The Manifest Beauty of Dreams: The Surrealist Imaginary in Paul Păun’s Marea palidă

Abstract

In the frenetic and eccentric panorama of the Romanian avant-garde, Paul Păun's poetic and pictorial work had a singular and obscure fate, marked by the silence of an enigmatic, solitary, and discreet life. As Monique Yaari stated in a 1994 article, Păun's work prior to 1975 is little known outside Romania, and the only volume that appeared in 1975 in Israel, written in French-La Rose parallèle (Parallel Rose)-knew only a very limited circulation, having been produced and distributed "privately. .. without copyright, in the best situationist anarchist tradition." 1 This situation made the poet's work appear, in the words of Yaari, twenty years ago, as a veritable "chimera" ("Paul Paon's Sur-surreal Chimera" 108)-although in her analysis the term is primarily used to describe a major trope in the poet's texts. In terms of recognition, things have been slowly evolving since the 1990s, and the present article aims at contributing to the rediscovery of this poet. Paul Păun, pseudonym of Zaharia Herşcovici 2 , made his literary debut in 1931 in number 6 of the first series of the review Alge (Algae) edited by Aurel Baranga. Already signing under his pseudonym, the budding poet was then only 16 years * The introductory pages of this article appeared in French as an introduction to the author's extended analysis of Plămânul sălbatec in