by Gellu Naum
GREEN INTEGER BOOKS
Edited by Per Bregne
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First English language edition 1999
©1972 by Gellu NaUM
Publisher originally as Total Men Obosit, 1972
English language translation ©1999 by James Brook
Interview with Gellu Naum ©1999 by James Brook
All rights reserved.
The translator is indebted to Oana Lungescu, Sebastian Reichmann,
and Sasha Vlad for their help on this translation.
The initial drafts of My Tired Father relied on Sebastian Reichmann's French
translation of the book, Mon Pere fatigue (Paris: Editons Arcane 17, 1983).
Design: Per Bregne
Typography: Guy Bennett
Cover: Gellu Naum, photograph O1999 by Marius Caraman
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Naum, Gellu [1915]
My Tired Father / Pohem
ISBN: 1-892295-07-5
p. cm — Green Integer 19
I. Title it. Series sit. Translator
Poetic Contestation
An Interview with Gellu Naum by James Brook
Gellu Naum is the sole surviving member of the Romanian Surrealists. If we can provisionally annex Surrealism to the avant-garde, he is also the last of the Romanian avant-garde, which flourished so intensely between the wars in journals such as Contemporanul, 75HP, Integral, and Unu, whose contributors included Iancu (Janco), Tzara, Pana, Roll, Voronca, Bogza, and Brauner. After the war and before the full imposition of Stalinism, Romanian Surrealism had its brief season, with a host of publications and exhibitions. It was in this fertile period that Paul Celan rubbed shoulders with Surrealists Gherasim Luca and Dolfi Trost before he emigrated in 1947, with his first book of poems under his arm. Andre Breton acknowledged the efflorescence of the small Surrealist group by declaring that "The center of the world has moved to Bucharest."
As My Tired Father went to press, Gellu Naum remained home in Romania, without the slightest inclination to make the trip across two continents and one ocean in order to celebrate the English- language publication of this work. So, with Naum's telepathic consent, I conducted this interview with my memory of the man last seen here in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1983. The ether was highly conductive that day. I was wearing an old black sweater, and Gellu Naum was smoking.. Miles Davis's "Round Midnighr was on the turntable as we began our conversation.
Gellu, what can you tell us about "the tired father' of your poem?
I was born on August 1, 1915, in Bucharest. My father was Andrei Naum, a well-known and much-admired poet around Bucharest. When I was only two, he was killed in battle, fighting the Germans in what people call "the First World War." Facts! As I grew up, he was present for others in monuments and memoirs; for me, he was a shadow. In any case, there's no relationship between My Tired Father and my dead father.
Then was there some unresolved conflict—a feeling of abandonment, perhaps—that led you to want to write about your father?
Let's not be modern, stupid, or American. The locus of experience—even the experience of absence—is not the cause of poetry. I never thought about my father, and I wasn't even curious. But in 1965 my friend Gigi Rasovzky brought us together once again: in a collage, where I at age 50 stand next to my better-dressed father, younger by two years at age 48. This chance meeting on the visual plane improved father-son communication. If we often cannot talk to the living, why shouldn't we talk to the dead? And why use words?
Of course, even at first glance it's clear that My Tired Father is not a book of "I remember" poems.
Such poems, no matter how personal the circumstances they relate, end up, almost without exception, as generic, "personalized" only in the 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, 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 there were many distinct bodies that in blending neither disturb nor exclude one another They were in some very distant places
A young woman appointed professor in a gigantic school resolved to love her students
A photographer left his wife and felt compelled to accept the invitation of a priest retired to the south The priest succeeded in reconciling the separated couple
A man was stretched out next to his wife The ceiling reproduced the incline of the roof
A yellow spot seemed to emerge from its own absence
Two ladies told each other the scariest stories about the stagecoach They said it had turned over the day before they said that last year it had run over a child etc Speaking thus of catastrophes they came to the balloon that had recently fallen on British soil
For them even the meeting made sense even the walk in the mud with Abend
With that man alone lost in a black hostile immensity (many wanted to prolong their studies)
I gnawed on a little crust of bread to annihilate the emotional force of reverie
Afterward the thought lead me to the man fishing with bread He was neither my friend nor a close or distant relation He was small and green something of a recluse who says "ska-oo" and leaves his excrements when someone chases him from the tree trunk on which he has settled
The others did not let me even though I beat them with sticks and struck them with rocks They had no sense of discipline When I fell asleep they slid over me licking my lips and looking for meat
Now and then I woke up punching whoever was on me He fled howling frightfully The others followed One time one of them slipped and kicked me in the eye When I in turn hit him the others wanted to tear me to pieces
Consequently we longed for our muddled bodies
We indulged ourselves on leveled ground while we pecked at the earth
I don't know whether the feeling of encirclement followed on the affective void or vice versa
I nearly forgot one detail the earth was completely covered with a carpet
On the following mornings I went to the university around nine o'clock My legs were tied on with straps and on my head I wore the usual crested hood like a dwarf People seemed quite disappointed with my very rudimentary technical equipment and tried to convince me to give up the hood
It was a matter of finding again the central point from which each would have been able to return to his initial asymmetry
In selecting calligraphic works one voted with the aid of small pieces of cardboard As for the rest the selection was made by a show of hands
It was still more difficult with flat objects (for example the elk antlers)
Through brutal but precise experiments I searched for an explanatory model because even the physical schema of agitation could no longer serve me as a basis
I said bed for painful
The horror of the void became once again its own inverted retort
The grand champion A happy dog
On the other hand I gave proof of remarkable qualities by becoming the lover of a dentist whom I absolutely wished to marry But her assistant for the sole purpose of discouraging me maintained that the dentist was already married
It was clear that she thus meant to attract the attention of the most influential and at the same time most sentimental circles
From time to time she collapsed with a bird noise A little while later a small mouse covered with yellow grass sprang up in her place
To stop the penetration of the wax into her bones I lightly wetted them using to this end a paintbrush
Five years later she enrolled in physics and mathematics courses She lived in an attic and subsisted on milk and fruit
Then she asserted that she would to take me very far away to the Orient
In those days Abend came to repair the armchairs Francois-Marie I said to him there are those immense adjustable panels sometimes pink sometimes violet and t
hey decompose us and we shine
Ageless women gravitated around us The heads of some of them emanated light
The visitors turned in a circle toward the left
The dogs accompanied by trainers lined up for the obedience test
The apples fell on the grass and were eaten with devotion
We sat lined up in silence on the low ridge of the roof of a nearby building We waited without much hope but also because we had nothing better to do
In any case I can swear that all we could do was unleash a mechanism of possible action Those who showed the fewest signs were the most worried
Thank you sir said a young girl with a charming smile I don't know what I would have done without you
I don't know you but modesty is a girl's most beautiful adornment which doesn't mean much she told me on another occasion
She was one of the cleanest and most demanding creatures but when I visited her they warned me to watch out for her black-and-white striped legs that struck with the force of a catapult
I touched her forehead and ascertained that it was as cold as marble
The dog's mechanism kept working Its amorphous and disordered memory became richer
I impregnated the untreated canvas I toned down the intensities I neutralized the shadows Fortunately the experience of space embarrassed most of us
The others appealed to the comforting feeling of confidence the sentinels gave and they over-estimated their prospects by eating decently
They rediscovered the plumb line and the double ladder
The calculation of the total points was made at well- lighted tables
Concomitant with the arrival of the eighth everywhere
Someone managed to press his face to the window before being beaten down with a stick and falling next to the wall where he was immediately and Pitilessly trampled underfoot
The ball or the fire element digested Under another form it colored the liquid which it changed into blood And still it shone in our eyes and glistened on our skin
At table I sat next to an old man glad to be with me That's instructive he said His hair was graying and naive He was a widower