Andrei Ciurunga, the poet of Olympian gentleness

In the poetry department, there are a few names that have made it into the Prison Poetry Anthology. The most famous, like Gyr or Crainic, you never had the chance to meet, but you can count yourself lucky to have shared the same cell or hut with two of them. One of them was Robert Eisenbrau, who later became Andrei Ciurunga. When Zahu Pană published his book of poems from prison, to protect it from communist reprisals, he called it Acturus, after a star in a constellation.

When he met him in Jilava in 1959, he was 39 years old and already a veteran of the prisons, he had passed through the canal and was now recited in the unique folklore of the communist prisons. He is the one who gave the canal its name:

… Our history, squeezed out of tears, / will remember and squeeze between its leaves / this terrible Danube that pours / water from three mouths and blood from the fourth…

He was small, thin, very short-sighted, with thick glasses like magnifying glasses, and he also had diseased lungs. The old convicts who knew him took care of him as best they could, as if he didn’t have much left… He too was aware of his physical condition and the brevity of his life. But his tough spirit, which was hard to beat, overcame all odds […].

Sick and dystrophic as he was in Jilava, after long years in cells and camps, even though he was officially declared tubercular, socialist humanism still kept him in the limelight and he was destined to go to a labour and extermination camp once again. The only thing that kept him alive was the golden thread of poetry, which the executioners could not take away. He had the unique technique of writing in his head and memorising the variations and cycles that he created. In Jilava, sick as he was, he would hide under a bed, lying on the cold, damp bricks, closing his eyes and murmuring his elegantly chiselled verses, and after a few days he would emerge with a new gem, like this one, which you never knew had been published:

In the dream’s betrothal to the moon / When candles light under the eyelids / The stars come down one by one / From the pale bundle shimmering. / Silence, silence, the poplars / As they turn from the earth / The wind aches softly like the caress / Of hands that no longer turn / And cannot fit / From the deep void of nothingness / The soul spills out like water / Beyond its limits.

Later, in Balta, you often discussed the merits of the line underlined above, which is perhaps a unique case in Romanian poetry, in which three nouns appear one after the other, but without being an enumeration.

At the birth of many of Robert’s lines, you were a discreet and silent witness, trying to memorise as much as possible, with the intimate aim of one day taking them out into the wild where they deserved to be.

He had planned a volume to be called Blind Lover Sings, a reference to his possible blindness, which had a line of unique tragedy in it somewhere:

… Beloved, beloved, last night I felt the sadness on your cheek…

To feel one’s sadness on one’s face is another linguistic gem.

In the camps of Balta, in that misery in which you all struggled, under sticks and filthy curses, through slimy mud, the wheelbarrow full of useless earth that was to cover many, in that indescribable misery, Robert found the strength, and you didn’t understand from what source, to write in his mind, tormented by years of physical torture, verses of Olympian gentleness, as if he were composing in an ivory tower:

It was snowing like a prelude to a grave symphony / Barely glimpsed at the first violins / It was snowing as if the apples had ascended to glory / And pitied the earth by sacrificing flowers….

… You rose suddenly and with a miserable laugh / You waved a hand so white towards the sky / That the snowflakes around you fell in grey…

One remembers that at the time, between two wheelbarrows and three strokes of the shovel, as others do in Paris between two coffees, it was still being discussed, very academically, that the symphony had no prelude, but anyway, the poetic licence has passed.

Robert also influenced Goma, because in his first novel, published after his release from prison, under the spell of the false nationalism into which he and others had fallen, he quotes him discreetly, as if by chance, in prose form, using a familiar quatrain:

And here we’ll build a cathedral / with saints thin and heavy with goodness / with faded gold, with equal marble / and half the masons will die.

His prophecy came true. The cathedrals of suffering, built of our blood and flesh, may have cost the lives of more than half the builders. But Robert, fortunately for Romanian culture, survived as much of it as is left.

(Daniel Philip – From the Land of Cain. Memories of the Personal Golgotha, Romanian Word Publishing House, Hamilton-Canada, 1996, pp. 110-112)