Anthologist: Claudiu Komartin
Translation: Angela Bratsou, Stavros Deligiorgis
Preface: Stavros Deligiorgis
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Alex Văsieș, Ligia Keșișian, Ion Buzu (Moldovan), Radu Nițescu, Florentin Popa, Cristina Stancu, Olga Ștefan, Mihók Tamás, Alexandra Turcu, Victor Țvetov (Moldovan)
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The scope and usefulness of an Anthology, once delivered to an audience of unknown readers, become entirely separated from the original intentions of both the anthologists and the anthologized. But what remains to fill the void left by the declared and undeclared scope of its publication? Explanatory subheadings – such as, say, young poets in a foreign language – at least imply a starting point for a positive response; here we have yet another book that, before it is read, manages to instill a promise of a sui generis anthropological profiling. The Anthology thus becomes both a sociological study and a collection of stylistic proposals, instead of a mere plain album of travel impressions.
Our Anthology, itself also a product of great and multiple realizations – to a larger degree than novels or essays – is surrounded by an infinite number of fields of pre-critical views that demand not an author, but a verification. At best, instead of seeking other “signs of the times” in the voices of younger poets, the perception of a collective creativity will certainly capture the interest of the historian of ideas, the theoretician of contemporary European literature, the researcher of mental states on the cusps of the connections between technology and nationalisms. The stylistic structures, which constitute the dominant feature of a compilation of poems from our contemporary neighbors, are turned into a tool for studying individuals and situations that are inevitable different from their translations, in terms of both cultural background and time.
The novelty of the present assemblage lies in the fact that the male and female poets featured in its pages haven’t yet been anthologized in their home country. This is an achievement from the very beginning and brings to mind, at least to some extent, the two-volume monument of Romanian literature brought together during the interwar era by Ion Pillat and Perpessicius [nom de plume for Dumitru S. Panaitescu], ed., “Antologia poeţilor de azi” (Anthology of Current Poets), publ. Cartea Românească, 1925-28; 70 portraits in ink by Marcel Ianco), and also the shorter Anthology compiled by this author under the title “Flesh Made of Dreams: Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poets” (bilingual edition in Romanian and English, publ. Agora, 2010, 441 pages), in which the twenty-eight poets featured in its pages, much like the seventy poets in the anthology of Pillat-Perpessicius, were distinguished, if not widely acclaimed, long before they were anthologized.
One glance at any page of our poets – in short, at this stage, knowledge of the Romanian language is not required – reveals an abundance of references to places, persons, languages and things in ways different than those commonly held as fact when it comes to Romania. The neo-romantic, francophone Romania of fine taste, arts and decency, even under the inhumane oppressive regime of its last tyrant, the Romania that was in love with its language and written tradition, the Romania of Enescu, Brâncuş, Trare, Fondane, Eliade, Ionescu, Cioran, is now called into question and opposed.
The presence of foreign materials can be justified by the fact that other than mimicking the latest trends, these materials also add new and unexpected textures to the fundamental texts of almost all poems. The narrative mesh of similia and vocal judgments of the poets is laden with elements from another language, whose diction is intensely and persistently separated by the familiar romance canvas: Gadget, Herzog, Cheshire Cat, Kitsch, Quantum, Dread [locks], FIFA, Warhol, Wenders, Humbert, Plath, Pink Floyd, NIKA, Scan, fake, IBM, Dark, Cuddling, Shoulda, Elk, Jaspers, Whiskey, Arbus, Cobein, Moleskine, Samples, LSD, Glitch, Bugles, Caps Lock and last but not least, the inimitable, emblematic, deadly Delete. This is not an interlingual sampling, but rather a stentorian interpellation towards the beloved mother tongue, questioning whether it would be capable of speaking its piece without all these insufferable foreign words like Disneyland, Colorado, Trackpoint, Walkman and Groovy!
That said, the poetry of these youngsters, does it have anything to say? The answer is yes; it actually has a great many things to talk about. The pathetic sexuality of the father who thinks that the encoded contacts in his phone are inaccessible; the radioactive cloud of Fukushima that hovers above the junkfood restaurants at the center of all capital cities; the rime that exposes the plentiful blowjobs given by the female partner of the prophet Eliseus the Adventist; the all-too-Hellenistic game of verses that takes down both Darwin and the Little Red Riding Tart with one stone. As one would expect, frivolity and frantic associations are key to accomplishing this, because if the readers look beyond the harsh Anglo-American innuendos, which will undoubtedly be attributed to the wide use of computers, they will see that this merciless poetry calls a few spades like they are for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall. There had already been several precursors since the ‘80’s – for example, Marianna Marin, Angela Marinescu, Ioan S. Pop, to name a few – but the verve of our compiled poets could easily be dated back to the wrath of Cecco Angiolieri (1260 – 1312), who, had he had the strength, wouldn’t think twice about bringing down the entire cosmos, starting from his own father.
For the first time in the post-war chronicles of Romania, we see art (along with all the ensuing products of an uncertain and ambiguous discourse) created from materials such as undead young substance users, tortures inflicted on political prisoners during the Stalin era, vomiting of the New Year’s Eve’s wine, the “great family” of the European Union, the deadly spraying of agricultural products, the child’s refusal to take care of his father as he takes care of his grandfather, the plastering of a Soviet mental asylum, the depletion of the ozone layer above us, a young man’s estrangement from the hypocritical evangelic church, therapeutic electroshocks and makeshift frontal lobotomies and the execution of Arab poets.
The recurring – and tragically so – common element is the loneliness of the poems’ voice, the impossibility of escape and, under the keyboard constellation of Delete – no Romanian would ever pronounce this word as dhe-lhe-te (quick, easy and carefree); delete, in its proper pronunciation, prolongs the graphemic heteroglossic ambiguity – the eternal deletion of all historical and emotional experience.
What we have before us is a debilitated, overwhelmed and sickly corpus of a language that expresses itself by writing over its own devastation; a splintered cry so deed and humane, that before you even understand it, it makes you fall in love with it.
Stavros Deligiorgis