Mircea Cărtărescu

"Poetry Is" Simona Popescu, Translated from the Romanian by Christian Moraru As I was shooting the breeze with this blockhead it crossed my mind once more that I had no idea what poetry is... As I was shooting the breeze with this miratrix of Y and X it crossed my mind once more that I had no idea what poetry is. . . As I was listening to this criticaster, to this literary estate surveyor and to this newbie who worships only the three poets he has ever read it crossed my mind once more that I had no idea what poetry is... As I was getting acquainted with this asshole who said his poetry was winning awards left and right in his country it crossed my mind once more that I had no idea what poetry is... As I was bumping into this moron for whom poetry is a hobby —which rhymes with lobby (he is so good at it too) — it crossed my mind once more that I had no idea what poetry is. . . I have read about Shi Jing today. ["Poezia este, "from Lucräri în verde sau Pledoaria mea pentru poezie/ Mircea Cärtärescu Paul Cernât, Translated by Julian Semilian and Laura Semilian Upon (re)readirtg the poetry that Mircea Cärtärescu wrote during the eighties, it becomes clear that what appeared, against the paralyzing, solemn "triumphalist" backdrop of 1980s Romania, to be "subversion," "uprooting of myth," or "polemical opposition" aimed at the canonical tradition is, actually , a lucid yet nostalgic and tender recycling ofthat tradition: a rescue operation undertaken with "sedatives " afforded by the rhetorical, ironic, and parodie apparatus. It is a historic irony that, at the end of the decade in which communism itself had become its own parody, the conception of "the national epic poem"—postulated as "triumphalist" by the Nicolae Ceausescu propaganda machine—reached fruition with none other than Mircea Cärtärescu's The Levant (1990), a heroico-comic masterpiece, ludic-parodic, and intertextually encyclopedic, a local Levantine synthesis in subtle debt to Mihai Eminescu and visionary to the point of anticipating the 1989 revolution. After The Levant, Cärtärescu wrote poems only sporadically, without illusions, without claims to greatness; some ofthese poems would become part of the much-touted volume Nothing. They reveal mere remnants ofyesterday's brilliance, but what remnants! His poetry continued to nourish from within the great visionary prose of The Dream/Nostalgia (1989) and Orbitor ( 1 996) (which itself develops along lines sketched in 1985's The All), shedding ludic mantles in order to explore, thoroughly, in all directions, the monstrous underground tunnels ofbeing. In truth, the author never renounced poetry. The poet Cärtärescu is, in fact, a metaphysical Romantic in postmodernist drag, but isn't the hippie generation the avatar ofthe erotic-oneiric, escapist Romantic ? Within poetry's present predicament, within the current trends towards pedestrian generalization of the postmodern model, the innovative character and daring irreverence of the young poet of those days appear in a new light, in a break away from less dramatic, pre-existing models of 1960s neo-modernism or neo-traditionalism. Cärtärescu is, infact, a metaphysical Romantic in postmodernist drag. The intense aesthetic experience of (re)reading Cärtärescu's poetry outclasses that of reading any other poet from the "eighties generation." Reading his poems with an open mind and without prejudice discerns the injustice and inconsistency of the reductivejudgments resentfully invoked by his ivory-tower detractors regarding aesthetics ("parodist," "artificial," "empty virtuosity," "facile mannerism," "lack ofontological profundity") or the ethico-political ("irresponsible aesthetical frivolity," "Bucharest presented as Las Vegas during the demented Ceausescu years"). This poet-emblem of the "eighties generation" is the only writer who, along with novelist Mircea Nedelciu, created a representative, "emblematic" literary identity for the Romanian 90s: a mythology. For Mircea Cärtärescu, a mythology of Bucharest in blue jeans, a mythology "against the grain" and rooted in a holistic poetical system, a system ofmagic correspondence , in which everything is related to everything else. The path of biography mystically opens into the world, into literature's spectacle, exploring, simultaneously , the contingent and the phantasmal, the real and...