The Sponge Diver

By Panait Istrati

"The Sponge Diver" features the young Romanian vagabond Adrien Zograffi, this time in Greece, as he listens to the harrowing tale of a fellow Romanian drifter's season of forced labor aboard a small ship plying the Eastern Mediterranean in search of rich sponge beds.

Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was once among the most popular writers in Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fario
• Release date: Apr 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458056672

Panait Istrati

Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was a Romanian with little more than a grade-school education who, for some ten years, beginning in the early nineteen-twenties, was among the most popular writers in Europe.

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The Sponge Diver

Panait Istrati

Translated by John Penuel

Original title: Le Pêcheur d’éponges

English translation copyright 2010 John Penuel

Published at Smashwords by John Penuel

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

The Sponge Diver

Bakâr

Author’s Note

Certain readers I esteem have recently asked me why, after Mikhaïl (1927), I stopped the Adrien Zograffi cycle.

I didn’t stop it; I suspended it.

The sequel to Mikhaïl was supposed to be Adrien Zograffi himself, his life and death: the life and death, worth telling, of an obscure hero, through the thirst for the ideal that enlivens so many obscure existences and was my Adrien’s foundation.

But I, Adrien, saw his thirst for the ideal quenched by a sudden, unexpected, and atrocious gall: his ideal was perverted by those who, as he had, had reveled in it.

Other perversions followed, other annihilations of precious feeling. Today, back in my village after thirty years away, may it be allowed me to gaze on the ruin of a great existence, to gather my strength, and, if I still have the time, to set out again.

For what horizons?

I couldn’t say. Nor could Adrien!

But the globe is still beautiful, and most human beings are still deprived of liberty.

We will attempt to the discover them yet again and to love them. In the meantime, we are digging through the rubble.

Panait Istrati

Baldovinesti-Braila, April 1930

The Sponge Diver

In 1907, not far from the Acropolis, there was a street in the outskirts of Athens whose name escapes me just now. This street may still have its old name, it may have changed, or both may have changed, without leaving a trace, since streets and their names are barely less short-lived than men, and, in fact, it doesn’t matter at all.

What I remember, and what matters, is that, at the time, on this street there was a humble restaurant where, from a small terrace, the view went straight up to the astonishing marble temple perched atop the Acropolis. And as always with the mediocre places you come across in the vicinity of a wonder, this restaurant was called The Parthenon.

At a table on the terrace and savoring a good Greek dish, the young traveler Adrien asked himself, fairly reasonably: What glory can a cheap tavern get from a unique monument? Whereas if it were called, say, The Fine Steak, the passerby would realize it’s a good place. And since his was a talkative nature, Adrien took a look at one