Call me Yigru

Hello there, fellow Steemit users...

Most people know me as Yigru Zeltil. It's a pen name that made some believe I must come from Turkey or from an African country (the name Yigru, I would later find out by googling, may be encountered in Ethiopia).

In fact, it's merely the product of a Surrealist game. I am Romanian (although I may have Turk or Tatar blood myself) and my legal name is very common among Romanians. But I was born and raised in Constantza, a city on the coast of the Black Sea, in a region of Romania that was occupied by the Ottoman Empire for about four centuries - Dobruja. It's (or used to be) a cultural and ethnic mosaic full of contrasts, just as I am myself a bundle of contradictions.

I come from a modest family, but my father worked (and still works) in IT, so I spent my childhood as a total nerd, in front of the PC and TV... Literature didn't grab me until my teens - encyclopedias, atlases, newspapers, specialized mags were all much more appealing to my aspie mind. But I was only a reader, while getting into literature made me a lot more than that...

To skip details (as I could write an entire book right here), let me press fast forward to what I do now (things which will artificially be divided in categories, for the sake of clarity):

• literary stuff. I have been writing poetry constantly for the last 10 years - from lyrical poems to experiments in conceptual or sound poetry, with various influences from the historical avant-garde and from contemporary authors.
  Aside my texts and performances, some people know me more for my reviews or for my online activity and projects (including one in which I am indexing each poetry book released in Romania every year).
  My only 'international' project so far is A Bibliography of Conceptual Writing, an attempt to bring together as many books as possible that may be considered conceptual writings.
  I am also working on translations of North American and Brazilian/Portuguese modern and contemporary poets, including a Romanian version of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons...

• visual arts. After having contributed for a few years to the database of the site now known as WikiArt, I received a couple of years ago the invitation to write for an on-line paper on local exhibitions. The articles - reasoned critiques of the provincial scenes and its conservative mores - attracted the attention of many people, including one of the editors of Revista ARTA, to which I now contribute when I can.
  As an art critic, I am still searching my way. One of my working projects is a kind of history of minimalism across arts, disciplines.

• music. I've been writing reviews casually for many years, as someone who always wanted and never committed to actually making music. There's just so much great music to explore!
  Recently, I've been asked to write a few words for the cassette release of a new album by Somnoroase Păsărele, an experimental music project including Gili Mocanu (who is also one of my favorite painters and poets, and not because we both live in Constantza). There are also a few other bands who appreciated/quoted my reviews over the years.

So these are some of the things I do, that more or less define me. I am even more complex (which sometimes can be quite a burden!) than that and I get sometimes stereotyped solely because most other people get to know few sides of me.

To end on a more humorous note... I do enjoy cats and cakes! You see, no matter how alien I may seem to you, we may still have something in common!... Oh wait, you are a dog person? You don't like chocolate?! Hm... okay. What about sunsets?