My Tired Father

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