Bulfinch's Mythology

"As a boy, I spent some summers in the Carpathian mountains, where I heard stories from shepherds. When I read a children’s version of Bulfinch’s , I recognised some of the stories, and realised that there existed an underground world where supernatural beings and humans did strange things with adventurous consequences. The human body I dragged to school every day in a drab uniform was only the flesh tip of a universe parallel to ours, where gods, animals and superhumans played inexhaustible games. I suspected that this secret underground – which I could go to whenever I felt like it – actually held together the drab world of school and our boring society, as a kind of mask in order to hide itself from the police. Bulfinch’s was dangerous because it told everybody about this world. Luckily, everyone condescended to it as being “unreal”, just “fantasy”. I knew better. “TS Eliot was a banker, and wrote like one.” When I read the original in English, at 25, I was amazed by the beauty of the language, and the storyteller’s unrelenting fascination with the stories he has collected. I can still open it anywhere, start reading, and not stop for hours. He was just like me in Romania. But thanks to his other life, I didn’t have to go work in a bank when I grew up. Oh, no, the black-listed poets did. When I was 16, the best poets of pre-war Romania – Lucian Blaga and Tristan Tzara, to name two – were forbidden reading. Writing poetry was a dangerous profession, like being a burglar. I felt doomed, alien and angry, and poetry seemed like the perfect way to go out in flames. While my two girlfriends – Aurelia, who didn’t, and Marinella, who did – watched in speechless admiration. Then I found out that I was good at poetry , because the cultural police questioned me. I felt like Arthur Rimbaud, Queen of the Damned. Then even Aurelia started doing it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Things like Bulfinch were extra-curricular reading. When I was a teenage poet, the only prose I deigned to look at was fairy tales – especially bloody ones, with cannibalism involved if possible. Happily, there are a lot of fairy tales with cannibalism, necrophilia and alienated heroes. I do think that some writers who lead double lives are inspiring, though. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for one, wrote normal stories for family magazines and weird ones for his friends. Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company in the day, and wrote poetry at night. And then there are writers whose double lives are both boring. TS Eliot was a banker, and wrote like one. Philosophically, I mean. If he’d written memos like his poems he’d have been let go. I never wanted to be anything but a writer, so I was willing to stay poor – which I did, forever."