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

which was as stupid as the bourgeoisie before it. Only then, at the beginning of the Cold War, an interesting term, did it become absolutely impossible to meet or carry on any kind of activity. Among other innovations, hunger was reinvented then, too.
    How do you reconcile your adhesion to the Communist youth organization before the war, your later joining the Writers Union, and your apparent disgust for politics and government?
    Am I on trial? Am I rehearsing a bad play derived from Kafka? In the first instance, I had to do something while going to school as the Iron Guard was a presence in Romania. Cioran and Eliade chose the other side.... In the second instance, I had to eat. And I earned my daily bread, if that's any consolation. In the third instance, poetry—the changed life—has little enough to do with the world, let alone the idiocies of politics.
    Later, everything fell apart. Faun stopped writing. Luca and Trost emigrated. Teodorescu became president of the Writers Union and wrote hymns first to Stalin and then to his friend Elena Ceausescu. My wife Lygia and I could not emigrate...and then there was always the question of language: I am not a French writer. I prefer Romanian, which is rougher and more elemental. Like English. And it is my language.
    Following the 1948 consolidation of power, you were unable to publish much beyond translations and children's stories for twenty years. How did this censorship affect your work?
    My life improved, and so did my work. Lygia became my spiritual support, my portal "to the other side" (as one of my books is called). I drew closer to the sources of poetry, even when hungry and ill and wandering about the countryside. I lost myself in the world and then I lost myself in Lygia, where she found me.
    Censorship continues. After the fall of the hideous Nicolae Ceausescu, there is the tyranny of the market, which censors in its own way. Pornography sells, not poetry. What we need is a new dada today, a new dada every day, without dadaism or dadaists.
    Isn't this the story of your "novel," Zenobia (translation published by Northwestern University Press, 1995)—a book that seems to me a response to Breton's Nadja, with the narrator taking Nadja's part?
    Exactly. It was Lygia who called me back from madness and despair, who called me to the androgyne. Now that we're old, we are also finding the world again, in the dark, where we left it.

    May 1, 1999
     

 
     
     
     
    MY TIRED FATHER
     
     

 
    My tired father used the thought-gaze
    He hit something solid with a pole and turned to me with a triumphant air
    In fact everything was limited to a sort of exorcism of fear Only the crossing to the other side of the gesture was important
    I had heard of the terrible storms there and I had come to know them
    I made identical gestures the dial had no numbers and the sun shone somewhere very low
    Weeping I asked for something to drink My wife mentioned Abend Oh if only he weren't at this moment above the masts in his barrel she sighed There he is and there he should stay I said
    And if he sails in a barrel he'll be in a fine spot
    Around the same time someone decided to dedicate his life to science (potassium sodium aluminum)
    On the other side two groups of three executed identical but inverse movements The second part corresponded to the first The third part excluded any countertendency and became a product
    A ball rolled on a floor thus transposing itself into a completely separate category
    Everything upset cried out
    Between the two (parallel) walls only one man still practiced the old demonstrative functions
    Space was a kind of sequential panel on which I could apply anything at all
    On waking I had a pulse just as blind and obscure
    While the intelligent students acquired sound knowledge within the framework of a demanding program
    The language of sets was integrated in small doses
    The pendulum's oscillation on which I had meditated a long time showed me furthermore that