PENTAGRAMMA - ROMANIAN LIBRARY

Middle Ages speak through Cezar Ivãnescu, the Byzantine Middle Ages have
found a most valuable representative in Ioan Alexandru and his ascetic (occasionally
arid) hymnic and ecstatic poetry (see his monumental volumes
„Hymns“, „The Hymn of Joy“, „The Hymns of Love“, „The Hymns of
Walachia“). Next come the oriental structures with the Sufi and Iranian type
of hermetism found in Dumitru M. Ion’s „Hunts“ (written in arabesques
like a Persian carpet) and with the polychrome Turkish and Phanariot Balkanism
of Gheorghe Tomozei („Suave Cross-grained“, „Romantic Machinery“).
Characteristic of these works is the regeneration of poetry by recourse
to internal phenomena of culture, but the parallel process, of addition by
reference to musical phenomena, is equally possible. The poetry of Greek
antiquity (ªtefan Augustin Doinaº), the Petrarchan Renaissance (Radu
Cirneci), a romantic striving for the „ballad“ and a cult of the sonnet (Tudor
George) – all these configurate an essentially bookish poetry of adoptive
character. These phenomena, obviously directed towards the integrality of
a civilization, are summed up in the poetry of Nichita Stanescu, an encyclopaedia
of native formulas and bookish reminiscences, an exercize in imperfect
forms whose synthesis gives it a sense of balance, necessary despite the
ontological precariousness. This sense of balance, with a marked environmentalist
component and with its origins in the poems of Nicolae Labiº (1935-
1956), has been illustrated by such an unequal but predominantly ethicist
oeuvre as Adrian Paunescu’s.
Hence, exploitation of the vernacular poetical tradition, regeneration
through historical strata of culture (both signifying an illustration of an unconsumed
fund), post-modern encyclopaedism, ecological solution (both ethical
and formal), those are the principles Romanian lyrical poetry, organized
into specific structures and striving to assert itself monumentally.
The Prose: Epos, Phenomenology, Ethnological Argument
The evolution of Romanian prose cannot, in its turn, fail to take account
of the traditional configuration, and quite undoubtedly, with Mihail
Sadoveanu („The Hatchet“, „Ancuta’s Inn“ and „The Jder Brothers“) Romanian
literature reached the threshold of a great epos and epic synthesis that
tapped ancient strata as well. Besides this inner prototype of mythical prose
we find Liviu Rebreanu’s social novels („Ion“ and „The Uprising“) and the
Camil Petrescu’s analytical, intellectualist prose („The Procrustean Bed“).
These were three formulas that could guide Romanian prose and yet failed
to do so; the dialectics of the novel (a species of societies defined by an enterprising
spirit, analogous to financial, economic and territorial expansion)
and of the epos (illustrating a world with a generally stable, ritualistic
peasant structure) can be detected here too. Romanians seem to be, above
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