Of all the authors mentioned in this book, Lucian Blaga offers the most surprising intellectual evolution. A figure so closely associated with inherent concepts of Romanianness—as much before 1944 as in the 1980s, and still today—that he is synonymous with the idea of distinct cultural styles, Blaga during the 1950s turned to translation as a model for and practice of cultural interference. He developed his argument in the second part of his Trilogia culturii, the 1936 Spațiul Mioritic, in which he argues that Romanian cultural production all shares an analogical relationship to the undulating geography of hills and valleys in which the folk ballad Mioriţa is set. His address on his election to the Romanian Academy is likewise a description of Romanian culture, idealized in village life. In 1939 the University of Cluj awarded him a chair in cultural philosophy, confirming his intellectual authority on questions of national identity. After World War II, the philosopher—who had noted the persistence of distinctly Hungarian, German, and Romanian houses, after these groups of people lived for centuries side by side in the Transylvanian village—now turned to the theory of mixing styles that produced minor cultures of Spain and Moldova. Blaga took pains to connect his earlier and later positions, the effect of which is to dismantle the national structures of his earlier work and emphasize the skeptical center of the cultural style model. Only decades later would the field of cultural philosophy arrive at concepts of the minor nation similar to Blaga's. He did not, in this period, use the term “minor,” yet his philosophy and translation practice articulate the most convincing model of the minor nation we will discuss. With the benefi t of several decades’ more work in cultural theory, we can recognize Blaga's distinctive use of translation to model a national identity between essentialism and hybridity.

Lucian Blaga's cultural politics under Romanian communism, as we have seen, are as complex as his theory, and in fact his politics and philosophy work hand in hand. We might expect the philosopher of “Mioritic space” to marshal an idea of Romanianness against Soviet hegemony, but he neither does so nor capitulates in the face of power.