MARGENTO (editor-at-large, Romania): “Eutychia,” from our July 2012 issue, has been identified by Simona Popescu—poet, critic, and the foremost authority on Romanian poet Gellu Naum’s (1915 – 2001) work and life—as the Naumian poem par excellence, not in the sense that the rest of his huge oeuvre is contained in it, but because it stands out as one of the most comprehensive and emblematic expressions of the poet’s creed and poetics. And, more importantly, it highlights the unmistakable way in which his work was not only an art but a mode of existence.
A visionary, a great shaman—le grand chaman de Roumanie, as a French critic once called him—whose poems have always worked as Pythic oracles, Naum was also an incredibly shrewd and inclusive craftsman. The very personable and humorously playful person that he was in everyday life was the same as the artist who integrated biographical details, political critique, and popular culture (along with erudite and alchemically-oneiric intertexts) into his mesmerizing rhythms, expansive diction, and enthralling imagery. Although—or rather particularly because—he was a true poeta vates, a poet-prophet, he did not look down on the trivialities of common existence. His corrosive ironies never settled upon postmodern detachment, and, instead of rendering the verse flat, his absorption of the ‘insignificant’ actually turned the everyday into something magical, miraculous, and overwhelming.
