Before becoming the most important Romanian novelist of his generation, Mircea Cărtărescu wrote poetry influenced by the “hallucinatory imagery” of Allen Ginsberg and distinguished by its Beat sensibility and humor. Cărtărescu was in his twenties in the ’80s, and his word-slinging poems, with references to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, remain subversive gestures under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauș “The West opened my eyes.” A young man “overwhelmed by loneliness,” charged with erotic, urban energy, and besotted with Natalie Wood, he observed the anonymous women on bicycles and at tram stops with “my hundred thousand eyes, crematoria windows of sparks, [which] set the fir trees ablaze and leave the mountainbald.” Brimming with adolescent yearning, self-consciously “complicated,” and unwilling to silence themselves, Cărtărescu’s poems convey the nervous vibrancy of the younger generation living immediately before and after the fall of communism.
