Poetry. Gellu Naum is the sole surviving member of the Romanian Surrealists. If we can provisionally annex Surrealism to the avant-garde, he is also the last of the Romanian avant-garde, which flourished so intensely between the wars in journals such as Contemporanul, 75HP, Integral, and Unu -- James Bronk, translator. First published in Romania in 1972, MY TIRED FATHER is an autobiographical collage, an assisted cut-up. In words and diction lifted from old books and popular magazines, Naum demonstrates that desire is a constructive principle -- and that the spirit of Surrealism is not reducible to a period style or rhetoric.