“I admired and loved him in his threefold aspect of great poet, of a man of great distinction, and of an apostolic ‘holy unmercenary'”
I first met V. Voiculescu at the beginning of 1925, in the company of Ion Pillat, in a brasserie in the former capital. I was struck by his Byzantine holy figure, his slender hands with long fingers, like those of an icon, his soft and calm speech.
I saw him on many occasions afterwards, at the home of the author of “Limpezimilor”, whom he often visited, and at the editorial office of “Gândirea”, where he came to see Nichifor Crainic. We were not bound by a close friendship, but only by a good literary collegiality, the “Pârgăi” poet – always benevolent and attentive, showing me a great esteem since my very young lyrical experience (he was 21 years older than me).
He was Pillat’s most faithful friend, the two of them forming a soulful pair, a brotherhood reminiscent of Orestes and Pylade. I can still see him, slumped in an armchair in his dear friend’s office, restrained in his gestures and words, more dreamy and celestial than earthly, as if he were always talking to angels and cherubs. However, very human in his appearance, gentle and gentle, a doctor without any venality, similar to the biblical “doctors without silver”, Voiculescu always found opportunities to help the sick poor. He rushed to the bedsides of the sick wherever they called him, even giving them medicines from his own purse. A devout Orthodox Christian, he loved all living creatures, birds and animals, with a paradoxical Franciscan love. This Franciscanism is also evident in some of his own poetry, which combines his native Orthodox lyricism with the mystical poetry of Catholics Francis Jammes and Rainer Maria Rilke. It seems strange to me, however, that around 1930-1935 “Franciscanism” was even “fashionable” in the circles of some Bucharest writers, and was not limited to a simple literary attitude, but became a true religious cult of the “poor man of Assisi”, a veneration shared, among others, by Ion Marin Sadoveanu, who lit candles at the icon of the venerated saint in the city’s Catholic cathedral.
Voiculescu’s psychological structure was also curious, with its glaring contrasts. A fervent Christian, a refined intellectual, with a vast library in his head, he also indulged in superstition and magical practices, obsessed with popular myths, charms, a human and zoological universe endowed with miraculous powers. This strange development marked his life and his poetry. The man who was visited by angels and the poet who often cultivated a religious lyricism in enchanting “paintings” reminiscent of the naively graceful paintings of Fra Angelico, Giotto and Botticelli, had violent worldly impulses. Beneath his Christlike demeanour and genuine condescension, there was a faun-like sensuality that occasionally erupted in the verses of his collection ‘Destiny’ (1933), a prelude to the erotic sonnets that would appear later. Thus, from the womb of “The Dancer”, who “begins to pluck the air with her feet… a black dove waits to take flight”, or “on the lunette of Eve’s flesh you float towards the abyss”, contrasts of ethereal stanzas and images vibrate with sensuality. Tense flashes, erotic eruptions, followed by celestial sublimations, angelic purifications – as we discover them in Shakespeare’s Last Imaginary Sonnets, in Voiculescu’s “imaginary translation” – simultaneously and fully testify to his true nature. But we will not be too surprised by such a soulful composition if we recall Victor Hugo’s famous and eloquent line: “Un poete est un monde enfermée dans un homme”! A world of telluric temptations and greedy physical desires, alternating with another of sincerity and “ascent” to paradisiacal zones.
The seraphic and at the same time Dionysian poet Voiculescu did not limit himself to being a wonderful colleague, always kind and affectionate, but once, towards the end of the winter of 1932, when my little girl, barely a year old, had pneumonia, the good and generous doctor immediately responded to the request of the anxious parents and came to the bedside of the sick little girl. After the consultation, of course, I wanted to pay him his fee. Deeply offended, he threw the money on the table and said to me: “You are hurting my love as a man and as a Christian!”
The Gentle Samaritan, whose profession was to go around the villages and “love” the beggars and the needy, also wrote a book to popularise medicine, All the cures at hand (1935), another sign of his untiring dedication.
I admired and loved him in his threefold aspect of a great poet, a very special man and an apostolic “doctor without money”. I have read all his volumes of poetry, eagerly awaiting their publication, and I still know many of them by heart, such as “On the Danube” – a splendid resurrection of a secular and frustrated native landscape, from which I reproduce a few verses: “On the slope of the Danube, in the valley, / Among sad thickets of thistles, / A rafter with a matted cowl / Passes in a pool, swaying agilely, / … The man sits with an empty head and hand, / Stuck in the trunk of the cart; / And he sits with his jordans in his hand / He goes on and on, without limit. / Like a bear lying down he sleeps / On the four-skinned sheep’s bristles, / Only the wild goat watches over him, / Stuck with new brass / … “The green leaf, the thread of the pelinia / The little goatherd sings / And wakes, with him once sings the scyths / Who once walked the steppe like him!”.
Voiculescu’s poetry, varied and, I would say, contradictory in its themes, is surprising precisely because of the variety and renewal of the motifs it deals with. Vigorous and harsh verses evoke the wild or Carpathian landscape, next to the elemental vital energies of nature and the peasant, with ancestral echoes; Poems with stony expressions, carved as if from Dacian flint, suggesting a climate of rural primitivism, are followed by “poems with angels”, creating a picturesque and unusual world, a mixture of terrestrial paradise and rustic domestic realm, where angelic creatures, accustomed to the human environment, often lose their diaphanous naivety to become mere agricultural presences, performing hesiodic labours. Eroticism, then, is the third and most surprising aspect of Voiculescu’s lyricism, revealed above all in the last love sonnets published after his death.
Critics like Al. Piru, who saw in the author of “Urcuș” a quasi monocord poet, “essentially pictorial or narrative”, with the exception of the posthumous poems, were obviously mistaken. In fact, Voiculescu’s poetry is varied in terms of themes, from “Țara zimbrului” to “Pârgă”, from there to “Poeme cu îngeri” and from there to “Destin”, not to mention the excellent sonnets quoted and the richness of the lexicon, so original, refreshed not only with regional vocabulary but also with an archaic colour.
The last time I met my elderly and cheerful colleague at Ion Pillat’s house was at the beginning of February 1944. He was terrified by the news of military catastrophes and major social and political upheavals, and especially by uncertainty. We both felt a sad foreboding and we shook hands for a long time and looked into each other’s eyes as if we were saying goodbye forever. I was leaving for a bleak future, full of hatred and suffering, he was setting out to discover an unexpected lyricism and to deepen the Christian piety that was to be his supreme refuge…
Religious faith, which in the course of time had taken on a mystical pathos and almost reached a paroxysm in the poet’s old age, caused the gentle but overzealous Orthodox great difficulties. Having tried to initiate himself into the practice of asceticism and having frequented a circle of learned theologians,[1] the feverish Christian, who had known the pain of losing his wife, had to experience the bitterness of imprisonment. Several years of imprisonment were followed by weeks of misery and agonising illness, ending – the only consolation – in fervent prayer and death.
The great poet and Samaritan doctor died on 26 April 1963.
(Radu Gyr – My Calendar. Friends, Moments and Literary Attitudes, Ex Ponto Publishing House, 1996, pp. 149-151)
[1] It is about the spiritual movement “Burning Bush” of Antim.