ION POP
Abstract: The article reviews the way in which B. Fundoianu’s Romanian work, represented by merely three books – the “biblical parable” Tăgăduința lui Petru (Peter’s Denial) (1918), the collection of essays Imagini și cărți din Franța (Pictures and Books from France) (1922) and the volume of poems Priveliști (Landscapes) (1930), published seven years after the writer had settled in Paris for good – was received. Affected by the opinions expressed by the essayist in the preface to the 1922 book, where Fundoianu argued against the existence of an original Romanian literature, stating that it is but a “colony of the French literature”, the echoes of this remarkable volume prove, beyond the controversial reactions of its reviewers, lead by Eugen Lovinescu – the great “modernist” mentor of the age, the originality of its author, a great connoisseur and interpreter of contemporary French literature. One also records the interpretations to his poetry, apparently of a “traditional” rural and pastoral inspiration, setting them against a critical overview which places Fundoianu at the crossroads of the Romanian lyrical modernism, a personal synthesis in which Baudelaire’s aesthetics of the ugly and Rimbaud’s taste for adventure in Le bateau ivre, form a symbiosis with the exacerbated vitalism and the existential restlessness of the tense landscape of expressionist poetry. One does not overlook Arghezi’s lesson in poetic syntax or the dialogue with the symbolist-decadent poetry of George Bacovia.
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