On Vasile Baghiu’s poetic chimerism
by Cristina Savin
Link to the page on Poetry in Process
He came to the realisation that, instead of living isolated in the sanatorium, surrounded by dying people, he could be someone else, someone residing in Palermo for example, or in any other city, and he could write from that person’s perspective.And so he began to write.Through poetry he became someone else. Baghiu created an imaginary world, a parallel reality, in which his poems materialised.
Based on Jules de Gaultier’s philosophical system, chimerism
is a cross between bovarysme and literature that brings together four defining
elements: imaginary journey, transfiguration, disease and science. Each element
was born out of a sense of despair and contributed to the creation of a new
identity. Imaginary journey was a way of escaping the socio-political
constraints and the cultural provincialism in which the poet lived during the
totalitarian regime of the 1980s. This escapism led to the invention of a
universal citizen, a stateless person – Himerus Alter – able to freely travel
through space and time. Himerus Alter is thus central to chimeric poetry. A
stateless character who lives in a parallel reality and travels around the
world and throughout history, he is some sort of ghost, “the ghost of the
sanatorium” as described in his collection of poems Gustul înstrăinării [The
taste of alienation]. His presence is testament to the fact that chimerism
brings back the fantasy and magic that postmodernism had taken from Romanian
writers. Disease, influenced by his work as a nurse, represented a reality
devoid of superficiality and flippancy; the poems are imbued with disease and
the patient is the true measure of lyricism. As the poet confesses, every
collection of poems is infused with an obsession for illness. The sanatorium,
which is a rare occurrence in Romanian literature, became a literary theme, for
without it the imaginary journey would be reduced to a meaningless pilgrimage.
For the chimeric poet, the sanatorium is the general setting, the place of
departure and return, the scene of separation and reconnection. Transfiguration
was a way of creating new experiences by forcing the poet to become someone
else; through this process, poetry becomes an expression of estrangement.
Finally, science was the poetic adventure in a space that has rarely been
explored, through poetic means, in the Romanian literary milieu. Baghiu takes
the view that there is significant resistance to incorporating other fields,
particularly science, within the literary realm. While most poets tend to
reject and, to a large extent, despise science, Baghiu advocates a blend of
poetic mystery and science. He encourages authors to infuse their poems with
positrons, quarks, DNA, molecules, chemical elements, theorems, electromagnetic
fields, hematomas, and not just as signifiers, but also within their substance.
A poet who writes chimeric poetry should include at least some of these
elements.
In the process of creating Himerus Alter and devising his persona, which resulted in his first collection of poems The taste of alienation, Baghiu often wondered whether the attempt to escape his own condition through an imaginary journey would in fact be seen as a ‘fake reality’ and would betray the poetic act. When Himerus Alter began to materialise, the general view was of poetry as the embodiment of real, rather than imaginary, journeys and experiences. Taking the leap of faith from real to imaginary was admittedly one of the most difficult things for Baghiu. As soon as he broke free from such prejudice, he realised that the imaginary journey around which chimerism gradually formedwas in fact as intense and as powerful as the real journey.
Baghiu remembers a moment from his early chimeric days, when
Rome featured prominently in his imagination as a place that stirred his desire
to travel. He imagined and re-imagined Rome at the local library, flicking
though books, art collections, travel diaries or tourist leaflets. The concept
of globalisation was foreign to him and in any case, Romanians were forbidden
to travel abroad during the totalitarian days of the 1980s. In some way,
chimerism was the precursor of these adventures. A few days in the library, imagining
himself in Rome and listening to its sounds, were followed by creative
endeavours in which he aimed to re-create the Eternal City the way he saw it
with his mind’s eye:
That Day in
Rome
That day in Rome the obsequies of a great poet
proceeded under a
merciless sun, flowers and
delicate scents.
We could not cross
the street for an hour or so.
We watched the
slow procession.
Up in the
balconies, on the blue sky, the lemon
tree blossomed
and your hair was
undone in the wind,
undulating
against the
backdrop of a dense crowd
accompanying the
stately corpse. *
In one of our conversations Baghiu remarked that the poems
depicting the Arab world were influenced by Lawrence Durrell’s celebrated
tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet. Geo, a journal that portrayed people from
Tana Toraja in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, was the inspiration for another poem,
Death was a wooden doll. In the same fashion, ideas and thoughts from travel
diaries, memoirs or even random texts invaded poems. This occurred during the
imaginary stage of his chimeric adventures.
Over the last 15 years however, during his travels, Baghiu’s
poems have become a way to contemplate his ‘lived’ experiences. As the poet
confesses, this is, paradoxically, a return toward his inner self, toward an
individual reality which he previously neglected. While travelling, the poet
tends to reflect upon the destination; but as soon as he reaches that
destination, he devotes time to ponder his poetic self. This is because
technically, the destination, seen as the geographical realm where “poetic
circumstances” occurs, is no longer important; what matters is the process of
contemplation. For example, a trip to Berlin resulted in a poem that made
references to the Mark Hotel in which he stayed and which afforded him an
opportunity to identify with Himerus Alter, his alter-ego. Up until then, the
poet regarded Himerus Alter as an individual with a unique, distinct identity.
From a poetic perspective, however, this change in attitude engendered a new
type of detachment, which could be construed as “mellowness”, a new way of
perceiving the world – more compassionate and serene, ultimately a poetic
improvement. Baghiu is no longer afflicted by the travel anxiety and the
obsession to record every detail that shaped his early poetic years. His poetic
mission is to rediscover and perhaps reinvent the inner self, particularly in
relation to the world he had previously dreamed of and that is now his reality.
He is no longer on a quest for imagined tourist destinations; instead, his
poetry “speaks” of places that he sees with his own eyes in his travels. The
chimeric fiction is no longer relegated only to written poetry, but to “lived”
poetry as well, which brings a protean type of wisdom to new levels of the
poetic equation. As Baghiu aptly describes it, this process is similar to a
“reversed spyglass”. In more practical terms, reconciling imagination with
reality gives his poems the power to reclaim an identity that had been lost in
the chimeric maelstrom of youth.
The poem below, On the sideline, is a felicitous
blend of imaginary journey, transfiguration, disease and science, that
encapsulates the concept of chimerism.
On the sideline
I saw death
fluttering like an invasion of cormorants
On the Ballestas
Islands, and the squawk of this bird
That Peruvians
affectionately call El Niño echoed my own voice
Repressed by some
sort of inner censorship
That never went
above thirty-eight degrees,
A way to live on,
lukewarm,
Some sort of
troubled stroll, with my hair undone in the wind, and my cane,
On the shores
white with guano,
Remembering the
ingress into Bahia of Joao,
the prince regent
of Lusitania,
Chased by
Napoleon,
Gaping at the
collectors of excrement
Filling up their
bags, in the roar of the sea
And, seemingly,
laughing at me, the accidental meanderer.
I don't know if a
flutter of the heart is an impasse,
A contemplative
moment
Or a discreet
warning, like a breeze
Tousling a few
hairs at the back of your head,
Announcing the
tornado.
Death is perhaps
this constant clatter of the blinds,
The darkness
inside the house in the middle of the day,
The cellar where
an asthma attack, caused by humidity
Or perhaps by fear
Swayed us towards
silence.
The past is a
ghost I see even today
As I look at the
white walls of the sanatorium in the forest,
on the road
passing Vaduri,
It's some kind of
diminished death,
A metallic ghost
by the name of Mustafa Kemal
Constantly
reminding the people of Chabiukarahiazar of a mysterious dread,
I am the past,
wearing these second-hand clothes,
And the future
also, maybe, seen here from afar,
Just like the
Aghtamar cathedral on the shore of a sombre Lake Van,
The future with
its share of uncertainty
That makes
astrologists wealthy,
A Chinese song
fluttering through vernal plains,
That you too would
like to sing,
But you cannot
understand the words.
I'm not afraid, a
bed redone with canvas under the sheets
Is still proof
that ours is the best of all worlds,
Because it's not
for everyone
To overindulge in
illness as if in a carnival
Fooling around
with tambourines, a unique reference point
In a myriad of
colours and shiny skins,
Beneath the statue
of Christ on the Corcovado peak.
I see the dead,
happy, with tears in their eyes,
And I feel as if
I'm one of them,
Yet somehow
flippant
Only because I
stroll, hands clasped behind my back
Through the
University Square, in Bucharest,
An eclectic place
of dazzling charm.
But I turn off the
headlights,
I'm on the
sideline and I write no more, I only breathe
With love and
devotion, for the dramatic effect
Of artificial
lungs, compressing and expanding,
When I hesitate,
timidly and warily,
Disguised on the
steps of the morgue, hat in my hands,
Disguised as the
one I wanted to be,
the one I am,
Himerus Alter,
From whom I
borrowed the overcoat
And this silly hat
that entertains
The children in
Zona Norte, when I get off the taxi
After launching Les égarements de Madame
Bovary,
Just for a moment, ignoring the
warnings from the taxi driver
Who spoke French:
"C'est très dangereux, Monsieur
Alter!"
As in a reverie, I hear him between two
whispers of the harmonica,
Abandoning my hand
into your restless hands,
On the edge of the
table on wheels
Pushed noisily
last night along the corridors
By kids admitted
to hospital with minor injuries
While everyone
else gathered for a chat over coffee.
I'm neither dying
nor pretending to be a victim,
I'm simply
collecting data for a thesis
Forced onto me by
those who still believe in me,
And I keep
forgetting, sadly, who hit the false notes,
When we played the
piano four hands
Practicing pieces
that can be heard in rehearsal rooms,
Especially when
pupils leave a window open,
And I, returned
from Sydney after an exhausting stopover
In Bangkok, remain
beneath the window sobbing softly,
Squatting by the
dirty wall.
It is not autumn
yet and I am now eluding
All sorts of
nostalgia-filled ripostes,
Some sort of dust
on the riverbank,
And the streets
misbehave with me,
When I roller
skate, exquisitely,
Up on the surgical
table,
Child with one leg
in a cast
And the future
held up in texts where the content attempts
To overtake the
form, the way it happens in life, naturally,
Rolling into the
valley without regrets, without sorrow, with love.
Notes
This essay was adapted from the Manifestos of Chimerism,
originally published in Romanian, and from communication with Vasile Baghiu.
The translation is all mine, unless otherwise stated.
* ‘That Day in Rome’ first published in The AALITRA Review:
Vasile Baghiu is a Romanian poet and
novelist. He has published eight collections of poems, three novels, a
collection of short stories and a number of essays. Baghiu is well-known in the
Romanian literary milieu for coining the concept of chimerism, a cross between
bovarysme and literature, defined as a tendency to escape everyday realities
and to create a parallel universe, a counter-reality in which one lives. The
concept, which began to take shape during his life and work under the
totalitarian regime in Romania, was developed and explained in his four
Manifestos of Chimerism published between 1998 and 2010. Baghiu works as a
teacher in his native Romania.
Cristina Savin holds a Master of Translation Studies from Monash University. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Translation Studies at the same university. Cristina is the translator into English of two novels by French author Marie Lion, a book chapter by French philosopher Marcel Gauchet and an article on the French explorer Nicolas Baudin. She also translates Romanian literature into English. Her work has been published in The French Australian Review, The Cordite Poetry Review and The AALITRA Review.
Vasile Baghiu – Bibliography
Gustul înstrăinării (The Taste of Alienation), Timpul, Iași,
1994
Rătăcirile doamnei Bovary (Madame Bovary’s Wanderings)
Eminescu, Bucharest, 1996
Febra (The Fever), Panteon, Piatra Neamț, 1996
Maniera (The Manner), Pontica, Bucharest, 1998
Himerus Alter în
Rheinland (Himerus Alter in Rheinland), Vinea, Bucharest, 2003
Cât de departe am mers (How Far We Have Gone), Limes, Cluj,
2008
Depresie (Depression), Limes, Cluj, 2012
Metode simple de încetinire a timpului (Simple Methods to Slow Down Time), Eikon,
Bucharest, 2019
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