compliant quatrains.
StÄnescu navigated this demand with various tactics in his first two books, published in 1960 and 1964. Some of his poems treated Romanian suffering during WWII, which the state referred to as the âWar for Peace.â Works that catalogued enemy aggression, e.g. Eugen Jebeleanuâs Hiroshimaâs Smile , were approved for publication in part because they provided justification for the new regime. StÄnescu was ten years old in 1943, when the oil fields of his hometown of PloieÅti sustained some of the warâs heaviest bombing, and throughout his life the images of incendiary bombs and human bodies afire haunted him. He was thus able to shape his early poems about the war in compliance with the official narrative. For example, âEnd of an Air Raidâ first presentsthe destruction caused by the enemy and ends with an optimistic gaze toward nascent spring, to be understood as the new, postwar Communist era. Other early poems, such as âThe International,â made more direct statements of allegiance: âAnd it was a terrible war â / but whether you call its end PEACE/ or you call it LENIN/ it means the same thing.â StÄnescu supported his more intensely literary pieces by writing a quantity of party-line poems. His first two collections interspersed these poems with more self-consciously artistic work; later in his career he segregated his poems into separate volumes. He published the political books A Land Called Romania (1967) and Vertical Red (1969) with the Military Press almost at the same time that Egg and Sphere (1967) and Unwords (1969) were released with literary presses.
Yet StÄnescuâs engagement with political verse is not mere pragmatic calculation. StÄnescu gained fame because he and his generation transformed Soviet-style aesthetics from within. The poetry of this period took the form of anecdotes in verse and paeans to state leaders, the party, or agricultural collectivization and industrialization. In a political atmosphere in which leading literary journals published poems such as âThe Bricklayersâ or âVerses About the Young Lathe Operator,â StÄnescu wrote âSong on an Aluminum Scaffoldâ in the voice of a construction worker. Yet the speaker describes something unusual: a personal experience of transcendence. Although carefully framed by references to Hiroshima and a luminous future, the moral is deliberately vague and the workerâs soul travels in a kind of ecstasy. Confronted with the stateâs opposition to mysticism, StÄnescu cunningly portrays socialism as the impetus for a mystical experience.
This perversion of state aesthetics continues in his transformation of âobscurity.â StÄnescuâs characteristic simplicity of style â he preferred common nouns such as âstonesâ and âbirdsâ and avoided ornamental description â can be seen as unassailably direct. His images become âunsettlingly concrete,â in Matei CÄlinescuâs description, as they present abstract ideas of light, the universe, or the seasons. Condeescu describes 11 Elegies as a âdifficult volume which opposes the imprint of its time by programmatically closing off immediate understanding, escapingideological accusations based âon the text,â making sociological interpretations impossible.â StÄnescuâs poetry features things , just as Socialist Realist poetry features tractors or new apartment blocks. Yet when we read, in his fifth elegy, âI was never angry with apples / for being apples, with leaves for being leaves, / with shadow for being shadow, with birds for being birds. / But apples, leaves, shadows, birds, / all of a sudden, were angry with me,â we feel unsteady, as though we might not know what these things are or how we should consider them. Without challenging the importance of the physical world, StÄnescu questions
StÄnescu navigated this demand with various tactics in his first two books, published in 1960 and 1964. Some of his poems treated Romanian suffering during WWII, which the state referred to as the âWar for Peace.â Works that catalogued enemy aggression, e.g. Eugen Jebeleanuâs Hiroshimaâs Smile , were approved for publication in part because they provided justification for the new regime. StÄnescu was ten years old in 1943, when the oil fields of his hometown of PloieÅti sustained some of the warâs heaviest bombing, and throughout his life the images of incendiary bombs and human bodies afire haunted him. He was thus able to shape his early poems about the war in compliance with the official narrative. For example, âEnd of an Air Raidâ first presentsthe destruction caused by the enemy and ends with an optimistic gaze toward nascent spring, to be understood as the new, postwar Communist era. Other early poems, such as âThe International,â made more direct statements of allegiance: âAnd it was a terrible war â / but whether you call its end PEACE/ or you call it LENIN/ it means the same thing.â StÄnescu supported his more intensely literary pieces by writing a quantity of party-line poems. His first two collections interspersed these poems with more self-consciously artistic work; later in his career he segregated his poems into separate volumes. He published the political books A Land Called Romania (1967) and Vertical Red (1969) with the Military Press almost at the same time that Egg and Sphere (1967) and Unwords (1969) were released with literary presses.
Yet StÄnescuâs engagement with political verse is not mere pragmatic calculation. StÄnescu gained fame because he and his generation transformed Soviet-style aesthetics from within. The poetry of this period took the form of anecdotes in verse and paeans to state leaders, the party, or agricultural collectivization and industrialization. In a political atmosphere in which leading literary journals published poems such as âThe Bricklayersâ or âVerses About the Young Lathe Operator,â StÄnescu wrote âSong on an Aluminum Scaffoldâ in the voice of a construction worker. Yet the speaker describes something unusual: a personal experience of transcendence. Although carefully framed by references to Hiroshima and a luminous future, the moral is deliberately vague and the workerâs soul travels in a kind of ecstasy. Confronted with the stateâs opposition to mysticism, StÄnescu cunningly portrays socialism as the impetus for a mystical experience.
This perversion of state aesthetics continues in his transformation of âobscurity.â StÄnescuâs characteristic simplicity of style â he preferred common nouns such as âstonesâ and âbirdsâ and avoided ornamental description â can be seen as unassailably direct. His images become âunsettlingly concrete,â in Matei CÄlinescuâs description, as they present abstract ideas of light, the universe, or the seasons. Condeescu describes 11 Elegies as a âdifficult volume which opposes the imprint of its time by programmatically closing off immediate understanding, escapingideological accusations based âon the text,â making sociological interpretations impossible.â StÄnescuâs poetry features things , just as Socialist Realist poetry features tractors or new apartment blocks. Yet when we read, in his fifth elegy, âI was never angry with apples / for being apples, with leaves for being leaves, / with shadow for being shadow, with birds for being birds. / But apples, leaves, shadows, birds, / all of a sudden, were angry with me,â we feel unsteady, as though we might not know what these things are or how we should consider them. Without challenging the importance of the physical world, StÄnescu questions
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