On the Work of Romanian Communist Poet Eugen Jebeleanu

Alina Stefanescu writes about the poetry of Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (1911–1991) for The Operating System (powered by Medium), "a peer-facilitated experiment in the redistribution of creative resources and possibility." Stefanescu reads, in particular, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems (Coffee House, 2008), translated by Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid. From this piece:

...Secret Weapon was his final collection. The title poem begins by describing the “secret weapon”:

“This thing
so many despise
but everyone wants to make.”

When he says everyone, he means all of us. He means every social and national grouping of the human species. He means power and how we define it as the ability to exterminate and destroy one another. Living in a nation colonized by Puritans, a nation whose creation relied on the extermination and erasure of native peoples and tribes, I’m skeptical of purity — its vows, its rituals, its cultural elucidations.

7. Like Jason Stumpf, I hear Transtromer and Milosz in Jebeleanu. To quote Stumpf: “The lyric intensity of the poems reflects crises that are psychological and moral rather than political. They are a means of talking about an interior reality that has no other form of expression, a reality in which the self is caught inside an endless state of terror and dread.”

8. Jebeleanu’s lyric testimonies to life under the Ceausescu government are profoundly unsentimental, yet deeply moving expressions of collective and personal guilt. Trapped between his clear understanding of the government’s corruption and brutality, and his own dilemmas as a public figure and reluctant favourite of Ceausescu, the poet found an outlet for his disillusionment in the spare, allegorical poems of his later life.

Read on here.