Urmuz
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Urmuz, pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău (March 17, 1883, Curtea de Argeş—November 23, 1923, Bucharest), was a Romanian writer of absurdist and avant-garde prose.
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[edit] Biography
In his early youth, he dreamed of becoming a composer, he read science fiction and travel literature. During his years at the Gheorghe Lazăr High School, he became friends with George Ciprian (who later wrote an affectionate memoir on Urmuz, in which he recorded some of his writings as he had memorized them) and Vasile Voiculescu.
He studied law and after he obtained his degree, he became a judge in the Argeş and Tulcea Counties, as well as in Târgovişte. He took part in the Romanian military intervention in Bulgaria, during the Second Balkan War (1913), and afterwards became a court clerk at the High Court of Cassation and Justice in Bucharest.
He began writing only to entertain his brothers and sisters, by mimicking the clichés of contemporany prose. His texts were noticed by Tudor Arghezi, who was also the one to name him Urmuz, and he was published in 1922, in two consecutive issues of the Cugetul românesc magazine - with his Pâlnia şi Stamate ("The Funnel and Stamate"), a short "anti-prose" which has the ironic subtitle "a novel in four-parts". It relied on a series of sophisticated puns using the double meanings of some Romanian language words, such as: men that descend from monkeys as they would do from one floor to the other; a table with no legs - that is supported by computations and probabilities; walls that, "in accordance with Oriental customs", have cosmetics applied to them each morning or, alternatively, are measured with a compass, so they would not shrink randomly (the first of the wordplays here is on the antiquated verb a sulemeni - "to paint" as well as "to apply makeup").
Perhaps his best writing is Ismail şi Turnavitu ("Ismail and Turnavitu"), which can be seen as a precursory to the Theatre of the Absurd and Eugène Ionesco:
- ...Ismail is made up of eyes, whiskers and an evening gown, and nowadays he is in very short supply in the market... Ismail never walks alone. Yet one may find him at about half past five a.m., wandering in zigzag along Arionoaia Street, accompanied by a badger, to which he is closely bound with a ship's cable and which during the night he eats, raw and alive, having first pulled off its ears and squeezed a little lemon on it....
He committed suicide the following year, without giving any reason for his gesture. Apparently, he had intended to die originally, "without any cause".
[edit] Urmuz's role
His writings earned a posthumous glory. They had an important influence over subsequent Romanian avantgarde literature. Saşa Pană printed a collection of his works in 1930, and Geo Bogza published a magazine named after him. Eugène Ionesco continued exploring the literature of the absurd, considering Urmuz one of the forerunners of the "tragedy of the language".
Urmuz was closer to the spirit of Dada (although apparently he never heard of it), through his taste for the random creation of mechanic characters rather than a Surrealist opposition to lucidity. His work is, thus, an exploration of everyday, but nonetheless grotesque occurrences, having their limits explored through characteristic buffoonery.
[edit] Works
[edit] Pagini bizare
- Pâlnia şi Stamate (Roman în patru părţi)
- Ismail şi Turnavitu
- Emil Gayk
- Plecarea în străinătate
- Cotadi şi Dragomir
- Algazy & Grummer
- După furtună
[edit] Posthumous
- Cronicari
- Fuchsiada
- Puţină metafizică şi astronomie (Poem eroico-erotic şi muzical, în proză)
[edit] Translations
- Ismail and Turnavitu (excerpt)
- Fuchsiada
- Algazy & Grummer
- A Alfeça e Stamate (in Portuguese)
