''God Was Born in Exile'' (French: ''Dieu est né en exil'') is a novel by Romanian author Vintilă Horia, for which he was awarded the

Prix Goncourt The Prix Goncourt (french: Le prix Goncourt, , ''The Goncourt Prize'') is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward o ...

in 1960, though he was never handed the prize following allegations that surfaced after his nomination that he had once been a member of the Iron Guard. The novel's narrator is

Ovid Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the th ...

, the

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or wri ...

, and this apocryphal work is rather similar to

Marguerite Yourcenar Marguerite Yourcenar (, , ; born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour; 8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist, who became a US citizen in 1947. Winner of the ''Prix Fem ...

's '' Mémoires d'Hadrien'' in which Yourcenar writes the Roman emperor Hadrian's mémoires. In ''God Was Born in Exile'', "Ovid" covers the last eight years of his life, when he was exiled to Tomis, an Ancient Roman

colony In modern parlance, a colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule. Though dominated by the foreign colonizers, colonies remain separate from the administration of the original country of the colonizers, the '' metropolitan state' ...

Scythia Minor Scythia Minor or Lesser Scythia (Greek: , ) was a Roman province in late antiquity, corresponding to the lands between the Danube and the Black Sea, today's Dobruja divided between Romania and Bulgaria. It was detached from Moesia Inferior by th ...

. This novel adopts the form of a diary, divided into eight chapters (each of which corresponds to a year of exile) that reveal the steps of a progressive "maturation," or a conversion of sorts. The novel's universe is linked together around a primordial axis whose two poles are Roman society and the Dacian world, respectively. This dichotomy generates a rich range of metaphors, but perhaps this novel's most important attribute is the way in which both worlds are constructed, and their importance as "chronotopes" in the narrative. Ovid's spiritual journey resolves itself between both symbolic universes whose antagonistic characters become interwoven during a chiasm, in order to rise up again at the end of the radically metamorphized narration.

External links

An article on the novel
(French) 1960 novels French-language novels Novels set in ancient Rome Novels set in the 1st century Romanian novels Prix Goncourt winning works Cultural depictions of Ovid {{1960s-AncientRome-novel-stub