reverence followed StÄnescu until his early death in 1983,at age fifty, and continues today. In what is perhaps an even more meaningful indicator of his significance, he has also become a parricidal target of poets who followed him, among whom, in Doru Mugurâs apt phrase, âhe is loathed like a god.â
Despite his relatively brief life, StÄnescu published an extraordinary amount. The present volume includes roughly a sixth of the first post-Communist edition of his collected poetry, edited by Alexandru Condeescu. This edition does not include StÄnescuâs voluminous output of essays, prose poetry, and translations. In general, I selected poems that demonstrate not only StÄnescuâs particular power as a poet of the intellect, but also his ability to write on a range of themes, from love to war, and that reveal his humor. This selection also highlights StÄnescuâs formal versatility, including elegies, free verse, and many works in rhymed quatrains.
While this edition includes poems from each of StÄnescuâs books, I have focused on the particularly fertile period from 1965 to 1971 in order to chart the emergence and growth of his characteristic style. His distinctive voice developed, I feel, in large part through his friendships with various Serbian poets, beginning with his translation of Vasko Popa into Romanian in 1965. For this reason, I have included all his poems from the short collection Belgrade in Five Friends , first published in former Yugoslavia in a bilingual edition in 1970.
StÄnescu thrived on his public reception, constant company, and the presence of friends. Of all the poets of his generation, he perhaps took the most inspiration from the company of others, be they his readers, lovers, or entourage â what W. D. Snodgrass once called the âloud and boozy group at a table in the corner.â StÄnescu was famously averse to solitude, and he often practiced what he called âthe ritual of writing on air,â composing his works out loud, in a café or bar, while a friend transcribed them on the tablecloth. âGutenberg flattened words out,â declared StÄnescu in a Belgrade interview, âbut words exist in space . . . Words are spatialized. They are not dead, like a book. They are alive, between me and you, me and you, me and you. They live; they are spoken, spatialized, and received.â We see this in the scores of poems written in dialogue, withangels, stones, generals, or horses. In his personal life, StÄnescu found it easier to develop friendships outside of Romania where, he explained, there was no tension from literary competition. StÄnescuâs closest friend seems to have been his Serbian translator, Adam PuslojiÄ.
Poets and Soldiers
StÄnescu debuted in a time when history impinged strongly on aesthetics, a decade into the Romanian Communist regime. The 1950s had seen a series of campaigns against writers who refused to declare their allegiance with the new Communist regime. Pre-WWII Modernist poets, such as Lucian Blaga and Tudor Arghezi, were attacked as âhermeticâ and âmystical.â One common line of accusation held that their obscure language served a bourgeois politics and confused readers in order to sap their desire to construct a new, Communist regime. Consequences were severe for suspect writers: their work was censored, and they were subject to surveillance, harassment, arrest â which could result in torture, prison, or a labor camp â and assigned unattractive and time-consuming jobs. Writers thus faced the choice between some variety of this treatment or the production of work that demonstrated allegiance to the regime through Soviet aesthetics, defined by simple, accessible language and a clear and uplifting moral message, or what Evgeny Dobrenko has labeled âthe disaster of middlebrow taste.â Romanian literary journals were filled with unimaginative and
Despite his relatively brief life, StÄnescu published an extraordinary amount. The present volume includes roughly a sixth of the first post-Communist edition of his collected poetry, edited by Alexandru Condeescu. This edition does not include StÄnescuâs voluminous output of essays, prose poetry, and translations. In general, I selected poems that demonstrate not only StÄnescuâs particular power as a poet of the intellect, but also his ability to write on a range of themes, from love to war, and that reveal his humor. This selection also highlights StÄnescuâs formal versatility, including elegies, free verse, and many works in rhymed quatrains.
While this edition includes poems from each of StÄnescuâs books, I have focused on the particularly fertile period from 1965 to 1971 in order to chart the emergence and growth of his characteristic style. His distinctive voice developed, I feel, in large part through his friendships with various Serbian poets, beginning with his translation of Vasko Popa into Romanian in 1965. For this reason, I have included all his poems from the short collection Belgrade in Five Friends , first published in former Yugoslavia in a bilingual edition in 1970.
StÄnescu thrived on his public reception, constant company, and the presence of friends. Of all the poets of his generation, he perhaps took the most inspiration from the company of others, be they his readers, lovers, or entourage â what W. D. Snodgrass once called the âloud and boozy group at a table in the corner.â StÄnescu was famously averse to solitude, and he often practiced what he called âthe ritual of writing on air,â composing his works out loud, in a café or bar, while a friend transcribed them on the tablecloth. âGutenberg flattened words out,â declared StÄnescu in a Belgrade interview, âbut words exist in space . . . Words are spatialized. They are not dead, like a book. They are alive, between me and you, me and you, me and you. They live; they are spoken, spatialized, and received.â We see this in the scores of poems written in dialogue, withangels, stones, generals, or horses. In his personal life, StÄnescu found it easier to develop friendships outside of Romania where, he explained, there was no tension from literary competition. StÄnescuâs closest friend seems to have been his Serbian translator, Adam PuslojiÄ.
Poets and Soldiers
StÄnescu debuted in a time when history impinged strongly on aesthetics, a decade into the Romanian Communist regime. The 1950s had seen a series of campaigns against writers who refused to declare their allegiance with the new Communist regime. Pre-WWII Modernist poets, such as Lucian Blaga and Tudor Arghezi, were attacked as âhermeticâ and âmystical.â One common line of accusation held that their obscure language served a bourgeois politics and confused readers in order to sap their desire to construct a new, Communist regime. Consequences were severe for suspect writers: their work was censored, and they were subject to surveillance, harassment, arrest â which could result in torture, prison, or a labor camp â and assigned unattractive and time-consuming jobs. Writers thus faced the choice between some variety of this treatment or the production of work that demonstrated allegiance to the regime through Soviet aesthetics, defined by simple, accessible language and a clear and uplifting moral message, or what Evgeny Dobrenko has labeled âthe disaster of middlebrow taste.â Romanian literary journals were filled with unimaginative and