POET IN NEW YORK--GELLU NAUM--"ATHANOR"

Gellu Naum (1915 -- 2001) is one of the greatest European poets of 20th century.  He

started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with André Breton and Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s, where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne. After returning to Romania in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career, riskily immune to the political agenda of the Communist regime. He reshaped surrealism by means of a mode-of-existence poetics that absorbed (often jocosely) erudite eastern and western references along with popular culture and the quotidian, thus managing to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions into a unique discourse, shamanistic and ironical at the same time. His verse contains varied infinities while staying mysteriously homogenous and enlightened by the pursuit of the same unmistaken path.