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ŞTEFAN MANASIA – the GUEST in EgoPHobia #16

Written by Revista EgoPHobia

[EgoPHobia #16, invitat]

He was born on 18 May 1977, in Ploiesti. In 2000 graduated the Faculty of Letters at Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca and during 2002-2003 taught Romanian in Calarasi village, Cluj district. Now he is editor of the cultural magazine Tribuna. His poetry and articles appeared in the magazines: Echinox, Tribuna, Familia, Vatra, Interval, Steaua, Paradigma, Ziua literară etc. He published the poetry volumes:  Amazon ( Tritonic Publishing House, 2003; Vinea Publishing House, 2005) and when You come. grunge  ethics (samizdat, 2006). Cartea Romaneasca Publishing House is about to publish The Book of the Small Invasions.

An interview with Stefan Manasia

by Ştefan Bolea

1.
You have published two poetry volumes:  Amazon ( Tritonic Publishing House, 2003; Vinea Publishing House, 2005) and when You come. grunge ethics (samizdat, 2006). Which were the public’s reactions about the two books? Would the second volume have only samizdat or it will be published by a publishing house?

Dear Stefan Bolea, Amazon’s history is not very simple. The book had to be published a year before, in 2002, at Aula Publishing House, but something determined the editor, Mr Musina to change his mind and maybe it was better this way. I had my first appearance at a technical publishing house, a pedagogical one, where me and Mihai Gotiu inaugurated a kind of poetry collection about which today I don’t know what happened to it. Because of the publishing house’s profile , Amazon remained for a while in semi-darkness, its most critical echoes beeing destinated only after the second edition printing, at Vinea in 2005, filled in with small poems written in the same epoch(1998-2002).
The notebook when You come. grunge  ethics appeared at Cristian’s initiative: 300 exemplaries delivered for free to a frills public and which, otherwise wouldn’t spent its money on poetry. 300 exemplaries of a book desired by us humble, grunge, consisting of a kind of  poetic stories( What’s the poem? A story, said Pavese), about extremely vulnerable persons, schizo etc.
The poems here can be find, among the others, in the given volume, in July, to Cartea Romaneasca Publishing House and which we baptised “The Book of the Small invasions”.
About the public’s reaction I have nothing to confess, in my entire life I don’t think that I have meditated longer than a few minutes about this thing. I write to satisfy my own tastes, pleasures, airy visions and if the poem reveals to be as reasonable as not to regret that I have wasted- writing it- a whole summer afternoon, a drink with friends, a film, than I’m satisfied.

2.
Claudiu Komartin notices in an original text of the 16th edition of EPH magazine:” I’m convinced that, in 20 years, the list of the important poets after the year 2000 could be untroubled opened with Stefan Manasia”. How do you see your role inside the 2000 year generation? Do the debates of this type  leave you unmoved or do you feel that you have somehow participated at the apparition of the new generation?

Let me start with the ending: postfestum debates about 2000ism still exist because of a few books( not all bad, not all great, printed from 1998 untill now) and because of a few chapters        ( more or less theoretical). Placed by the anthologists and other literary kibitzers in the Mendeleev’s Chart of the 2000 year people, I admit: it’s warm , convenient, it could be ok. But only a few of the year 2000’s authors are indeed original( or they appear as so). Among them is our  friend Claudiu Komartin, whose Papusar and other sleeplessneses, at his time, made me both scandalized and won over.
I couldn’t take a discussion about “my role inside the 2000 year generation” seriously without making my blood be up, and a solemn and dangerous guaran prepare, inside my brain, its tube reed and poisoned arrow……

3.
Would you prefer to be published in the textbooks? Which text would recommend you for this?

I believe poems like Ostroveni. Life And Its Contacts, The Cast Anchor, Amazon or Levitation could take part in any textbook. Of Failure. Of Nothingness.

4.
Which are your main  influences? Except from literature, what kind of films or type of music inspired you?

Among writers, the prosaists and essayists. Among cinema workers, the Italians, Northerns and East- Asiatics. A long and unpleasant string, where a “few” names are recurrent: Pasolini, O’Hara, Trotzig, Dawkins, Nabokov, Proust, Beckett, Junger, Kafka, Kis, Hrabal, Thomas Wolfe, Lowry, Joyce, but Truffaut, Bille August, Moodysson, Bergmann, Dagur Kari, Lars Von Trier, de Sica, Fellini, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Marco Ferreri, Asia Argento, Wong Kar Wai, Kim Ki Duk.

5.
You have graduated Faculty of Lettres with a research about M. Blecher. What is you connection with the talented morbid writer?

Max Blecher, whom I forbidden forgot, I add him now to the list. When I was 20, I wished to die at 29, like Blencher. After a productive aesthetical pain. But, I reached the age of 30 and I direct my steps, more and more reluctantly, like an diving A380 Airbus, towards the beautiful age of 31…. The saying: “ Some die when they want,/ others when the time comes;/ some die like Serghei,/the rest, like Isadora”(Serban Foarta) is getting far by me day by day.

6.

In a poem from Amazon, you fascinating deal with the theme of the spider. Lautreamont and Cărtărescu, just to name only two thematizations, have the same obssesion. Do you have something in common with the above mentioned writers? What’s your reaction when you find a spider inside your house?

I don’t think so. I howl my family not to damage its web nor to kill him on the walls.A month ago, a fat, little water spider made his net in the Ceratopteris bush inside my 360 L aquarium. I think he arrived with the residual water, by the infernal multitude of tubes, otherwise, I can’t explain.Who told him( perhaps Camelia) that on Tasnad lives a kind-hearted friend of spiders.

7.

During a special session of the 2005 Equinox, together with Rares Moldovan and Cosmin Perta, you have recited. What’s your opinion about these poets and their achievements?

You referr, of course, to Skycam and the Clay Sentinel, to whom it will be added Song for Maria. The Pyrotechnist’s Evening, by Rares Moldovan is one of the most beautiful poetry books printed after 1990. Unlooked through, it was injustly unincluded in tops and hierarchies, nor to say unread by some crtics. At Cluj, this book( printed by Paralela 45 in 2000), was falling like a fragment of a meteorite on the alcohol damaged minds, when not affected  by a perfectly useless, asexual, Sundy seraph. From Skycam, this year letter pressed Tzone, I gladly transcribe:” „«kill all hippies», without anger, I only quote/by the arm’s skin appear a blue notebook’s corners/ my guilt and lines/ when they will take somewhere, we will love you more/ I listen to the indemnities’ seller when says/« no one can gift mind»”(Indemnities’ Seller).
,        Perta was a strange appearance in the scenery of letters from Cluj: when he came down from his Maramures he already knew that he will become a poet. He was impressing like Yeti, like Big Foot. He ritualised, he was a kind of excessive ceremonial, he was getting angry, he was conciliating, sometimes he was writing poems like these ones( which are still dear to me even now):” From the great whirling of the green waters/ we will fill our inkpots/ and will poultice our splitted and bare legs with leaves / of marjoram and plantain// In the solid bones room, a dry eye like a lion claw watches resigned on the cornered and wrinkled ceiling”( The Clay Sentinel).

8.
In  the picture from Collocutional Notebooks of the Young Poets from 2007, you were pictured beside a cat. Once, in Bulgakov( after Daniel Sur’s volume), you have horrified me in a nihilist way, arrogantly declaring that you have taken to a second-hand bookshop an entire collenction of St Augustin just to get a new kind of filter to your acquarium. What’s your relationship with pets? Have you ever militated in the favour of animals’ rights?

I have taken indeed three volumes of a translation of St Augustin to a second-hand bookshop, but I would never separate myself of Lausian History, Russian Pilgrim or Egyptean Lives of the Fathers. In the same way I have liquidated a Borges collection, just to increase another, Nabokov. I have to admitt that I am an acquarian fisher with vague theological inclinations.
The cat’s name-the one from the picture- is Grisa and lives in a village from Muscel. At Cluj, worse than a shaddow, escorts me through the house, Csilla.

9.
In Amazon, the childhood( and the yearning after its lost) it’s a strong theme. Did you have a beautiful childhood, let’s say like Cioran’s?

Beautiful? I have no idea. Obssessive, maybe, unintelligible, violent, passionate, ecstatic, unverisimilar, bookish, genuine, sport, disturbing, attical, awkward: that’s it, I have finished my enumeration and now I let you answer this question- if you can and if you are in the mood.

10.
“ But your soul is an old Mesopotamiam temple”. Are you a Starcraft fan?

Nope. I am not as patient as to initiate myself in computer games.

11.
Since 2003 you are the editor of the Tribuna magazine. What do you actually do ? Is this a satisfactory job?

It’s a job for living. The sallary is bad but the job leaves me enough spare time for reading and gardening, for roaming about and watching movies etc. The males of my family don’t have practical tastes. I have the satisfaction of publishing a few special, thematical,editions, dedicated to the young literature, to poetry, to some eccentric and extremely original authors like Serban Foarta and Attila Bartis.

12.
One of your poems, „Running through Manastur after money” impressed me. Did you live in the great communist district? Did the living there inspire you?

„running through Manastur after money after /an old carpet beater / dressed with my plaster stone stained trousers/ which you try to hide in vain „.
I have lived, I still live and I will probably let my bones in Manastur :). Manastur, the district anti but also pro- communist of Cluj, is L shaped, surrounded by forested hills, winded by paths crowded in the morning by the city’s old pensioners. Blocks of bedroom-districts, houses and huts. Not so many greens, curtailed parks by the mayor’s Bocanila arm. „Bucium” Restaurant, known as „Bastardul”.”Hit-Făget” platform. The repugnant cementery like a wide-opened cetacean’s mouth, , loaded with whaleboned. Ladies. Illiterate kids. Bla-bla, bla-bla.
Manastur, of course sustains my erection and inspiration, chronical bronchitis and apotheosis.

13.
Which is your main motivation when you’re writing? Eternal glory or the disgust against another existance which you have to double to infringe?

I think I have already answered to question number 1. I add: I write and because I try to prove myself that I’m not a looser. I sometimes succeed.

14.
You have worked as a teacher of Romanian in the countryside. Did you consider yourself as a kafkanian victim of the system or rather like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds? Did you try to inspire to the young the trust in poetry?

I started as a Michelle Pfeiffer’s type  of teacher and I ended like the poor arpentage, not knowing how to deal with it. For the time I have taught in Calarasi-Turda, I succeeded in taming an owl, which I have called Curti. That was the most difficult break-up I have ever lived until now, ended with tears, vodka, tender words, screamings, promises.

15.
What’s your relationship with the internet? Do you already have or wish to have a site or a blog? What’s your opinion about the disputes about on paper publishing vs online publishing?

I am an eager internet reader. I initiate myself, again, in the blogospere’s technics and strategies and fight for survival. I don’t have a blog nor a site yet. I hesitate because the most precious thing in the world is my/your time.

A few words about Manasia’s Amazon

by Claudiu Komartin

„Manasia’s Amazon, an impressive poem, emanating the distinction and the calm force of a great predator, woke up, I believe, most of those still dizzy by the difficult to breath scents of the early century’s vary dirts, convincing them that the best poetry still continues to be written in a way which never ages, in the crucible of unintimidated imaginary by the suite of fashionable images and obsessions, being tempted of the daily occurences, the metaphisical and flashy reality, but also of the secret bookish rustle of the predecessors. I wait excited the second book of this enigmatic and always master of himself poet, convinced of the fact that this will be a confirmation on the same measure of his exceptional talent. I am certain that, in 20 years, the list of the important poets after the year 2000 could easily be opened with  Stefan Manasia.

[published originally in Romanian, translated by Aida Mihai]

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