Poezii by Eugen Jebeleanu

“Cele mai frumoase poezii”
[Poems. “The most beautiful poems”] Portrait: Fl. Cordescu.
[Bucharest], 1959. Editura Tineretului. 192 [4] p. First edition.
Publishing full cloth binding, paper dust jacket. Geza Hegedus for autographed book.

Geza Hegedus (1912 – 1999), Hungarian writer, journalist, poet and theater writer, critic, professor.

Eugen Jebeleanu (1911 – 1991), Romanian poet.

After World War II, he solidly supported the new Communist leadership and ardently promoted socialist realism. Most of his postwar poetry deals with the struggle against fascism, the Romanian revolutionary tradition going back to 1848, and championing the new regime’s ideology.

Jebeleanu first achieved international recognition with his collection of humanitarian poems about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: Surîsul Hiroşimei (“The Smile of Hiroshima”, 1958) (149-th p.) In the 1970s, the Romanian Academy, of which he was a member, nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Although initially a supporter of the regime, he expressed alarm after the July Theses were issued in 1971, and, considered one of the leaders of the liberal wing of the Writers’ Union of Romania, was dropped from the Romanian Communist Party’s central committee at its 13th Congress in 1984.

Jebeleanu translated poetry from six languages, including Hungarian (Petőfi), Turkish, French (Hugo) and German (Rilke). Three poems of his appeared in English in a 1969 anthology, and five more in 1985. In 2007, his last collection of poems, Armă secretă (“Secret Weapon”, 1980), appeared in English, the first full volume of his work to do so. His son Tudor is a graphic artist. He and his wife Florica (née Cordescu), a painter who died in 1965, also had a daughter, Florica.