"The Manifest Beauty of Dreams": the Surrealist Imaginary in Paul Păun's Marea Palidă

«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 works , still little known in Romania and abroad, and it is focused on the second poem Marea palidă, published in book in 1945. In Marea Palidă Paul Păun apply deliberately and consciously surrealist strategies, the fragmentary delirium of this poem seems to be founded 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. In my analyse I will focus on the following topics: the lethal waters, the solitary voyage and the magical-ritual word, the poetics of dangerous spaces, the feminine constellations, the Eros and the metamorphose of desire, the flud rhytm and the hypnagogic rhetoric.