My Tired Father by Gellu Naum Read Free Book Online Page A

sense of mass-produced objects targeted at a demographic. I could give a damn about memories or facts or identity!
    Technically, this book seems to be a kind of enhanced collage, with randomized clippings from all manner of source material improved and improvised on by the poetic imagination. Scientific jargon, bits and pieces of discontinuous narrative, descriptions of desolate landscapes, military maneuvers and war, nonsensical games, dialogues of the deaf mythologies of invented races, ethnological reports, trivial details, and small wonders combine in ricochet parataxis to evoke the poetic state that presided over their assembly.
    I don't wish to analyze or discuss it. I can listen, if you think you have something to say.
    Could one read My Tired Father for its "laying bare of devices," for its obedience to the injunction, "make it new," or even for its "alienation effect”?
    My Tired Father , like anything else I've written, and like all the books and poems I have not written, and like all the poems and books anyone else has written or not written and so forth and so on, has nothing to do with theory or experimentation. If I were a critic or otherwise employable, I might say that this book, etc., could be read for its alienation affect . The affective poles are reversed and paranoia, which is our normal state, is transformed into poetry. Poetry is what someone in the poetic state apprehends. That "someone" could be a bank clerk, but poetry would turn the clerk into a poet. Obviously, this is a limit-case.
    Don't the verbal juxtapositions that you make in My Tired Father, with scientific jargon rubbing against evocative fragments to produce a kind of reverie between the words, recall the visual collages, the cubomanies , of your fellow Surrealist, Gherasim Luca? The two of you appear to enlist parataxis to the same ends.
    I don't know who or what you're talking about. I have heard the name "Luca" somewhere, I admit. But I've managed to forget where or why. And what is Surrealism?
    You don't wish to speak of your participation in the Romanian Surrealist group during the Second World War? Of your old colleagues—Gherasim Luca, Dolfi Trost, Paul Paun, Virgil Teodorescu? Victor Brauner? Andre Breton? Benjamin Peret, Remedios Varo, Pierre Mabille, Roger Gilbert- Le comte, Jacques Herold?
    I will say that that was a long time ago. Poetry is what endures. Not because it is written down but because it is outside of all that. Outside of names, dates, tendencies, the right answer, the wrong answer. Victor Brauner, whom I met when I was very young, signifies an origin that destroyed in advance all that was to come. And made possible and necessary what was to come. There is nothing here to be documented. Eternity is not documented. Victor Brauner was the messenger.
    In Remy Laville's Gellu Naum: Poete Roumain Prisonnier au Château des Aveugles (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994), we discover that you were drafted into the Romanian cavalry—the Queen's Hussars—at the outbreak of the war and that, mounted on a horse called "Plato," you participated in the Axis assault on the Soviet Union. Wasn't this a doubly or triply difficult time for you? A Marxist and a member of the clandestinely formed Surrealist group, sent off on horseback against "the revolution"?
    And I ask you the question: wasn't Plato the enemy of poets? The important thing was to stay alive—and here I think poetry enveloped me in a kind of protective film—and to try to maintain contact with the others that you mentioned and whose names I've already forgotten again.
    And after the war?
    Which war do you mean? After the war we were hungry, as usual. But we finally had the opportunity to bring our nocturnal works into the light of day. Books were published, meetings were held, exhibitions were mounted. Poetry, which was called "Surrealism" in those days, was still scandalous to the small public that remained. It was certainly scandalous to the new Communist government,