© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com ‘Don’t You Dare to Vote With the Communists!’: Timeliness, Nostalgia and the Authenticity of Experience in I’m a Communist Biddy! JOZEFINA KOMPORALY* Abstract This article investigates the parallel adaptation processes between genres and media of Dan Lungu’s celebrated Romanian novel I’m a Communist Biddy! (2007). Drawing on Stere Gulea’s ilm adaptation (Sunt a babă comunistă!, MediaPro Pictures, Romania, 2013) and Tamara Török and Judit Csoma’s stage version (Egy komcsi nyanya vagyok!, Katona József Theatre, Budapest, 2013), the article observes that neither ilm nor play are governed by an agenda of idelity to the source text, and they depart from the literary source because of a new historical and economic context, in which the preoccupation with the communist era remains a timely endeav- our all the same. Both versions strive for authenticity in terms of location and time period, and to this end they opt for an elaborate recreation of the past in the ilm and a reduction to literal levels of austerity onstage. Thus, both cinematic and stage adaptation operate as explorations into the protagonist’s past, and in this sense they are illuminating works of art about personal memory, embedded to a certain extent, within collective memory. The adaptations strive to accurately represent selected notions of history, in parallel with which they also create alternative temporali- ties that mythologize history and favour a nonlinear sense of time. For this reason, I read these adaptations—ranging from transposition to commentary—as a form of translation, that explores the relationship between women and history and intertwines a cluster of inluences, from histori- cal plays and ilms, memory and verbatim plays, as well as staged biographies and enactments ‘on location’. Keywords Romanian cinema, Hungarian theatre, Stere Gulea, Dan Lungu, Sunt o babă comunistă!, I’m a Communist Biddy!, authenticity. Dan Lungu’s 2007 novel Sunt o babă comunistă! [I’m a Communist Biddy!] was one of the publishing sensations in recent Romanian iction and has been translated to date into almost a dozen languages. Its French and Polish translations have been exceptionally well-received, being awarded major literary prizes and, in this way, acculturated to a degree into those particular cultural contexts. This paper seeks to investigate the afterlife of the novel through adaptation between genres and media, considering the adaptation processes for screen and stage, respectively, and it draws on Stere Gulea’s ilm adapta- tion (Sunt a babă comunistă!, MediaPro Pictures, Romania, 2013) and Tamara Török and Judit Csoma’s stage version (Egy komcsi nyanya vagyok!, Katona József Theatre, Budapest, 2013), the latter based on the Hungarian translation of the novel by Gabriella Koszta. The paper contends that these adaptations are timely because Romanian—and indeed *Department of Drama, De Montfort University. E-mail: jkomporaly@dmu.ac.uk Adaptation doi:10.1093/adaptation/apu016 Page 1 of 11 Adaptation Advance Access published July 3, 2014 by guest on July 4, 2014 http://adaptation.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from