Urmuz

Urmuz, pen name of Demetru Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău (March 17 1883, Curtea de Argeş-November 23 1923, Bucharest), was a Romanian writer of absurdist and avantgarde prose.

Biography

In his early youth, he dreamt to become a composer, he read science fiction and travel literature. He studied law and after he finished his degree, he became a judge in the Argeş and Tulcea Counties, as well as in Târgovişte. He took part in the Romanian military intervention in Bulgaria, during the Second Balkan War (1913), and afterwards became a court clerk at the High Court of Cassation and Justice in Bucharest.

He began writing only to entertain his brothers and sisters, by mimicking the clichés of contemporany prose. His texts were noticed by Tudor Arghezi, who was also the one to name hin Urmuz, and he was published in 1922, in two consecutive issues of the Cugetul românesc magazine - with his Pâlnia şi Stamate ("The Funnel and Stamate"), a short "anti-prose" which has the ironic subtitle "a novel in four-parts", which made a series of sophisticated puns using the double meanings of some words (such as: men that do not descend on the stairs, but from a monkey; a table with no feet - that is based on computations and probabilities; the walls that, according to Oriental customs, have cosmetics applied to them each morning or, alternatively, are measured with a compass, so they won't shrink randomly).

Perhaphs his best writing is Ismail şi Turnavitu ("Ismail and Turnavitu"), which can be seen as a precursory to the Theatre of the Absurd and Eugène Ionesco:

...Ismail is made up of eyes, whiskers and an evening gown, and nowadays he is in very short supply in the market... Ismail never walks alone. Yet one may find him at about half past five a.m., wandering in zigzag along Arionoaia Street, accompanied by a badger, to which is closely bound whit a ship's cable and which during the night he eats, raw and alive, having first pulled off its ears and squeezed a little lemon on it....

He commited suicide the following year, without giving any reason for his gesture. Apparently, he had intended to die originally, "without any cause".

His writings earned a postume glory. They had an important influence over subsequent Romanian avantgarde literature. Saşa Pană printed a collection of his works in 1930, and Geo Bogza published a magazine named after him. Eugène Ionesco continued exploring the literature of the absurd, considering Urmuz one of the forerunners of the "tragedy of the language".

Urmuz was closer to the spirit of Dada (although apparently he never heard of it), through his taste for the random creation of mechanic characters rather than a Surrealist opposition to lucidity.

Works

Pagini bizare

Pâlnia şi Stamate (Roman în patru părţi)
Ismail şi Turnavitu
Emil Gayk
Plecarea în străinătate
Cotadi şi Dragomir
Algazy & Grummer
După furtună

Posthumous

Cronicari
Fuchsiada
Puţină metafizică şi astronomie (Poem eroico-erotic şi muzical, în proză)

Translations