MARTANOVSCHI LUDMILA - ‘The I Embodied from Somebody Else’ – place and Memory in Ioan Flora’s Poetry
(pag. 67-72)
Ioan Flora (1950-2005) comes from the Serbian Banat, a region which shapes his poetry and makes him generate themes and techniques along and against the mainstream culture. This multicultural region becomes poetic matter in his texts as geographical references are recurrent throughout Flora’s work. Another interest here is to analyze the ways in which the poet, a major representative of the postmodern canon, dwells on memory and uses irony to rewrite landmarks in Romanian literature such as Bolintineanu in the bilingual volume Cincizeci de romane şi alte utopii / Fifty Novels and Other Utopias (1996). The text quoted in the title of the present study, “Din altcineva se întrupează Eu” / “The I Embodied from Somebody Else”, included in the bilingual volume Medeea şi maşinile ei de război / Medea and Her War Machines (2002), concentrates on a third person figure who seems to be intent on otherness while scrutinizing his own self. Identity is shaped from a permanent relation to previous authors who have to be integrated into a sense of one’s own place in the history of the Romanian literature.