Jakub Kornhauser

The main aim of my article is to investigate, or simply to highlight the evolution of the twofold
character of Surrealism-influenced, and later Surrealist, manifestos in three consecutive stages
of the avant-garde movement in Romania. I apply the notion of the avant-garde manifesto
developped by Benedikt Hjartarson in his essay “Myths of Rupture. The Manifesto and the
Concept of Avant-Garde”, with the aim of taking a closer look at the anti-Surrealist Romanian
manifestos of the mid-twenties, pre-Surrealist texts of the thirties, and the proper phase of the
newly-established Romanian Surrealist Group’s discoveries in the forties.

The paper presents one of the most interesting experiments in the Gellu Naum’s Surrealist repertoire, The Advantage of Vertebrae, a cycle of collage poems, created originally in the 40’s, but published late in 1975’s book The Description of the Tower. The poem is de-poetized by removing its teritory to the new context of the fashion-plate’s illustrations. This strange piece of art could also anticipate the formal experiments of the 50’s and 60’s, notably the concrete poetry, or be treated as a representative of liberature, the category invented by Polish poet Zenon Fajfer back in the late 90’s. Fajfer underlines the material aspect of literature as an object: from this point of view, The Advantage of Vertebrae becomes the laboratory of the poetry itself, gaining a new, unlimited identity.

The paper continues “object-oriented” analysis of the most inspiring experiments in the Romanian Surrealism’s repertoire, notably in the short stories by Gherasim Luca, one of the movement’s leading representatives. His two books of poetic prose, published originally in the 1940s, could be interpreted as the emblematic example of Surrealist revolutionary tendencies in the field of new materialism. Such texts as The Kleptobject Sleeps or The Rubber Coffee become the laboratory of the object itself, gaining a new, unlimited identity in the platform of Surreality, where the human-like subject loses its status. Objects possess quasi-occult powers to initiate and control human’s desires. Therefore, Breton’s “revolution of the object” could concretize as literary praxis showing the way how contemporary “materialist turn” in anthropology deals with avant-garde theories.

The aim of the article is to analyse the influence of occultism on the development of the Central European avant-garde, especially the Surrealism of the ‘30s and ‘40s. On the one hand, occultists affirm a retreat from the tyranny of reason, which for many avant-garde artists embodies the pettiness of human existence, stifled by the forces of family and public duties. On the other hand, they are an inexhaustible source of props, actions and rituals. Both aspects are extremely important for both Czech Artificialists (Toyen and Štyrský) and Surrealists (Teige, Nezval); however, they gain particular importance in the theories and practice of Romanian Surrealists – Victor Brauner, Gherasim Luca and, above all, Gellu Naum. The space in which these transformed entities with a new status enter consciousness are the eponymous „dangerous territory” that André Breton wrote about, and which become a metaphor (but is it only a metaphor?) of the alliance of the proto-language and the proto-image.

Nut Terrorizing the Cities. The Liberation of the Object in Gellu Naum’s Vasco da Gama

The paper analyses one of the Gellu Naum’s poetic masterpieces, Vasco da Gama. The main aim is to reconstruct Naum’s aesthetic premises that lead him to transform the images to reveal the real nature of the poetic objects. The theoretical background for Naum is created by the André Breton’s essay Crise l’objet (1936). The article presents the crucial imperative in the Romanian Surrealism leader’s Nuca terorizează orasele. Eliberarea obiectului suprarealist în Vasco da Gama de Gellu Naum 219 appeal, the object to be stripped of cretinizing uniforms and liberated by removing from the quotidian context. Rather than an inert object engulfed by the perceiving consciousness, the liberated thing becomes active and devours its observer. The language of permanent and fluid transformations accompanies a promiscuous, perpetual orgy of devouring. The concept of “liberation” is claimed as both “emancipation” and “release”. Disfunctional objects gain a new identity, being anthropomorfized or animated. Vasco da Gama propose a special type of sensibility reclined on an unruly imagination and encourages the reader to discover new relations between the object and the word.

The term “liberature” (pol. liberatura; from lat. liber – book; libertas – freedom), was introduced by Zenon Fajfer in 1999 in his essay Liberature. Appendix to a Dictionary of Literary Terms to describe the phenomenon of literary works created as material artifacts rather than only a neutral containers for a text. As Fajfer writes, the first, elementary space is an “actual book – a material object”. In one of his liberature-inspired manifestos, “Liberature: hyperbook in the hypertext era”, Fajfer introduces the term of “hyperbook” which involves both material and unique aspects character of this special kind of a literary work, created as a fully prepared artifact. I focus on two different examples of neo-avant-garde hyperbooks not only to discuss their dissimilarities, but also to emphasize their material structure and mutual influence. The first example is the hyperbook-manifesto of “verbo-voco-visual” literary and art movement in Slovenia containing interdisciplinary works and various objects fixed to the paper as the crucial elements of its spatial identity. The second work is Gellu Naum’s The Advantage of Vertebrae, a cycle of ten collage poems, published in 1975. This cycle consists of ten boards, covering ten pages in the paper edition. Though originally, all of the collages were presented on a single canvas, inside a wooden frame painted pink, hanging on the wall in one of the Bucarest art galleries. The most important issue comes from the fact that the prevalence of the both Westeast 4 anthology and Gellu Naum’s cycle are not widely available in their original (respectively, dispersed or non-existing) form, but reprinted in the books, reproduced in thousands of copies in various selections. Therefore, all published versions gain the status of the original hyperbook.
 

The article discusses the problem of the object in the neo-avantgarde poetry on the example of Vujica Rešin Tucić’s volume San i kritika [Dream and Critique] from 1977. Basing on two different methodological paths – an ‘anthropological’ one, linked with Marek Krajewski’s notion of ‘unbridledness’, and a ‘formalist’ one, associated with Eco’s, Belknap’s or Pomian’s categories of catalogue, list and collection – the author reveals two different aspects of the object. Firstly, it can be seen as an autonomous and emancipated, even alive, entity which overshadows the subject to gain a new, dominant identity and a vast “living space”. Secondly, the object, or its textual equivalent, is a part of the catalogue- or list-oriented structure of the poem. Tucić’s poetics is marked with a number of two- or three-piece sequences of objects which build a particular objective paradigm, analysed as a “lifestyle of the objects” phenomenon. In conclusion, the author tries to utilise the notion of an “uncanny collection” of objects (as independent entities or as textual representatives) as a point of convergence of those two methodological approaches.
 

The Incendiary Traveller and Vasco da Gama of Gellu Naum. Surrealist Hero in statu nascendi

The paper presents the early poetic works of Gellu Naum, leading representative of the Romanian surrealism. The point of departure for considerations becomes the theoretical background of Naum’s aesthetic premises. On that basis, surrealism is being reconsidered as a special type of sensibility reclined on an unruly imagination rather than anarchical doctrin. With a starting glimpse of Naum’s debut (The Incendiary Traveller, 1936), surrealism in Romania has earned a lot of consciousness, confirmed by several volumes (particularly Naum’s Vasco da Gama, 1940). The new lease of life brought to the movement by the Romanian group was incontestable.

The principal part of the paper is devoted exclusively to the analysis of Gellu Naum’s early masterpieces – The Incendiary Traveller (1936) and Vasco da Gama (1940). The main aim is to reconstruct Naum’s imaginary areas full of unseen things that underlie the surfaces of the quotidian and consciousness. The Romanian poet concentrates on the liberation of the subject or a person from the necessity of identity. The Surrealist hero (both Vasco da Gama and The Incendiary Traveller) has to be at the same time a textual construct, only a toy in the demonically animated inorganic things’ hands, an inert object, and, at least, the poet’s alter ego, exploratory of the irrational and marvellous, a grand voyager over the devouring sea of objects (sea of bones), a platform build on the basis of free imagination. The goal of the Gellu Naum’s textual representative is to move between worlds, to participate in a fluid series of magical changes in the permanent process of seeking for a secret identity.

Concrete Poetry Translator’s Tasks. Methodological Prolegomena

The paper focuses on the methodological approach to the problem of translating experimental poetry. The presented analysis is based on three texts: Julian Kornhauser’s Przekład jako objaśnienie (O tłumaczeniu poezji konkretnej) from 1983, Jerzy Jarniewicz’s Tłumacze na urlop! and Leszek Engelking’s Konkretne decyzje tłumacza, both from 2006. Each of these three articles includes a translative strategy towards the concrete poetry. The term, in narrow meaning, can be used to describe the worldwide movement founded simultaneously in Switzerland/Germany (by Eugen Gomringer), Sweden (by Őyvind Fahlstrőm) and in Brazil (by the Noigandres group – Haroldo and Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari) in the early 1950s. The movement itself represents a form consisting of both verbal and visual elements and, in consequence, unites the distinctive marks of poetry and painting. With a vague status of a hybrid, as well as the experimental character, this specific genre is situated beyond the traditional categories of analysis and interpretation. Despite the confusion in terminology, though, there is fundamental requirement which the various kinds of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made.
Considered as an object, the concrete poem causes a fundamental problem in the frames of the translatology. The concrete poetry interpreters and researchers are disunited on the question of its translatabilty. Julian Kornhauser distinguishes the two major kinds of the concrete poem – a “poster-poem” and the “non-poster” one, the latter allowing or even requiring a translator’s intervention. The “poster-poem”, owing the complicated visual structure, cannot be translated. Jerzy Jarniewicz defines the entire concrete poetry as untranslatable, classifying it in the terms of the visual arts. Leszek Engleking presents a contrary view, which considers a translator as an interpret who promotes the experimental forms of poetry in the new literary context. The author of this paper attempts to put these methodological concepts into translation practice, examining the concrete poems of Eugen Gomringer, Friedrich Achleitner, Gerhard Rühm, Hansjörg Mayr and Jiří Kolář among others. While the most significant component of the concrete poem is language itself, treated predominantly as a graphic structure, the translation strategies can differ significantly. The analysis evokes its internal status, which appears to be miscellaneous from different perspectives, as it initiated an interdisciplinary genre by searching for new artistic horizons.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the notion of “the Physical World” in the André Breton essays and manifestoes of Surrealism, and its presence in the Gherasim Luca’s theory of “the Objectively Offered Object”. In the first part of the article, the author investigates the interactions between the “Surrealist object” and the “poetic image”, linked by the metaphors parallel with the language of Physics. The Surrealist image occures when combining two heterogeneous objects. It is compared to the moment of the short circuit when two “poles” of a machine are joined “with a conductor of little or no resistance”. This notion is explored in the second part of the article as a rigorous key to read The Passive Vampire of the Romanian-French Surrealist Gherasim Luca. His theory of “the Objectively Offered Object” masterminds the game of constructing the hybrid items, put together as the effect of the “objective chance”. The narrator/subject of The Passive Vampire describes his “obsessional” and “delirious” contact with certain objects “projected by desire”. With this concept Luca proves the predominant role of the “Surrealist object” in the works of the Romanian Surrealists.