B. Fundoianu / Benjamin Fondane – Towards a more comprising identity or Ulysses’ never returning road
This essay presents, from a comparative perspective, the subtle relationship established between Romanian poet B. Fundoianu and the French author Benjamin Fondane, seen as different and subsequent creative hypostases of one and the same writer, this being a clear and interesting example of bilingual poetic exercise. B. Fundoianu is an important poet as far as the evolution of the modern Romanian literature is concerned in the period before the Second World War. His only one volume of poems written in Romanian, Privelisti (Landscapes) is a traditional one as far as the content is concerned, classical in form and modern in expression and the anti-descriptive tendency toward the idea of landscape. His “landscapes” are not inspired from Vasile Alecsandri’s poems, but from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, all of these texts representing examples of anti-poetry. After adopting the French language, the author starts using the pen-name of Benjamin Fondane, without adhering to any aesthetic movement; thus he writes avant-garde poems (as seen in his volumes entitled Ulysses and Titanic) that indicate the distance but also the profound relationship with his Romanian roots and his Romanian poetic identity; nevertheless, in the mean time the poet expresses his aspiration toward a more clearly defined artistic identity.
Keywords: contemporary Romanian poetry, B. Fundoianu, Benjamin Fondane, creative bilinguism, poetic identity
