A moment with Andrei Codrescu

(Photo source) Andrei Codrescu, Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, magazine editor, screen-writer, radio commentator and University Professor, was born Andrei Perlmutter in Sibiu in 1946.

Richard Collins writes, "When Codrescu left Romania at age nineteen, he by no means left his birthplace behind. Along with "the sensual pleasure of the sounds" of the Romanian language, Codrescu also internalised Romanian literary culture, both ancient and modern. Aside from his claim that he has not stopped telling the tale of Miorita (see later - Sarah's note), we may see in his chosen name of Codrescu the trace of another traditional Romanian verse form, the doina, which begins by addressing the forest [codrul] in the absence of other kinship."

In 1965, he left Romania for the United States, arriving in Detroit in 1966, became a naturalised citizen in 1981 and has been called “one of our most magical writers” by The New York Times. When asked of the circumstances of his departure by Frontline World, he replied, "My mother and I were part of a deal in the mid-60s between Romania and Israel. Israel bought freedom for Romanian Jews for $2,000 a head. Ceausescu made a bundle in hard currency. He also "sold" ethnic Germans to West Germany. Instead of going to Israel, my mother and I came to the United States. She had a fiancé here, and I was determined to write in English."

His first poetry book, License to Carry a Gun, won the 1970 Big Table Poetry award. He founded Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas which states its purpose as catering to the "craven complexes of overeducated esthetes while also pleasing the autodidact lumpenproletariat" (huh?!) in 1983, and taught literature and poetry at John Hopkins University, University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University where he was MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English. He has been a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered since 1983, and received a Peabody Award for writing and starring in the film Road Scholar. That's some CV.

In 1989 he returned to his native Romania to cover the fall of the Ceausescu regime for NPR and ABC News which won him critical acclaim, and subsequently wrote The Hole in the Flag: an Exile's Story of Return and Revolution.

Back in 2002, the following interview took place (see the full interview HERE) between Andrei Codrescu and Frontline World. Here are some of my favourite extracts on topics in Romania at the time (and remain to be so ten years on):

On poetry and tyrants:

FW: As a teenage rebel, you had already started to write poems that could have landed you in jail had you stayed in Romania. Some poets you know became dissidents and revolutionaries. Still others wrote paeans to the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. What is it about poets and tyrants?

AC: Milan Kundera wrote a wonderful analysis of the duplicity of poets and the troubling relations between poetry and power in his novel 'Life Is Elsewhere'. His point is that poetry encourages irrationality and sentimentality and thus appeals to the least reasonable side of human beings. I have no quarrel with that, but then look what reason has gotten us: "scientific" Marxism, eugenics, materialism without borders. There has to be a balance between the -- granted -- unprovable yearnings of the human heart and the dictates of reason. In the past, tyrants have appealed to "reason," but they used court poets to charm the masses. Many dictators started writing poetry as students (Mao, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh) but later preferred killing poets instead. Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language.

On post-communist Romania:

FW: I like your description of post-communist Romania as a country where people, after four decades of totalitarian rule, "let out a great sigh of relief that has morphed into quickened breath, fits of anxiety, howls of agony -- a veritable caco(sym)phony." Describe some of the excitement, anxiety and pain you saw this trip.

AC: I saw a lot positive energy, sometimes quite surreal, in young entrepreneurs and artists. I saw also the unbearable misery of retired people who can barely survive on miniscule pensions. On the one hand, the cafés in the cities were full of young people with cell phones, the streets were full of color, the beaches were crowded with fine -- topless -- bodies, and villas under construction dotted the countryside. On the other hand, old folks crowded the churches hoping for a miracle so that they could eat.

Romania's youth culture:

FW: You told me about a Romanian punk group named Cold Stuffed Cabbage who sing an ironic anthem, "Cryogeny Will Save Romania," mocking famous "frozen" Romanians, including Dracula and Ceausescu. What do you make of Romania's youth culture?

AC: The young are Romania's best hope. They are not afraid, they don't whisper, slouch or hide. They are outspoken, in your face, and they will eventually replace the still-scared old folks. Families are pretty close, but attitudes are worlds apart between the old and the young.

On Vadim Tudor:

FW: Producer Jason Cohn, one of your colleagues, describes Vadim Tudor, the ultra-nationalist leader you interviewed, as a man who combines characteristics of Elvis and Hitler. Is he a buffoon? a threat?

AC: He's certainly a threat, but he's neither as magnetic as Elvis nor as evil as Hitler. He's more of a clown in the Zhrinovski mold. He'll say anything that comes to his mind, especially if it's shocking or outrageous, and enjoys the reactions. He does make a pretty good case against corruption and that finds a large audience. Unfortunately, he's mostly a populist demagogue. Nobody has any idea what he really thinks.

Democracy in Romania (bearing in mind this takes place in 2002):

FW: In your book about the 1989 revolution, The Hole in the Flag, you report that elements of the Old Guard stage-managed the overthrow of Ceausescu and found ways to insinuate themselves into the new order. How democratic do you find Romania today? Who's in charge?

AC: Good question. In my opinion, there are dozens of mini-mafias operating at every level of society. Some of them have achieved a modus vivendi, others are out only for narrow pieces of the pie. These people lie to everybody, including the monitors for the European Union, NATO, etc. They are giving Romania a reputation for untrustworthiness, alas. Happily, there are also extremely scrupulous and smart people who run various civic society projects, such as Ioana Avadani of the Center for Independent Journalism, terrific journalists, and graduates from Western universities who are going back and doing good work.

***

I first came across Andrei Codrescu with the publication of his Mioritic Space which appeared at the beginning of The Disappearance of the Outside - his "manifesto for escape" - where he gave his own version of the Miorita folk-tale. It is not so much a philosophical piece as the childhood experience of hearing the story at aged ten from "a thousand-year-old shepherd wrapped in a cloak of smoke." Faithful to oral tradition, Codrescu improvises on detail, but the changes lead him to add an apology to Romanian readers "pentru modul oarecum aproximativ in care am repovestit mitul Mioritei" ('for the approximate manner in which I’ve retold the myth of Miorita') when the book was translated into Romanian:

'One August evening in 1956, when I was ten years old, I heard a thousand-year-old shepherd wrapped in a cloak of smoke tell a story around a Carpathian campfire. He said that a long time ago, when time was an idea whose time hadn't come, when the pear trees made peaches, and when fleas jumped into the sky wearing iron shoes weighing ninety nine pounds each, there lived in these parts a sheep called Mioritza.

The flock to which Mioritza belongs is owned by three brothers. One night, Mioritza overhears the older brothers plotting to kill the youngest in the morning, in order to steal his sheep. The young brother is a dreamer, whose 'head is always in the stars.' Mioritza nestles in his arms, and warns the boy about the evil doings and begs him to run away. But, in tones as lyrical as they are tragic, the young poet-shepherd tells his beloved Mioritza to go see his mother after he is killed, and to tell her that he didn't really die, that he married the moon instead, and that all the stars were at his wedding[....] Before morning, the older brothers murder the young shepherd, as planned. There is no attempt to resist, no counterplot, no deviousness. Fate unfolds as foretold. The moon has a new husband, and the story must be known.

Mioritza wanders, looking for the boy's mother. But she tells everyone along the way the story as well. The murder was really a wedding, the boy married the moon, and all the stars were present [....] She never tires of the story. She laments the death of her beloved with stories of the origin of the worlds.

Her wandering takes her across the rivers of the Carpathian mountains to the Black Sea, a path that describes the natural border of Romania. Her migration defines the space of the people, a space the Romanian poet Lucian Blaga called 'mioritic.' Mioritza herself is the moving border of the nation, a storytelling border whose story is borderless and cosmic. She calls into being a place and a people that she circumscribes with narrative. She causes geography to spring from myth, she contains within her space-bound body the infinity of the cosmos' (Outside 1-2).

Richard Collins says, "Actually, Codrescu's version differs from the original only at a few points. First, Codrescu describes the shepherds as "three brothers"; in the original, the shepherd protagonist is from Moldavia (considered the "true" Romanian heartland), while the other shepherds are from Vrancea and Transylvania. In his own telling, Codrescu would have us identify the shepherd boy with himself (a Transylvanian Jew), and the others with his Romanian countrymen (Communists) who stole his heritage and inheritance. Second, in Codrescu's version the shepherd boy is also a poet, "a dreamer, whose 'head is always in the stars.'" This allows us, again, to sympathize with the visionary who has a connection to nature against the (dialectical) materialist brothers, for whom the fair Miorita is only property, so much mutton and wool to be sheared, divided and shared; for the poet-shepherd she is the voice of nature, his confidante and chronicler. Third, Codrescu’s poet-shepherd is "married to the moon," while in earlier versions the shepherd boy marries the daughter of a King at the entrance to a mountain (or, gura de rai, literally "the mouth of heaven," but actually a beautiful natural setting, like paradise), the sun and moon acting as godparents. The significance of these variants will become clear later, but what is certain is that Codrescu is making the poem his own, through these variants, for purposes of his thesis about the poet's role in the modern world. In either case, however, there is "no attempt to resist, no counterplot, no new deviousness. Fate unfolds as foretold."

As he remoulded his identity into that of an American poet, writes Collins, Codrescu cherished Blaga’s interpretation of the ancient poem of Miorita, transplanting it into the soil of American poetry and translating the myth into 'his new idiom'.

Andrei Codrescu is prolific to say the least. He has a vast body of work and a huge field of activities. Asked how he managed to do all that AND teach as well, he replied, "the higher your chair, the less you actually teach. I have a very high chair!"

In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious international Ovidius Prize (also known as the Ovid Prize), previous winners including Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, and Orhan Pamuk. Andrei Codrescu is also author of Whatever Gets You Through the Night: a Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (2011), The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, (2009) and The Poetry Lesson (2010), all published by Princeton University Press.

For more interviews, please see Atelier LiterNet and EWR and check out his web-site HERE.

Comments

[valentin]

Very interesting this moment with A. Corescu and his way of retelling things (my favourite "The Posthuman Dada Guide:Tzara and Lenin play chess" maybe because Tristan Tzara is one of my favourite poets). As for Mioritza its obvious that richard Collins doesnt know too much about it. There are tens of versions of this ne and there is one "official" (not "original one") made by Vasile alecsandri and the ne printed and learned in school. Its the version of a cultivate poet - like Codrescu. But its not the original one, as nobody can say about a popular poem that travelled with sheperds and was adapted from village to village. Codrescu creates his own version from what he remembers, keeping just the essence - the attitude towards fate. His version is as true and "original'. I don't understand how this theory of obeying the fate is consistent with the theory that Romania's hope are the young ones