The criterion of original nationality is hardly relevant in literary history. It is not always marked — thus for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "citizen of Geneva" of whom one is not aware that he never took French nationality — and it is not necessarily operative since it is not the passport that determines the originality or value of a writer. In most cases, it is difficult to determine what belongs specifically to the culture of origin and what belongs to universal culture. Finally, the acuity of vision, sensitivity, openness to others, intellectual reflection have more importance than a birth certificate. If language is an important marker, it cannot suffice for literary analysis. Under these conditions, one must ask whether it is appropriate to make a special case of writers whose only particularity is to have been born in the Carpatho-Balkan space. I would tend to answer in the negative. In truth, the question raised is of a cultural nature. Certain authors, whatever the language in which they express themselves, deal with a specifically Moldo-Wallachian civilization: one will then speak of Romanians of French expression, like Panaït Istrati. At the other extreme, some have completely merged into French culture, so that their country of origin is mentioned only for the record, to explain certain reactions of chauvinistic public opinion, as was the case with Tristan Tzara. Between these two extremes, the modalities of insertion into our cultural heritage are so diverse that one allows oneself to classify them into three categories: transfer, reviviscence, intrication, these three aspects of the contribution of Romanian writers being able to coexist in the same work.

TRANSFER

Most of the writers to whom I refer exiled themselves to Paris, where they thought they would find a terrain commensurate with their creative energy. But they were not born to literature in France, they accomplished themselves there. What did they bring in their cardboard suitcase? What did they go towards? This is what I would like to show through three successive aspects of the transfer phenomenon: adjunction, grafting, explosion. The Romanian poems of Fondane and Sernet had, it seems to me, a pronounced symbolist character. On the other hand, when he arrived in Zurich, Tzara contributed to the publication of the very modernist Cabaret Voltaire (1916) by exhibiting a 1913 poem "translated from Romanian": "Evening," of which here is the beginning:

The fishermen return with the stars of the waters they share bread with the poor stringing necklaces on the blind the emperors go out in the parks at this hour which resembles the bitterness of engravings (1)

A certain symbolist sweetness is transformed by explosive images that become as many scandals for poetic tradition. This is not yet Dadaist subversion, but already something is emerging, to which the reader of the time was not prepared. A similar tone is found, a few years later, when Ilarie Voronca has Ulysses in the City (1933) translated by Roger Vailland:

The funicular of days raises blood in the sand Each word brings its season its climate The adventures the wool sweaters slide in the window On the walls the night watches you jumps at your neck. (2)

It is an already made poet who speaks, assured of his means, conscious of being able to bring something new. The theme of Ulysses' travels allows a construction of the collection by accumulation, particularly adapted to the successive exiles of Voronca, Fondane, Sernet, who found there a substitute for the wandering Jew. The myth of Ahasverus, like that of Ulysses, is indeed the symbol of an original poetic saying, nourished by personal experience, which came to graft itself onto French poetry, bringing it not a national, folkloric, populist vein, but rather an international dimension, new concerns, what I would willingly call the humanism of difficult times. A poem by Fondane, "The Exodus," illustrates this perfectly:

It is to you that I speak, men of the antipodes, I speak man to man, with the little in me that remains of man, with the little voice that remains in my throat, my blood is on the roads, may it not cry for vengeance (3)!...

Later, an untitled poem by Claude Sernet confirms that the Romanian graft has definitively taken on the French trunk, to give fruits of an unknown flavor:

It came to me suddenly, like a love (or almost) A great desire, a great need to break To break with my name, to break with myself With my life to days often lived in advance With the world around me that defies me Its blind order and its deceptive rigor (4)...

This refusal of stability is undoubtedly a constant of this group of poets, so little gathered and yet strangely similar. Perhaps because voluntary exiles, having certain nostalgias in their hearts, a permanent dissatisfaction, they embody rupture. Rupture, explosion, this is the whole problematic of Dada that Tzara poses to us when he launches his poems and manifestos in the face of Europe. Does he proceed to the destruction of literary codes because he is a foreigner? Is he iconoclastic to the extent that he is not affectively attached to French, which is not his mother tongue? It has often been claimed. I am not convinced of this, believing rather in the virtue of cultural mixing. Not having the same relationship to language as a Frenchman by birth, he perceives better and differently its various faculties: rhythms, word games... His attitude proceeds from astonishment, from naive manipulation. So that two melodic lines alternate and oppose each other in a poem like "the great lament of my obscurity I": one relating to the abstract-universal, the other to the sentimental-personal (5). The result was a powerful shock on contemporary young poets, which seems to me to be the fundamental reason for the Dadaist empire, beyond a necessarily ephemeral scandal. And it is from there that, in France, the entire modern movement emerged, much more than from futurist words in freedom.

REVIVISCENCE

To transfer, giving rise to an entire literature, can be added another mode of action of Romanian literature on French literature, it is reviviscence. I use this term from Bergsonian vocabulary deliberately to qualify this return to life of certain Romanian cultural traits. Most of them, once settled in Paris, apparently forgot their native land, or maintained only private relations with their former compatriots. Not out of ingratitude on the part of the poets, but because they now belonged to the active movement of the avant-garde, because they were in full poetic effervescence and that, seen from Paris, their initial experiments, their boldness seemed timid to them. It is appropriate to seriously nuance such a picture: exploring Tzara's correspondence with his Romanian friends, I was able to show (6) how frequent and precise the relations between the two poetic avant-gardes were, to the point that one can say, not without provocation, that Tzara had remained a beacon for Romanian poetry until 1939. From this angle of reviviscence, I will take two extreme examples. First that of Panaït Istrati, this "Balkan Gorki" according to Romain Rolland's expression, his godfather in letters, who pushed him to become a Romanian writer of French language. The tales of Adrien Zograffi appear to us as an epic of the peoples occupying the Danube delta. It reveals to the French reader the simple, natural, vigorous and sometimes violent customs of mixed populations freeing themselves from the Ottoman yoke. It sings the virtues and defects of perfectly typed heroes who identify and merge with their land that saw them born. Moreover: Panaït Istrati does not content himself with bringing to an anemic genre, entangled in the meanders of psychology, the ardor of his vividly conducted tales, the warmth of the distant lands where they take place. Surface exoticism is submerged by the humanity of his creatures, by the very vivid feeling one has of their concrete existence. I do not want to know if what Panaït Istrati tells, he truly lived or saw with his own eyes. What matters is that in writing he acts as if he were reliving — is he not a miracle of life, saved by writing — and that in reading I am in the condition of a real witness. For Istrati, intertwining fiction and lived testimony, referring, in his tales, from one genre to another, manages to make me believe in the authenticity of what he tells. What is more moving than these Last Words thrown like a bottle in the sea to Romain Rolland, and which almost remained the ultimate words written in French?

Today begins the year 1921, but for others. For me, it is the beginning of the end. Is there any need to explain oneself when one decides to leave this world? No, one can leave in silence, and that would be, I believe, the best proof of sincerity. But for those of my friends who will think, perhaps, that it was because of some material difficulties that I committed this desperate act, I beg them to be reassured. I have much more serious reasons, and the strongest of all is the failure of friendship, of their own friendship! They did not feel it to the point of sacrificing their pride and their interest to it, and it is only from this side that friendship is a noble sentiment, for he who believes that friendship costs nothing has only to look at what it costs me: life! The rest will never be known (7) !

This ultimate call to put words in accord with deeds evokes rather the wanderings of this eternal wanderer, and his encounters in Egypt, than the Romanian individuals who will be the material of his work. But all this is nourished, one feels it well, by all his happiness and his sufferings since childhood in Braïla, as during an accident one replays the whole film of one's life. In the same way, at the moment of making a grave decision (the publication of Towards the Other Flame), he hesitates and projects a new cycle, entitled "The Seekers of Faith" where he begins by remembering his first job, at the Braïla Docks — and the effect that the first mechanization produced on the life of the laborers:

One day of this early autumn, — at the time of the great grain arrivals which constitute the hope of all the working population, — terrible news crossed the city with the speed of lightning: – Two floating elevators have arrived in front of the Galatz landing stage! In less than an hour, the suburbs emptied of all they contained as souls. Dogs, cats and even pigs, having never seen such an exodus, had followed their masters, barking, meowing, grunting. The port square, in front of the landing stage, being only a multicolored human ocean, howling, swearing, cursing, crying. Women were tearing their hair. Men were shuttling between bistros and quays, knife in hand, and drunk with rage more than with brandy. (8)

Perhaps one should be more precise, show what Istrati's language, despite some scoriae, has brought to our literary practice, to narrative art. It remains that Romain Rolland had seen correctly: the Istrati expression defended itself. I am convinced that the rewritings of Jean-Richard Bloch, Henri Poulaille, Jacques Robertfrance, moreover minimal, were sufficient to put the text on a par with the taste of the time. They had no other literary necessity: the proof is that the original text, published without retouching today, suits us perfectly. If Romania is always present, in one way or another, in the author of The Thistles of the Baragan, one tends to forget the part that belongs to it in the formation of Eugène Ionesco. I am not speaking here of works written and published in Romania, nor of his literary polemics with Romanian critics, which quite prefigure those he will maintain in France with Brechtians and other theater theorists. It would be useful to see a little more closely the role that these first experiences played in his work. For example, it seems impossible to me to detach Rhinoceros from its Romanian context, according to Ionesco himself. I believe that one is wrong, in commenting on this play of universal scope, not to return to the author's indications on the Romanian atmosphere before the Second World War, the pervasiveness of fascism, the domination of the Iron Guard. In doing so, one understands the play better. Rhinoceros is, in my eyes, the best analysis of the totalitarian process, from an intimately perceived experience, and in a dramatic language adapted to our time, refusing the facilities of a moral lesson. But this reviviscence of the Romanian past, Ionesco never ceases to call it openly in his essays, his tales and his dramas. Again, I will take only one brief example; in the last volume published of the Theater: Journey to the Dead.

JEAN

I am now older than you. Yet when I see you, face to face with you, I am always the unhappy child that you oppressed, that you beat. You insulted me because of my mother who had done you no harm and whom you had abandoned. Fortunately I was able to flee from your house at seventeen. What would a father like you have brought me, who beat his servants? Yet, it is true that you sometimes had vague impulses of tenderness for me, or pride when I had social successes. When politics made me a pariah, the ignoble politics of your country, you also made me a pariah. You did not resist the approval or disapproval of society, your society. But you see, I have defeated you. Because I had the luck and courage to never obey you. One cannot say that you did not succeed in obscurity. You were the favorite of the Freemasons, the democrats, the left, the right, the Nazi governments, the iron guard, then the communist regime.

THE FATHER.

I was wise, and modest (9).

This play has such an autobiographical character that it has been reproached for being neither theater nor literature. It is true that the obsession with the father is such, in this writer, that he seems never to have dominated his initial complex. Beyond a strictly intimate evocation, it is the whole relationship with pre-war Romania that returns here, manifesting as clearly as possible the return of the repressed. One will perhaps find this reviviscence trying, to the extent that it entails the eternal conflict of generations, and recalls a fortunately bygone time. I will allege another, emanating from a still young poet and very close, at the time of writing, to the surrealist movement. Tzara never renounced the forests of Transylvania that cradled his vacations. Without naming them, he refers to them many times:

already the day is caught in the rolling mill of cruel lace the saline crib in the heart of the earth tears the prey of dreamed angers at the step of the strong man and the bark of the first trees appeared in the relaxation of the lake (10).

As one might suspect, nothing in this sylvan poem would refer us to Romania if we did not know the author's origins, and if he had not himself borne witness to this subject. It remains that our three writers could not free themselves from obsessive images that marked their childhood and youth, memorable forests for Tzara, politico-paternal conflict for Ionesco, trials of work and industrialization for Istrati.

INTRICATION

There comes a moment when the primary experience of these authors is so intimately mixed with the French literary adventure that one cannot distinguish the part of the country of origin. Moreover: the work no longer has any national mark. It becomes universal and belongs to the heritage of humanity. It is in this sense that one can, rightly, speak of the contribution of Romanian writers to French literature. For, without them, would it have the same accent of universality? Imagining, by a sort of poetic intuition, anthropogenesis, Tzara describes the emergence of the individual, born from chaos:

approximate man like me reader and like the others mass of noisy flesh and echoes of consciousness complete in the only piece of will your name transportable and assimilable polished by the docile inflections of women diverse misunderstood according to the voluptuousness of currents interrogators approximate man moving in the approximations of destiny with a heart like a suitcase and a waltz in place of head steam on the cold ice you prevent yourself from seeing yourself great and insignificant among the jewels of hoarfrost of the landscape (11).

The general scope of this approximation will not escape anyone. In a more concrete way, Panaït Istrati is well aware of fighting in person for the defense of universal values when, after a long internal debate, he decides to publish Towards the Other Flame (1929) despite the use (which he foresees) that will be made of his remarks, despite the pressures he undergoes and the scruple he feels in criticizing a country that has generously welcomed him, but which he went to visit at his own expense. His illusions of the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution fall. He has the courage to say, the first, in the name of morality, justice and true humanity, that this immense hope is disfigured by the scoundrel:

Well, I separate from my communist friends, even in what makes their pride, in Russia: the building of socialism. It is sad, for our old friendship, but it is so. I do not discuss this building and I admit that it is socialist, even though it is only a question of "model" enterprises that function badly and will continue to function badly, as long as they are directed by incapable communists (12)...

How much time would have been gained, how many deaths would have been spared if he had been listened to a little instead of being slandered and soiled? Why was his spontaneous testimony not confronted with that of Gide, a few years later? In human terms, too human, he posed the only essential problem, that of the inscription of theory in practice. Of equally general scope will be, to finish, this poem on the evil of being, on this permanent scandal that pursues us from our birth, inscribed in us as a twin.

Such day, such hour — at what moment of what year Of what abyss and what disorder in sum Was born this other in me that I cannot know Who pursues me, who rejoins me, who surpasses me Who resembles me being (who not being bridles me) This other in me, severe or worse To whom I speak And who is me only to be silent And to wait for me and assault me? (13)

The voices here summoned are too diverse, too personal, and express themselves in genres and registers too different for one to be able to characterize them with a single trait and recognize each time the mark of their origin. The fact that these writers are so original is the sign of their greatness, of the variety of their inspiration, of their will to move forward, of their refusal of conventional formulas. Thus their contribution to our literature is both considerable and inappreciable. These authors do not all belong to the same generation. Yet all obstinately explore the territories of goodness, an enormous country, expressing together a radical anxiety, an anguish of living that will make them draw up the most absolute indictment I know against death, to which they oppose, tirelessly, human values. But perhaps one could say this of all the dear beings that life exiled? perhaps is it the virtue proper to poets? Ilarie Voronca was not far from making it the very object of poetry:

Poems are the seven-league boots That carry me from the polar circle to the warm tropics And from these verses as in a botanist's box Neighbor the herbs of so many distances (...)

It takes only one verse to cross the four seasons It takes only one step and the poem separates the continents (14)

I dare to believe that this rapid journey will have contributed to the rapprochement of two literatures that have never ceased to unite across space. Henri BÉHAR

1. Tristan Tzara, "Evening" in Complete Works, Flammarion, vol. I, 1975, p. 195.
2. Ilarie Voronca, Ulysses in the City, translated from Romanian by Roger Vailland, Ed. Sagittaire, 1983, p. 45.
3. B. Fundoianu, Poezii, Editura Minerva, Bucuresti, 1983, vol. I, p. 142.
4. Claude Sernet, poem dated December 30, 1967, in Michel Gourdet, Claude Sernet, text selection established by Denys-Paul Bouloc, Ed. Subervie, 1981, p. 74.
5. See "the great lament of my obscurity" in Tzara, Complete Works, vol. I, pp. 90-91.
6. See Henri Béhar, "Tristan Tzara and his Romanian contemporaries", Manuscriptum, 1981, n° 2 to 1982, n° 4.
7. Panaït Istrati, "Last Words", in The Pilgrim of the Heart, Ed. established and presented by Alexandre Talex, Gallimard, 1984, p. 93.
8. Panaït Istrati, ibid., p. 55.
9. Eugène Ionesco, Journeys to the Dead, Gallimard, 1981, p. 28.
10. Tristan Tzara, "The Forests of Memory", Midis Gagnés, Complete Works, vol. III, p. 263.
11. Tristan Tzara, "The Approximate Man", in Complete Works, vol. I, p.
12. Panaït Istrati, "Towards the Other Flame", U. G. E., 10x18, 1980, p. 33.
13. Claude Sernet, "Variants II", in The Next Stage, Seghers, 1964, p. 68.
14. Ilarie Voronca, "The Seven-League Boots", in Poems Among Men", Ed. du Journal des poètes, 1934, p. 39.