2022
Aplauze pentru poet • Ion Minulescu
Poezii: “Epilog sentimental”, “Ultima oră”, “Romanța tineretii”, “Ploaia Sfântului Ilie”, “Acuarela”, “Peisaj umed”, “Cântecul nebunului”, “Păpuşa automată”, “Celei care pleaca”, “Romanța celor 3 romanțe”, “Romanța retrospectiva”, “Romanța meschină”, “Sinuciderea unui anonim”, “Fetiţa din Făgădău”
Recită actorii Victor Rebengiuc, Rodica Mandache, Mihai Mălaimare
Filmări realizate în noiembrie 2021, la Sala ArCuB Bucureşti
Gellu Naum
b. 1 August 1915 – d. 29 September 2001, Bucharest
poet, prose writer
Gellu Naum is regarded as the most important Romanian writer of the Surrealist movement and one of its last major European figures.
In 1926, he entered the Demetrius Cantemir Lycée in Bucharest, where he started writing poems as a wager. He made his literary début in Cuvîntul (The Word) magazine, where he published two poems. From 1933 to 1937, he studied Philosophy at Bucharest University. At the urging of his friend Victor Brauner, the painter, Gellu Naum went to Paris in 1938 to continue his studies at the Sorbonne, writing a doctoral thesis on the Scholastic theologian and philosopher Pierre Abélard. While in Paris, he made contact with the French Surrealists and their leader, André Breton.
The Romanian Surrealist group formed in 1941, its members being Gellu Naum, Gherasim Luca (Salman Locker), Dolfi Trost, Virgil Teodorescu, and Paul Păun. The group was particularly active between 1945 and 1947, leading André Breton to say, ‘The centre of the (Surrealist) world has moved to Bucharest.’ After 1947, when Socialist Realism became the only officially allowed mode of literary expression, the group broke up. In 1948-9, Gellu Naum wrote a philosophical, esoteric poem entitled The Way of the Serpent, an experience that was to have a lasting impact on his style of writing. In the 1950s and ’60s, he published a number of books for children, including the greatly loved Book of Apollodorus.
During a brief thaw in the communist régime, Gellu Naum published poems that had long lain in his desk drawer, with the collection Athanor appearing in 1968. This collection and those that followed, including The Animal-Tree and My Weary Father, gained critical attention, but Naum only began to be acknowledged as a major writer after the publication of his novel Zenobia in 1985. Within the space of just a few years, a number of collections of poems by Gellu Naum were translated in different languages and he was invited to give lectures in Germany, France, Holland, and Switzerland.
In addition to being translated into the world’s major languages, Gellu Naum’s work has received a number of major awards: the Special Prize of the Romanian Writers Union, 1986, the Münster European Poetry Prize, 1999, and the American Romanian Academy Arts Award, 2002.
Like André Breton, Gellu Naum remained faithful to Surrealism as an existential project to the end of his life, writing poetry that shows that Surrealism was not merely a style, but the most authentic expression of the self.
