La « semence incendiaire » d’une parole nouvelle: Plămânul sălbatec de Paul Păun

“Le temps viendra où tous sera or et amour. Car toute transmutation est possible, là où ne sont que les cases d’un seul air...”, wrote Paul Păun in Les esprits animaux (1947). The two lengthy poems published in Romania, Plămânul sălbatec (1939) and Marea Palidă (1945), represents a high witness for this possibility of transmutation. They are secretly magnetized by “the manifested beauty of the dream”, but also by the alchemic decantation of the images and their metamorphic aspects. This paper is a fragment of a more extended research about Paul Păun’s poetical works15, still little known in Romania and abroad, and it is focused on the first poem Plămânul sălbatec, published in book in 1939. Even though in Plămânul sălbatec Păun did not apply deliberately and consciously surrealist strategies, the fragmentary delirium of this poem seems to be founded, in part, on automatism and on hasard objectif. His images are intended to transfigure reality, revealing, at the same time, these qualities of the unconscious that the poet defined as “cryptesthésiques”. The images become then a means to understand a complex reality, revealing also the desire of renewing the world through the power of dreams. Plămânul sălbatec, always suspended between the elementary poetry of the “immediate life” and the vertigo of the encrypted and abysmal “word”, represents a good illustration of “total poetry”, where action and dream, the ideological level and the poetological one overlap simultaneously. 15