Drawing by Harley Liao, Taiwan.
How about spending a Thursday evening, on April 25, 2024, at 6:00 PM, in the Golescu Manor, immersed in the most fabulous literary universe ever created in the Romanian language?
Imagine an infinite and useless Auto-cosmos, where celestial bodies are “children of nobody, with petty and selfish interests” because matter and cosmic forces have resigned, and where “on a legless table based on calculations and probabilities” sits “a vessel containing eternal essence”, guarded by “hundreds of old weapons, still stained with heroic blood” and where the walls are “makeup” every morning. A universe where you would encounter Stamate, “a dignified, greasy man of elliptical shape”, who throws dumplings made of bread crumbs and corn cobs in Nirvana, and Bufty, “a fat and blase child”, both fascinated by a cone, “a female that satisfies both the requirements of love and the higher interests of science.” But what if you were to meet Algazy, “a charming old man with a grill screwed under his chin”, who, by eating Grummer’s rubber bladder, felt the “shivers of future literature” awaken in him?
A literary universe where the primordial force is stubborn and won’t stop until it creates multiplicity, confusion, and contradiction, a fantastic, bizarre cosmos, maddeningly absurd, generated by an exacerbated sensitivity, an imagination that forgives too little, and a humor that blends Balkan fatalism and the politely decisive irony reminiscent of the spirit of “perfidious Albion”.
If I’ve piqued your curiosity, we invite you on April 25, 2024, to a meeting with Urmuz, moderated by academician Gheorghe Păun during a conference held at the Golești Museum.
Urmuz is the literary pseudonym of Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău (March 17, 1883, Curtea de Argeș – November 23, 1923, Bucharest). Although he dreamed of a career as a composer, he studied law and worked as a judge in the counties of Argeș, Tulcea, and Târgoviște. From 1913, he worked as a clerk at the High Court of Cassation. He wrote with the intention of parodying the current prose with false academism. His texts attracted the attention of Tudor Arghezi, who found his pseudonym and published his work in 1922 in two consecutive issues of “Cugetul românesc”, “Pâlnia” and “Stamate”, ironically titled “novel in four parts”. In 1923, he committed suicide in Bucharest, to die in an original way, “without any cause”. His writings had an unexpected influence on Romanian avant-garde literature. Sașa Pană, Geo Bogza, Eugen Ionescu would highlight his writings and draw the public’s attention to this profoundly original spirit.
Mr. Gheorghe Păun (born December 6, 1950, Cicănești, Argeș, Romania) is a mathematician, computer scientist, and Romanian cultural figure, a member of the Romanian Academy and a member of the Writers’ Union. A highly authoritative researcher nationally and internationally, Mr. Păun is a scientist and a cultural figure with a prolific and complex body of work: over 500 published articles, over 50 books (on mathematics, computer science, popular science, logic games, literature – SF, novels, memoirs, and poetry, essays). He has edited over 100 collective volumes on specialized topics and books on various other subjects.
We invite you on Thursday, April 25, 2024, at 6:00 PM, to a meeting with two great personalities of Romanian culture, Urmuz and Academician Gh. Păun.
Credit foto: albumul filatelic aniversar „Pe Argeș în Sus. De la Meșterul Manole la Urmuz”, Consiliul Județean Argeș, Romfilatelia, 2023.
Refrences:
Păun, Gheorghe, La curtea lui Urmuz, București, Ars Docendi, 2020, 3 vol.
Urmuz, Pagini bizare, Cluj-Napoca, Limes, 2008.
