friendly mini-series created by Theo Balan, a high school student in the Seattle area with a strong interest in robotics and experience in both FTC and FRC. The series is designed for students interested in robotics, engineering, coding, and FIRST Tech Challenge. Episodes introduce how FTC works, how teams build their robots, and what competitions look like behind the scenes. Theo wants his peers to feel comfortable stepping into robotics and he highlights the beginner skills worth learning, from CAD and Java to simple robot building. The videos are available with English and Romanian subtitles.

Veverița a început să mănânce, iar Viorel a privit-o cu atenție. După câteva momente, spre surprinderea lui, și celălalt obraz al veveriței a început să se umfle!

— Te doare? a întrebat Viorel îngrijorat.

Veverița a început să râdă.

— Nu, nu mă doare deloc! Obrajii mei sunt făcuți pentru a păstra mâncare.

Viorel a fost foarte surprins. Veverița i-a explicat că veverițele dungate au niște buzunare speciale în interiorul obrajilor. Ele pot pune acolo semințe, nuci și alte alimente pentru a le transporta și a le mânca mai târziu. Când buzunarele sunt pline, obrajii lor par foarte umflați. Viorel a zâmbit și a înțeles că nu totul este ceea ce pare.

Illustrations created for ARCS Journal with AI-assisted tools.

Note: Illustrations created for ARCS Journal with AI-assisted tools.

Povestea este scrisă în limba română. Dacă o vedeți în engleză, aceasta este traducerea automată oferită de Substack, conform setărilor dumneavoastră.

Dahlias, in vibrant colors and intricate shapes, greeted the youth at the entrance of the Bellevue Botanical Garden. Getting together for their third official photo walk, the young photographers arrived with cameras in hand and curious eyes searching for unique frames and fresh perspectives.

Moving past the rich mosaic of colors in the dahlia display, the group transitioned into the minimalist elegance of the Yao Garden. Here, early fall foliage caught the afternoon light as the sun danced between quiet branches. The stillness of the space prompted the teens to turn focus on subtle compositions, moving softly so as not to disturb the natural tranquility.

By the end of the walk, the remarkable diversity of frames captured proved that photography is as much about shared observation as it is about individual creative expression.

As my thoughts drift to the realm of childhood, I summon long summer days with no beginning and no end, elixirs served in glass jars fed with sugar that I am told are life-changing, dusty bookshelves where mites build civilizations, mysterious tesseracts drawn on graph paper by a child’s hand, classrooms with the smell of newspapers and the sound of bottles and jars that are ready to be given some kind of new life.

It has been three years since I read Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, and only now have its pages resurfaced in my consciousness. It’s a bit hard to say what was in the book and where my childhood memories seeped in. The truth is that ever since I finished reading Solenoid, its imagery keeps returning to my mind. One photographic image at a time: the world of School 86, the drawer of childhood artifacts, the fantastic worlds of the Picketists, the hypnotically bizarre universe of mites and the decay of buildings and people alike have colored and rearranged some of my childhood memories and I fear that just like the character in Solenoid I too am succumbing to the belief that they are suffused with a dreamlike quality. I am tempted to re-open the book and confirm my suspicions. Was Solenoid the source of all these thoughts or did my unconscious mind make them up?

I know for a fact that I never inhabited the world of mites, but I have often felt, viscerally, the need to break through the layer of dreary reality through fairy tales and figments of imagination. Endless strings of lonely days spent in the imaginary world of books loom large in my memories. Solenoid’s librarian Palamar reminds me that the possibility of 50,000 species of mites coexisting with our world — much like the proliferation of storyworlds in books — offers a multitude of alternate universes each with its own struggles, myths and escape hatches.

Growing up, I did not have an abandoned factory to get completely lost in, but I did have half-finished construction sites and rusty abandoned trucks to explore. In retrospect it’s hard to say whether those spaces were truly infinite; in my mind, they simply stretched on, revealing new realms day after day.

In other corners of the mind, there were whispered discussions of the metaphysical long into the night around the campfire, but who can remember if there were ever any answers by the next morning. We were seeking evidence in yellowed, dog-eared, photocopied books of Rudolf Steiner to make ourselves believe in the existence of something else. “I want to believe that things exist,” says Irina, Solenoid’s physics teacher, and like her we hoped that our times might just have been an illusion.

There was no solenoid that I can remember, but one might as well have been built in the dusty, crowded rooms full of electronics and clouds of soldering iron fumes that lifted from my father’s worktable

I cling to one memory of tasting the slightly acidic liquid that my mother poured from a jar of sugary water and coaxed me to drink. “It hasn’t harmed anyone” was good enough for me. I look at the “crystals” left behind in the jar. They will soon get fresh water and sugar, and I think there are so many more than last week and soon they’ll need a new home...

The possibility of a Mrs. Bernini, Solenoid’s music teacher, distributing these jars in my childhood town takes root in my mind. I decide to find evidence of the self-regenerating algae cure that I shared with Cărtărescu’s characters, which was nothing more than a bacterial culture grown in a jar of sugary water. There is not much information about this, other than a cursory mention that such jars were in fact circulated in the 80s in Eastern Bloc countries. This bit of knowledge grounds me. It might be safe to re-open the book and search again for the memories it left behind.

Every book speaks to me on a different wavelength, leaving its imprint sometimes like rings on a tree and other times like layers on a palimpsest. In Solenoid I found the building blocks of an origin story—a confirmation of vague impressions, dreams, and fears that I can no longer fully trust since they appear nowhere in photo albums or letters or any family artifacts. I come from that world and carry it with me.

Building a competitive robot may be the most visible part of FTC, but behind every robot is a team of students doing very different kinds of work.

In Episode 2 of FTC Explained, Theo takes us inside the team itself: how an FTC team is organized, how responsibilities are divided, and how the different pieces of the project have to come together. Robotics may involve mechanical design and CAD, programming, testing and much more, but no one person has to master everything. Part of learning FTC is discovering where your own interests and strengths fit within the team and how to work with people whose skills are different from yours.

For someone wondering whether robotics is “for them,” this may be one of the most useful things to understand: there isn’t just one way to belong on a robotics team.

English: FTC Explained: How Teams Work (Part 2)
Romanian: FTC Explicat: Organizarea echipelor (Partea 2)

About FTC Explained

FTC Explained is a beginner‑friendly mini-series created by Theo Balan, a high school student in the Seattle area with a strong interest in robotics and experience in both FTC and FRC. The series is designed for students interested in robotics, engineering, coding, and FIRST Tech Challenge. Episodes introduce how FTC works, how teams build their robots, and what competitions look like behind the scenes. Theo wants his peers to feel comfortable stepping into robotics and he highlights the beginner skills worth learning, from CAD and Java to simple robot building. The videos are available with English and Romanian subtitles.

I was home, in Cluj, at the beginning of August. “Home” is a strange word. Cluj hasn’t been home for 26 years, and yet, somehow, it still is. But perhaps that’s a story for another time.

As usual, I was looking for “new” books, and perhaps some “new” Romanian authors to bring back in my suitcase to Seattle. The books, not the authors. “New,” of course, is a relative term. Cărtărescu still feels new to me, even though I’ve been reading him for more than 25 years.

A comment on Facebook reminded me of Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu. Often called “Romania’s Agatha Christie,” she wrote dozens of mystery novels and created characters that have stayed in the memories of generations of Romanian readers. I hadn’t thought about her in a long time, and I hadn’t read any of her books in years, but, God, how I loved them! I remember the excitement of discovering one I hadn’t read yet, and those Sundays in my teenage years when I would shut myself in my room and read all day.

The truth is, I’ve always had a weakness for detective stories and mysteries, and Agatha Christie was, of course, my favorite. I always loved Miss Marple more than Hercule Poirot. I enjoyed the Poirot stories too, but if I’d had to choose, I would have picked Miss Marple every time.

And then I discovered Melania Lupu.

It was magic.

Back then, I thought she was an absolutely impossible and utterly charming little old lady. I still find her just as charming. It’s just that, somewhere along the way, I’ve developed some issues with the definition of “old.”

Melania, like Miss Marple, is a sweet little old lady, with an extraordinary mind and a talent for seeing what no one else sees.

But unlike Miss Marple, Melania lives somewhere in a gray area between the good character and the bad one (although, let’s be honest, it is almost impossible to truly see her as the bad guy). Even poor Major Cristescu comes to admire her, to like her and, sometimes, almost to enjoy their ongoing duel.

In Agatha Christie’s novels (and, in fact, in much of classic detective fiction) the lines are clearer. There is the detective, whether a police officer, a private investigator, or simply a very curious little old lady from an English village; there are the suspects; and somewhere among them, there is the culprit. By the end, the lines fall neatly into place and everyone ends up on their proper side.

Melania ruins all that order.

She can be the detective, the suspect, and the culprit, all at once. She can solve the mystery while simultaneously being the person you probably should have been wary of from the very beginning. She is admirable and formidable as an adversary, while somehow remaining very, very sweet.

And this is where I wonder whether this is precisely what makes her so Romanian. That refusal to fit neatly into a category. Is Melania an expression of a Romanian spirit that doesn’t quite believe in dividing people simply into “good” and “bad,” that has a soft spot for the trickster when the trickery comes with enough charm and intelligence, and that can forgive a character almost anything if we like them enough? Or is it simply Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu and her extraordinary talent for creating a character whom, by all the rules, we really shouldn’t love quite this much?

In any case, Melania Lupu remains one of my favorite characters of all time, but, of course, Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu’s world doesn’t end with her.

I had already rummaged through my mother’s library and found a few of the old editions from the 1970s, the very books I had read as a teenager. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered, in the bookstores of Cluj, that Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu’s novels had been republished and that, suddenly, all those stories I had loved were there again, on the shelves, within reach.

Obviously, I started buying.

I didn’t manage to bring them all back to Seattle. Unfortunately, suitcases have limits that my literary enthusiasm refuses to acknowledge.

But a few of Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu’s books made the journey with me. Among them, of course, Melania. And so, having gone to Cluj in search of “new” Romanian authors, I came back to Seattle with one of my oldest.

I’ll be going back. :)

Romanian, original

Am fost acasă, la Cluj, la începutul lui august. „Acasă” e un termen ciudat. Clujul nu a mai fost acasă de 26 de ani și, totuși, încă e acasă. Dar despre asta poate altădată.

Căutam, ca de obicei, cărți „noi” și poate niște autori români „noi” pe care să-i aduc în valiză la Seattle. Cărțile, nu autorii. „Nou” e, desigur, un termen relativ. Cărtărescu e încă nou pentru mine, deși îl citesc de mai bine de 25 de ani.

Un comentariu pe Facebook mi-a reamintit de Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu. Numită adesea „Agatha Christie a României”, a scris zeci de romane polițiste și a creat personaje care au rămas în memoria generațiilor de cititori români. Nu mă mai gândisem de mult la ea și nici nu mai citisem nimic de-al ei de ani buni, dar, Doamne, cât de mult mi-au plăcut cărțile ei! Îmi amintesc bucuria cu care descopeream câte una pe care nu o citisem încă și duminicile din adolescență în care stăteam toată ziua închisă în camera mea, citind.

Adevărul este că am avut mereu o slăbiciune pentru romanele polițiste, pentru mistere, iar Agatha Christie a fost, bineînțeles, favorita mea. Pe Miss Marple am iubit-o întotdeauna mai mult decât pe Hercule Poirot. Citeam și poveștile cu Poirot cu mare plăcere, dar, dacă ar fi trebuit să aleg, aș fi ales-o oricând pe Miss Marple.

Și apoi am descoperit-o pe Melania Lupu.

A fost magic.

Mi se părea atunci o bătrânică absolut imposibilă și fermecătoare. Si acum mi se pare la fel de fermecătoare. Doar că între timp am niște probleme cu definiția cuvântului „bătrână”.

Melania, ca si Miss Marple, este a sweet little old lady, cu o minte extraordinară și cu talentul de a vedea ceea ce nimeni altcineva nu vedea.

Dar, spre deosebire de Miss Marple, Melania se află undeva într-o zonă gri, între personajul pozitiv și cel negativ (deși, să fim sinceri, este aproape imposibil să o vezi cu adevărat ca pe un personaj negativ). Până și bietul maior Cristescu ajunge să o admire, să o placă și, uneori, aproape să se bucure de duelul lor.

În romanele Agathei Christie și, de fapt, în mare parte din literatura polițistă clasică, lucrurile sunt mai clare. Există detectivul, fie el polițist, particular sau doar o bătrânică foarte curioasă dintr-un sat englezesc, există suspecții și, undeva printre ei, există vinovatul. La sfârșit, liniile se așază frumos și fiecare ajunge de partea lui.

Melania strică toată această ordine.

Ea poate fi și detectiv, și suspect, și vinovat. Poate să rezolve misterul și, în același timp, să fie persoana de care ar fi trebuit probabil să te ferești de la bun început. Este admirabilă și de temut ca adversar, în timp ce rămâne, cumva, foarte, foarte sweet.

Și aici mă întreb dacă nu cumva tocmai asta o face atât de românească. Refuzul acela de a încăpea frumos într-o categorie. Este Melania expresia unui spirit românesc care nu prea crede în împărțirea simplă a oamenilor în „buni” și „răi”, care simpatizează cu șmecherul dacă șmecheria are suficient farmec și inteligență și care poate ierta aproape orice unui personaj dacă îl place destul? Sau este pur și simplu Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu și talentul ei extraordinar de a crea un personaj pe care, conform tuturor regulilor, n-ar trebui să-l iubești chiar atât de mult?

În orice caz, Melania Lupu rămâne unul dintre personajele mele preferate din toate timpurile, dar, bineînțeles, lumea Rodicăi Ojog-Brașoveanu nu se oprește la ea.

Scotocisem deja prin biblioteca mamei și găsisem câteva dintre volumele vechi, din anii ’70, pe care le citisem în adolescență. Dar vă puteți imagina surpriza și bucuria mea când am descoperit, în librăriile din Cluj, că romanele Rodicăi Ojog-Brașoveanu au fost republicate și că, dintr-odată, toate poveștile acelea pe care le iubisem erau din nou acolo, pe rafturi, la îndemână.

Evident, am început să cumpăr.

Nu am reușit să le aduc pe toate în Seattle. Valiza are, din păcate, limite pe care entuziasmul meu literar refuză să le accepte.

Dar câteva dintre cărțile Rodicăi Ojog-Brașoveanu au făcut călătoria cu mine. Printre ele, bineînțeles, și Melania. Și uite așa, plecată la Cluj să caut autori români „noi”, m-am întors la Seattle cu unul dintre cei mai vechi.

Mai merg. :)

Robotics can look intimidating: mechanical design, wiring electronics, programming. CAD, Java and more. Where does a beginner even start?

For our latest ARCS Youth feature, we’re turning the Journal over to Theo Balan, a high school student from the Seattle area who is sharing something he knows well: how to find your way into robotics.

We’re especially excited to feature a project created by a young member of our community that combines curiosity, technical knowledge, and the desire to make what he has learned accessible to others.

Through the series, Theo takes viewers behind the scenes of FTC: how robots are designed and built, what happens at competitions, and which skills are useful for someone just getting started. Along the way, he introduces everything from CAD and Java to the fundamentals of robot building, from the perspective of a student who has already been through that learning process himself.

And because we especially love seeing young people connect their interests with their Romanian heritage, FTC Explained is available with both English and Romanian subtitles.

Episode 1

In the first episode, Theo introduces FTC and begins answering a deceptively simple question: What does it actually take to get started in competitive robotics?

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@EngineeringinMind
English captions:

Romanian captions:

This is only the beginning. More episodes of FTC Explained are coming to ARCS Journal as Theo continues exploring the world of robotics, one beginner-friendly step at a time.

About FTC Explained

FTC Explained is a beginner‑friendly mini-series created by Theo Balan, a high school student in the Seattle area with a strong interest in robotics and experience in both FTC and FRC. The series is designed for students interested in robotics, engineering, coding, and FIRST Tech Challenge. Episodes introduce how FTC works, how teams build their robots, and what competitions look like behind the scenes. Theo wants his peers to feel comfortable stepping into robotics and he highlights the beginner skills worth learning, from CAD and Java to simple robot building. The videos are available with English and Romanian subtitles.

Clic… o poză în Maramureșul copilăriei mele.

Haida, hai la Maramu’, no hai amu’…

Așa cum spun poeții români, am simțit și eu că eternitatea s-a născut la țară, într-o seară liniștită de vară, pe unul din dealurile micuțului sat Drăghia, din județul Maramureș. Eram adolescentă și îmi însoțisem bunica la datul oilor în strungă. Priveam apusul înroșit și simțeam pe obraji prospețimea aerului, în timp ce glasul sătenilor și talăngile oilor mă țineau oarecum ancorată în realitate. Bunicii mei, lelea Elvira și badea Victor a lui Ariton, erau mulțumiți când nepoata de la Cluj participa la astfel de activități. Îmi plăcea mult să calc „fârcituri” ca să pot coborî pe „furcoi” la sfârșit, și în general să ajut la întorsul și strânsul fânului înmiresmat. Dar cel mai mult îmi plăcea să merg cu „ojina” la bunicu’ la coasă, căci așa, toată ziua, străbăteam fără griji dealurile Drăghiei împreună cu verișoarele mele.

Într-adevăr, păstrez în suflet amintiri dragi despre locuri și oameni din Drăghia. Mă văd aievea pe „drumul țării”, adică drumul asfaltat ce trecea prin sat, legându-l de alte sate, unde ne plimbam duminica cu fetele și verișoarele de seama mea; pe „pietrișul” de la intrarea în sat, unde iarna ne dădeam cu săniuța; pe ulițele întortocheate ale satului; și la „căminul cultural”, unde jucam la nunți și baluri. Acordurile ceterii îmi răsună și acum în inimă, peste mări și țări unde nu visam să ajung vreodată, darmite să joc ca în Maramu’... Colindele de Crăciun pe care le cânt și acum le știu din Drăghia, de pe vremea când umblam după colaci din casă în casă, unde întâlneam oameni blânzi și primitori. Desigur, căsuța bunicilor, unde număram puii aurii, poamele și ciupercile înșirate pe ață și lemnele de foc, este un refugiu în sufletul meu.

Biserica, în curtea căreia este înmormântat străbunicul meu și pentru care bunica a făcut multe șterguri, și chiar și biserica veche de lemn sunt folosite și îngrijite de generațiile satului și e uimitor să le văd astăzi pe internet.

Mă simt binecuvântată și privilegiată că am avut bunici țărani, că am copilărit în Maramureș, că am cunoscut un mod de viață ce dispare cu încetul – viața în ritmul naturii, cu grijă pentru oameni și suflet.

English version

Click… and a picture from the Maramureș of my childhood

Come to Maramu’, come now.

As Romanian poets say, I too felt that eternity was born in the countryside, on a quiet summer evening, on one of the hills of the small village of Drăghia, in Maramureș County. I was a teenager and I had accompanied my grandmother to bring the sheep into the pen. I would watch the red sunset and feel the freshness of the air on my cheeks while the voices of the villagers and the bleating of the sheep kept me somewhat anchored in reality. My grandparents, lelea Elvira and badea Victor, were pleased when their granddaughter from Cluj participated in such activities.

I really liked to help build the huge haystacks so that I could slide down on the “furcoi” at the end, and, in general, to play with the fragrant hay. But most of all, I liked to bring food to my grandfather in the fields, because that way I would cross the hills of Drăghia without a worry all day long with my cousins.

Indeed, I keep fond memories of places and people from Maramureș in my heart. I can still see myself on the “country road,” that is, the paved road that passed through the village, connecting it to other villages, where we would walk on Sundays with my cousins and other girls; at the entrance to the village, where we would go sledding in winter; along the winding paths of the village; and at the cultural center, where we would folk dance at weddings and parties village dances.

The sounds of the violin still resonate in my heart, across oceans and countries that I never dreamed of ever reaching, let alone folk dancing like in Maramu’... The Christmas carols that I still sing I learned in Drăghia, when we would go caroling from house to house, where we would meet kind and welcoming people.

Of course, my grandparents’ cottage, where we would count the golden chicks, the apples and mushrooms strung on a thread, and the firewood, is a refuge in my soul. The church, in the courtyard of which my great-grandfather is buried, and for which my grandmother made many embroideries, and even the old wooden church, are used and cared for by generations of the village, and it is amazing to see them on the internet.

I feel blessed and privileged to have had peasant grandparents, to have grown up in Maramureș, and to have known a way of life that is slowly disappearing – life in the rhythm of nature, with care for people and the soul.

Într-o zi frumoasă, Viorel se uita cum prietenii lui se jucau cu o minge. Mingea s-a spart și a început să se rostogolească spre el. Din greșeală, Viorel a căzut în ea. Când a încercat să iasă, și-a dat seama că țepii lui s-au prins în minge și nu o mai putea desprinde.

La început s-a speriat, dar prietenii lui au început să râdă și au descoperit că acum se puteau juca și cu Viorel fără să se înțepe. Au alergat, au râs și s-au distrat împreună, iar Viorel a fost fericit că, în sfârșit, putea participa la joacă fără ca țepii lui să îi înțepe.

Note: Illustrations created for ARCS Journal with AI-assisted tools.