Free My Tired Father by Gellu Naum

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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