MONICA
MANOLACHI reviews
Secret Weapon by Eugen Jebeleanu, Trans. from the Romanian by Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid with an
Introduction by Andrei Codrescu
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2008)
Eugen
Jebeleanu (1911-1991) was a controversial member of the Romanian poetry scene under
communism. A fervent supporter of the leftist doctrine in the interwar years,
Jebeleanu accepted, along with many others, what some contemporary critics call
a profound spiritual perversion, which meant sacrificing aesthetic truth for
the sake of cultural socio-political change. For example, in the first volume
of Romanian Literature under Communism,
1948-1964, the Romanian critic Eugen Negrici (2010) proposes a new
historiographic vision and set of approaches and he distinguishes between two
main intervals: the fundamentalist stage of the communist regime (1948-1953)
and the stage when the melting down was not real but just mimicked, leading to
an unsteady and perfidious dedogmatization (1953-1964). Negrici includes Jebeleanu
among the postwar progressionists, who rediscovered everyday reality and wanted
to innovate, after years of excessive aesthetic formality. The critic also
comments on some of Jebeleanu’s early agitprop poems aimed, for instance, at
presenting the invading Soviet hero in a positive light and at manipulating the
masses to believe in the idea of the “new man”, candid, honest, simple – and
hence easy to influence.
The postwar
decades constitute an epoch when modernism and the poetry of intimacy were considered
perils to the socialist literature and writing about the self was sometimes
seen as a sacrilege. However, Eugen Jebeleanu did not write only politically
engaged poetry. Especially starting with the 1970s, he became increasingly
aware of the effects of excessive politicization and began to gradually condemn
the ills of the regime, in his poetry too, until he was expelled from the
central committee of the Communist Party in 1984. His last collection, Armă secretă (Secret Weapon), initially published in 1980 and
translated into English in 2007, is a testimony of an inner struggle against
the totalitarian regime and of a strong wish to survive as a writer in spite of
the political cage in which he, like many others, lived. “In the middle of a
very difficult and dangerous time, Jebeleanu spoke out, as clearly as possible
and with a great self-implicating power and directness,” writes Matthew
Zapruder in “Translator’s Foreword”. What did Jebeleanu write about in his last
published collection? Out of the many themes covered in it, three of them stand
out: the act of writing, a focus on relationships, and death.
“Secret Weapon”, “The Saddest” and “Futility” are poems
which address the difficulty of writing in hostile conditions, characterized by
censorship and oppression. As Andrei Codrescu writes in the preface to the
book, the “secret weapon” is poetry itself. After a life of struggle for socialist
egalitarian values, the poet feels betrayed but discovers in failure the value
of survival against all odds. Poetry, as a “secret weapon”, is a “despised
thing / envied by all / because it cannot be seen / but exists [...] so
precious / it costs almost nothing [...] the breath of the Invisible”. The same
description can, however, suit other fundamental concepts such as love and also
faith or God, two other aspects which the regime despised.
In “The
Saddest”, the poet offers a disturbing and yet bitterly true definition of
poetry – “The saddest poem / is the poem which is not
written / swallowed with knots / stalked by customs officials” – that reminds
us of self-censorship as a result of internalized terror. In spite of this, the
volta or the turn of the poem
suggests there still are exits: hope and resistance. “Keep that poem. // She is
surely the woman / who will give birth in pain // And in her we shall each /
recognize ourselves.” Such a humanist message reflects the universal
“difficulty of living”, to quote French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto, and the
unusual way in which reality turns into art – by admitting the opposite of our
wishes. This poem contrasts significantly with some of the tongue-in-cheek
poems Jebeleanu wrote in his youth, which, as part of a larger propagandistic
programme, were meant to envisage the embarrassed and uncivilized rural man in
urban contexts. What once used to be a subject for mockery eventually became a
source of empathy and the poem mentioned here revisits the underlying state of
collective pain which, in fact, characterized the Romanian society during
communism.
“Futility” is a poem which questions a poet’s faith and vocation.
The author invokes God to admit that prayer may not be enough to achieve
recognition in front of the divine power. In an epoch when the supreme power should
not have been other than the power of the Party, the poet feels guilty,
incapable and unworthy, in competition with the divine voice, superimposed on
the almost unilateral public voice transmitted through megaphones and mass
media: “And Lord, it was all so futile. / Perhaps because I wasn’t dilligent. /
Perhaps because I didn’t know / how to launch prayers / for your voice / to
listen to mine.”
Several
other poems tackle the awkward position of the individual in a society in which
the uniformity is prevalent and often functions against exceptionalism.
The first
poem in the collection, “The Quiet One”, features a personal trauma and an
immeasurable gap between two voices, the poet’s and a woman’s. In 1965, Eugen
Jebeleanu’s wife, Florica, died. The portrayal of the dreaming woman alludes to
forms of production which may transcend reality. Because there is no direct
reference to his family tragedy, the poem can also be read as a complex
metaphor about the death of a powerful feminine spirit, more relational and
compassionate, a traditional spirit which collapsed once the new generations
left the countryside and moved to the sometimes estranging urban areas.
In “My Sister”,
the author caricatures the idea of brotherhood promoted by the system, by
portraying a cow as friendlier than man. “This cow has such gentle eyes / And
she understands me better, / my brothers.”
The poem also suggests that the urban man has forgotten about the idea
of death and a cow may be wiser because: “She is thinking about the slaughterhouse
/ prepared for her and for me / by that merciless, unseen power.”
In “Flowers
of Spring”, Jebeleanu offers a parable of the changes brought about by the new
regime. What seems a walk in the garden appears as an idealized picture of the
epoch: “These flowers which appeared overnight / move and terrify me. / So sure
of themselves, / so clean and strange… / They come toward me from everywhere. /
They tear open, incarnating in themselves / everything white / and everything
that is an echo / of innocence, the dream of hope.” The sense of purity and “of
an unending rebirth” contrast with the ending line – “It’s an earthquake of
flowers.” Three years after the 1977 deadly earthquake, in 1980, when the book
was published in Romanian, this line might have meant more than a metaphor, considering
that more than 1500 people died then, most of them in Bucharest. The line “I
walk among them, staying away” is ambivalent because it may refer to the poet
as a spectator of the world, but also to the Romanian leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu,
who happened to be in Nigeria when the disaster took place and who, however,
cancelled his stay and immediately returned to the country.
“Invisible”
is a poem which captures the sense of freedom Jebeleanu felt at the time he
wrote these poems. What starts as a warning against someone spying on the poet
ends as a surprising turn towards the supreme symbol of imagination, the moon:
“Don’t pay too much attention / When you follow me / The more attention you pay
/ the less you’ll see // I am not where you think I am // I’m in between spaces
/ I sing between sounds / I hide between bars / and not behind them // Stalked
by a tiger / I’m not safe in a cage / but in the spaces between // Sometimes
the moon / sneaks through // very pale // invisible”. The directness of the
message, the voice in the first person singular in contrast with an indefinite
“you”, the absence of punctuation, the insistence on in-betweenness – all
contribute to the configuration of a sense of freedom hard to imagine in the subsequent
1980s, when the poet was eventually removed from the political ranks.
The poems translated in this collection subtly draw on
the trauma of war and
of the radical political change of the 1950s, from years of Nazism to years of
Stalinization, which are not explicitly mentioned, however. Jebeleanu lived in
an epoch of cultural transformation, when the aesthetic of modernism weakened
and the postmodernists emerged. In line with other Romanian authors for whom
death meant “learning” (Mihai Eminescu) or “revelation” (Lucian Blaga),
Jebeleanu’s vision about death is rather transformative, if we examine the last
poem in the collection, “How I died”, which presents the dead as a speaking
subject, aware of “two leaves whispering” to each other: “Look, father is
dying”.
In terms of translation, Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid
preferred to preserve the narrative thread of the poems rather than their
rhythm and rhyming schemes, which is visible especially in the case of the short
fables. This approach changes Jebeleanu’s aesthetic project a little, but it most
probably brings it on the same wavelength with contemporary free verse poetry
in English. Otherwise, their translation is excellent.
Reading Jebeleanu’s
last collection in translation more than twenty five years after the 1989
Revolution may contribute to the health of Romanian literature and culture and
to understanding how good poetry emerges in totalitarian regimes. His concise
reflections on personal and collective trauma and his concern for truthfulness
in an epoch when truth took unimaginable shapes may help the contemporary
readers reconnect with the memory of a completely different past (and space) and
extract from it what is undoubtedly valuable.
*****
Monica Manolachi is a lecturer at the University of Bucharest, where she teaches English
in the Department of Modern Languages and where she completed her doctoral
thesis, Performative Identities in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry, in 2011. Her research interests are
American, British and Caribbean literature and culture, postcolonial studies
and contemporary Romanian and Eastern European literature in translation. As a
poet, she has published two collections in Romanian and was awarded a prize for
poetic eloquence by the American Cultural Center in April 2005. She is also a
translator and editor, contributing to the multilingual literary magazine Contemporary Literary Horizon.
