PANĂ, SAŞA

PANĂ, SAŞA (originally Alexander Binder; 1902–1981), Romanian poet and author. Born in Bucharest, Pană qualified as a physician and, while serving as an army medical officer, achieved a reputation as a writer. Generally considered the most fanatical propagator of avant-garde literary trends, he was the guiding spirit of the literary review Unu (1928–32), Romania's most important avant-garde magazine. Pană's blunt manifesto begins with the words: "Reader, disinfect your brains." His poems are notable for their scorn of literary conformism. He wrote essays and, after World War II, sketches and short stories inspired by army life mainly satirizing the behavior of officers. Pană also wrote some short plays and translations from Paul Eluard and ilarie voronca . Between 1926 and 1968 he published some 30 volumes. In the collection of verse entitled Pentru libertate ("For Freedom," 1945) there is a poem about the transportation of Romanian Jews to Transnistria and the crimes committed by the SS. Another volume on the same theme, Poeme fǎrǎ imaginaţie ("Poems without Imagination," 1948) was dedicated "to all the victims of the Nazi brutes… to Benjamin Fordane and Ilarie Voronca…" Pană edited Uliţa evreeascǎ ("The Jewish Street," 1946), a volume of reproductions of wood carvings by Aurel Mǎrculescu, and an album by the same author (1967) depicting scenes from life in the Transnistrian camps to which the artists had been transported. In 1969 Pană published an anthology of Romania's avant-garde literature (Anthologia literaturii românte de avangard). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Calinescu, Istoria Literaturii Române… (1941), 803, 922; L. Cristescu, in: Contemporanul (July 2, 1965). (Dora Litani-Littman)