During Romania's neutrality years, Porsenna veered between strong support for the Entente Powers (hinted at in a verse drama he co-wrote with Scarlat Froda) and a more cautious stance, akin to that of his political mentor, Alexandru Marghiloman.

This venue supported Marghiloman, who had emerged as Romania's "Germanophile" Prime Minister; Porsenna joined the governing Conservatives ahead of elections in May 1918, winning a term in the Assembly of Deputies—and acquiring the reputation of a dreary public speaker.

The Nazi-aligned regime of Ion Antonescu assigned him to its Labor Ministry, where he became an advocate of social welfare and a corporatist doctrinaire; in tandem, he embarked on a celebrated career as a translator of world literature, especially focused on poetry by Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

[10] During his second year, in August 1912, he formed a student movement in opposition to the mainstream body, receiving pledges of support from young authors such as Maniu, Scarlat Froda, and Theodor Solacolu.

Appearing in 1913 at Tipografia George Ionescu, it was designed as a partial correction of Émile Durkheim's theories, with input from the "opposing system" advanced by Gabriel Tarde, and thus rehabilitated the notion and study of human agency.

One story mocks all the world religions, depicting Jesus Christ as the prime critic of Christianity—a discourse that Teutișan sees as anticipating satirical takes by Gore Vidal and José Saramago.

[10] In 1914, Porsenna also issued a debut novel and began putting out his own newspaper, Latinul ("The Latin"), accompanied by a magazine, Ghilotina ("The Guillotine"), which appeared from November 1915 to March 1916[18] with Froda as the editorial secretary.

In his Latinul, he urged for an intervention in support of the Entente Powers, citing Francophilia and pan-Latinism as motivations—his articles were reunited as a propaganda brochure, called Războiul popoarelor ("The War of Peoples").

[27] An anonymous author report for the opposition newspaper Neamul Românesc, published in June, suggests that he spent his allocated speaking time monotonously reading from his own articles in Arena, "produc[ing] deep somnolence in the Chamber.

[32] In the resulting Greater Romania, which included both Transylvania and Bessarabia, Porsenna was recognized as a professional author: completing two more novels and two collections of stories by 1921, he was head of Gutenberg publishing house from 1920, and a member of the Romanian Writers' Society from 1923.

[37] As Teutișan notes, interwar critics almost always ignored Porsenna, and their indifference was not unjustified: the novels evidenced a "mix of intelligence and naive, braggart attitudes", cultivating sensationalism and interrupting the narrative flow with "wisecracking commentary, sometimes thrown in just for the feel of it.

"[38] Porsenna was not dissuaded by the poor reception—his younger friend Gheorghe Penciu reports that he showed "exaggerated modesty and shyness" in his private life, being indifferent to public honors while also unrelenting in his polemics with more prestigious literary figures.

In the short story Moartea galbenă ("Yellow Death"), he had described esotericism as the most accomplished development of the human mind, directly above scientific knowledge;[10] in 1927, he published an article on automatic writing.

[6] In 1928, as a columnist at Rampa daily, Porsenna mocked the left-wing "mysticism" advanced by Leo Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans, as well as by the Narodniks, contending that: "Adoring just one social class is an error, leading one into sectarianism.

In December 1925, when the LANC's A. C. Cuza established a "Bank of National Defense", which "will supply cheap credit only to Christian Romanians", Porsenna signed on as one of the founding members—alongside Sebastian Bornemisa, Ion Zelea Codreanu, Nicolae Paulescu, Valer Pop, and some others.

[49] Political scientist Victor Rizescu notes that the "protection of national labor", a concept introduced by G. Dulca in the spring of 1935, was fully embraced by Porsenna, now a "notorious anti-Semitic publicist"; both wrote for D. R. Ioanițescu's journal, Politica Socială.

[51] He ran again in the May 1937 election, which saw the FR taking second place at Ilfov; the results were highly controversial, and open to litigation, since it remained unclear how many seats were legally reserved for the electoral minority.

According to Porsenna, the law allowed high-school teachers to engage in electoral politics, and this permission would also cover Dobrișan; his reading was dismissed as incompetent by Stanciu Stoian, of the rival National Peasantists, who claimed: "Mr N. Porsena is a sophist of the cheapest variety, who likes to hear himself speak".

[54] In the late 1930s, Porsenna also became a sympathizer of the Iron Guard, and a regular contributor to, and editor of,[10] the Guardist paper Ideea Liberă—alongside the likes of Constantin Fântâneru, Radu Gyr, Mihail Polihroniade, and Simion Stolnicu.

"[22] Regenerarea neamului românesc ("Regeneration of the Romanian People"), appearing at Editura Cugetarea in 1937, was Porsenna's main contribution to a debate on national psychology,[6] seeking to identify "the causes of poverty and underdevelopment".

[57] Porsenna, who was also co-opted as publisher at Editura Cugetarea,[10] expanded on his theoretician's work with Proporția etnică și primatul muncii românești ("Ethnic Proportionality and the Primacy of Romanian Labor").

In a 1941 overview for Kisebbségvédelem journal, scholar András Arató noted that Porsenna, a "well-known right-wing writer and political reformer", had proposed the Romanianization of minorities by voluntary means (which implied that non-Romanians wishing to integrate ethnically would have to abide by a set of rules), as well as by more violent ones—such as resettling and dispersing them in rural areas, which could be thus become "wonderful farmlands."

Described by film historian Călin Stănculescu as a "melodrama from the life of Romania's grand bourgeoisie",[61] it told the story of a young woman "falling prey to a love affair that is as irresistible as it is unbecoming", hinting at the "incongruity between superior intellects and a mundane, regular setting.

[38] In September 1941, at the height of World War II and Ion Antonescu's dictatorship, he was a councilor for the Labor Ministry, in the social welfare directorate (called Luptă și Lumină, "Struggle and Enlightenment").

[65] Porsenna was additionally employed as editor of Muncitorul Național Român, the Ministry's publication, or "social tribune",[66] and, between 1942 and 1945, served as vice president of Filmul Românesc, the national film-making co-operative.

Porsenna hid in Zoe's apartment on Saligny Street, and only went out when she could accompany him; at the time, she had a good reputation as an employee of ICRAL, a state venture overseeing the nationalization of real estate.

During the preparatory stages of his trial, prosecutors spuriously noted: "as early as 1948–1949 [Țuțea and his co-defendants] have set up [...] a subversive fascist-Guardist-type organization called 'Nationalist Party', whose leader were the Guardists Ștefan Petre and Porsenna Nicolae (long-time defectors from this country) [sic], their purpose being the violent toppling of our people's democracy and the establishment of a fascist-type regime".

Moved into Aiud's 12th section, set aside for those too weak for prison labor, he was allowed access to antibiotics, which stopped progression of tuberculosis; however, as noted by fellow inmate Penciu, his incurable Parkinson's had pushed him into self-isolation, making him reject the friendship of most others (including Valeriu Anania and Sandu Tudor).

[78] He could only return to letters as a poetry translator: a large fragment of his rendition from Ovid's Ars Amatoria appeared in Tomis journal,[6][78] and, under contract with Editura Univers, he could print his final version of Wilde's Ballad, with illustrations by Vasile Kazar.

"[5] Regenerarea reappeared, care of Editura Vremea, in 2001; the following year, Saeculum publishers put out a large corpus of his translations,[6] which featured samples from Lamartine, Poe, Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Lord Byron, Catullus, Goethe, Victor Hugo, John Keats, Alfred de Musset, Friedrich Schiller, Paul Verlaine, and François Villon.