BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Stefan Baciu. Poemele

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Stefan Baciu. Poemele poetului singur (Honolulu: Mele, 1980). 355 pp. Stefan Baciu. Praful de pe toba. Memorii 1918-1946 (Honolulu: Mele, 1981). 542 pp. Stefan Baciu. Mira (Honolulu: Mele, 1979). 339 pp. Stefan Baciu was all his life a lone wolf, a capricious and independent spirit, and now, at well over sixty as a professor of European Languages at the University of Hawaii, he can look back upon a career entirely unusual for a Romanian writer. He was a boy-genius. His first volume of poetry received Romania's greatest national prize in 1935, while he was still a high-school student and assured him instant notoriety. As a law student in the late 1930s and early 1940s he edited different poetry magazines or literary sections of important Romanian dailies. He was engaged in the underground activities of the Social Democrats and was persecuted both by the military fascist regime and by the in- coming communists after 1945. He defected in 1948 through Switzerland to Brazil and began there a second life as a political journalist and literary critic gaining fame and influence all over Latin America. Faithful to his Social Democratic ideals he was one of the first to support a young unknown Cuban revolutionary called Fidel Castro; he was also one of the first to denounce Castro once he had become a dictator, even though the latter had offered him a high government position. After 1962 Baciu began his third life as an American academic, first in Seattle, then in Honolulu. He published several authoritative anthologies of South ' American poetry, as well as scholarly studies. He also has been bringing out for many years a quarterly, Mele, in which poetry in nine to ten languages is published. (The only similar journal known to me is Adam in London, brought out by another Romanian-born poet, Miron Grindea). Meanwhile, Baciu continued writing verse and prose in Romanian-his total output in several languages is staggering. Two of the books reviewed here are volumes of recollections. Mira is a memorial book in both senses of the word. It is a memorial to Mira Simian, Baciu's wife of over thirty years, who died in 1977. She was a writer in her own right, a professor of French, and a solid researcher of Eug6ne Ionesco's work. It recounts the nrivate adventure of two intellectuals and is, in moving love novel. ' Praful de pe toM. (the title alludes to a Romanian idiom suggesting loss and the vanity of endeavor) deals mostly with Romanian literary life in the 1930s and the 1940s. Other chapters recall the author's childhood in Brasov and there are a few portraits of Romanian writers scattered around the globe in the post-war period. Baciu's memory is stunning and his descriptions vivid and amusing. His books answer a sorely felt need in Romanian literary history and should provide some badly needed material for future research. While there is now much material in print on the great figures of inter-war modernism (Arghezi, Barbu, Bacovia and so forth) the later '30s and early '40s are treated gingerly in Romania. Much material has become unavailable for political reasons; some writers cannot be men- tioned publicly because they emigrated, others because they perished in prison; many writers who became vocal adherents of the system after 1945 had been involved in non-communist activities previously. Under the circumstances, even though much of what Baciu writes is subjective (as it is bound to be, and, indeed, as it ought to be) it helps to fill a gap by providing first-hand information. Beyond this it is a fascinating evocation of literary life in all its varieties, particularly because it devotes much space to minor figures. The tone is warm, sometimes 252 sentimental, but some ironic detachment can be noted once in a while. These books will undoubtedly hold their own in Romanian memorial literature. Baciu's poetry of the last ten years is itself heavily involved with the problem of memory. In the 1930s he had been among those who thought that direct imagery and linguistic simplicity would refresh somewhat the atmosphere of high-modernism then prevailing in Romanian literature. Baciu never engaged in avant garde and surrealist experiments. His recent poetry is also fairly direct and "realistic". The poetic strategy is to exploit the incongruence and the jarring clash between Romanian imagery, folk motifs, traditional prosodic structures and material taken from Latin American or Pacific cultural traditions. Localities and figures from the one are juggled magically into the other. A fair - part of these poems are somewhat mawkish and declarative, but others are more significant. Romanian symbolism around 1900 had been obsessed with exoticism, with the glittering syllables of remote toponymics; tropical fauna and flora had been part of its fantastic geography. Baciu pushes to the extreme this process by his multiple and exact references; what is more, he reverses it by turning exoticism into reality and the local tradition from which he come into an exotic and fantastic reference point. Thus Baciu may be said to represent the remote completion (and reversal) or Romanian symbolism. The faintly absurd juxta- position of shrill parrots and fur-clad Carpathian shepherds adds some re- deeming irony to the almost pathetic will to rebuild in memory a poetic universe. The attempt to investigate how memory and the imagination relate to each other remains interesting and places Baciu in the tradition of Nabokov or Eliade who pursued similar questions in their prose writing. Virgil Nemoianu Catholic University of America Dorin Tudoran. De buna voie. Autobiografia mea (Aarhus, Denmark: Nord, call. Verbaur, 1986).140 pp. Dorin Tudoran is a very special case in contemporary Romanian literature. He began to make a name for himself very early, as soon as he graduated from Bucharest University, first as a poet, then as a journalist. His earliest volumes of poetry, Mic tratat de glorie ("A short treatise on glory"-1973) and Cintec de trecut Akheronul ("Song in crossing the Akheron"-1975), were full of spectacular and rhetorical imagery, squarely placed in the imagistic tradition of the 1960s. This style began to change after 1975, and was soon replaced by a poetry that was more colloquial, manly and direct. In such volumes as Respiratie artificiala ("Artificial Respiration"-1978), Pasaj de pietoni ("Pedestrian passage"-1979 or Semne particulare ("Distinguishing Features"-1979) there is a new tone of bit- terness and of tough ethical and social criticism. A smooth and dark irony en- velops Tudoran's later poetry which often becomes parabolic. This poetic change was undoubtedly due to Tudoran's experience as a journalist at the weeklies Flacara and Luceafarul. He became soon known and ad- mired as one of Romania's few truly investigative reporters. His probing inter- views, his courageous criticism of the country's social conditions and his quick- witted essays gained him a well-deserved popularity. Many of these are collected in volumes such as Nostalgii intacte (Total Recall"-1981) and Adapturea la realitate ("Adjustment to Reality"-1982). In the 1970s he received four awards for his poetry and his journalism. Soon after 1980 Tudoran's relations with the Romanian cultural and governmental authorities began to deteriorate and he eventually renounced working inside the system. Tudoran joined the small but distinguished band of Romanian intellectual dissidents (Goma, Negoitescu, Vlad Georgescu and a few others); in fact he became one of the most outspoken and .

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