Gellu Naum (1915-2001) is one of the greatest European poets of the twentieth century. He started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with André Breton and his fellow Romanian artist Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s, where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne. After returning to Romania in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career, riskily immune to the political agenda of the Communist regime. He reshaped surrealism by means of a mode-of-existence poetics that absorbed (often jocosely) erudite eastern and western references along with popular culture and the quotidian, thus managing to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions into a unique discourse, shamanistic and ironical at the same time. His verse contains innumerable multitudes and infinities, while also staying mysteriously homogenous and enlightened by the pursuit of the same unmistaken path.
MARGENTO (Chris Tanasescu) is a poet, translator, critic, and performer who, with his poetry/action painting/jazz-rock project by the same name of MARGENTO, has received a number of national and international awards, including the Fringiest Event Award at Buxton Fringe (UK, 2005), and the Romanian Gold Disc (2008). He is currently assembling a graph-poem, a communal book poets from all over the world contribute to following the principles of mathematical graphs and the spirit of jam sessions. In 2012-13 he has been invited as a Visiting Professor to the Université Paris Ouest and Université de Lorraine.
Martin Woodside is a writer, translator, and a founding member of Calypso Editions. He has published five books for children, a chapbook of poetry, Stationary Landscapes, and an anthology of Romanian poetry in translation, Of Gentle Wolves. He spent 2009-10 on a Fulbright in Romania, studying contemporary Romanian poetry, and he is currently a Presidential Fellow working towards a PhD at Rutgers-Camden. His book of translations–together with MARGENTO–from Gellu Naum’s poetry, Athanor, is forthcoming from Calypso in August 2013.
Summer 2013
From “The Animal-Tree”
Generally we cannot know for sure whether it is a good thing or not to speak of that banished thing
of the well-known
strange thing we habitually do when alone
of the migrations to the gentle labyrinths where moans can be of an immeasurable value