Who is Mihai Eminescu? Any Romanian will
answer, without a moment's thinking: Our national poet. In
other words, a superlative expression of ethnical sensibility, a voice
authorized and competent to represent the Romanian nation in mankind's concert,
the axiological synthesis of the historical moment, one of the greatest lyrical
poets of world literature, comparable - in
his uniqueness - with Byron, Hugo, Holderlin, Leopardi, Lermontov, Petofi, Mickiewicz, therefore with the luminaries of European
Romanticism. A revolutionary poet in terms of attitude, of modality, of
metaphorical approach and manner, of background and outlook, of trailblazing, a
man of his own times, actively present in the immediacy of the "there and
then", divining the valences of the primordial, envisaging perspectives
and acquiring an unmistakable timbre for his voice. The voice of a poet whose
life-span only lasted 39 years (1850-1889), whose creative manifestation ended
at 33 years - the moment when his only volume printed
during his life-time appeared - yet bequeathing to posterity
an inestimable treasure of verse, of rough versions and variants - illustrative
in themselves, on the scale of the idea of a model. A model in which Romanian
neo-romantics as well as neo-classics, symbolists as well as avant-garde poets,
found their parent. In fact this holds good for the entire Romanian poetry of
the 20th century. Lucian Blaga and George Bacovia, Tudor Arghezi and Ion
Pillat, Alexandru Philippide and Mihai Beniuc, Emil Botta as well as Geo Bogza
and Nichita Stanescu no less than loan Alexandru, very much as countless other
poets. Each of them particularizing a certain colour of Eminescu's spectrum,
one of his options in point of themes, one or another of his existential
queries, one area of the universe which he investigated gnoseologically. Each
of them claiming descendence from Eminescu in point of problems tackled. From
Him seen as a Demiurge. Criss-crossing the continent of the human soul,
distilling so many faces of virtuality, revealing the antitheses of dialectics
from the angles of ethics and beauty, of the real and the ideal, of the
extremes ("angel and demon", "Venus and Madonna",
"emperor and proletarian"), but also of emotional reconciliations. An
Eminescu springing from the landscapes of Bukovina in northern Romania, a
traveller through the landscapes of Transylvania in western Romania, a student
who attended courses at the universities of Vienna and Berlin, who eventually
settled in Bucharest, summating life's essential experiences. Experiences also
conjugating employments such as that of a prompter for theatrical companies, a
librarian at Jassy University, a school-inspector, a journalist. In this last
capacity he ranked among the most representative Romanian journalists - a term of
reference to this very day. Through the passion with which he lived his ideas,
through the polemic verve of expression and the deep political involvement of
each gesture. An evolutionist in his outlook, he also shared a strong feeling
of tradition and of the national model; a great patriot, he militated for the
achievement of the unitary and sovereign Romanian state, conceived by analogy
with the life of bees, as a state of the working people - of the "positive
classes" - without stratification and without any servitude on a foreign
plane; a moralist, he shared the worship of values, within a context in which
literature and the arts were meant, in his acceptation, to educate people, to
become levers of progress, to lend lofty significations to their humanistic
message.
A poet, a prose-writer and a playwright, Mihai
Eminescu marked in Romanian literature the exceptional moment of the meeting
(identification) between the genius (as an individual value) and genius (as a
value of collective, ethnical thinking and sensibility). Between the particular
and the general. The general which, in his case, in fact embraces humanity as a
whole. It is not at all fortuitous that he always took for his model
Shakespeare, whom he styled "the great Briton", to whom he dedicated
a genuine ode and whom he more than once conjured up in superlative terms. His
second model was Romanian folklore - one of the richest and most generous in
the world, in point of problems and themes, in point of philosophical as well
as emotional vibration, open to whatever is truly human. Models - that is
universes. "Eminescianized", though. In a unique orchestral
transcription. Time, space, life, death, love, hatred, landscapes, the real and
die fantastic, myths, existential adventures, the search for one's own self,
gnoseological interrogation, the joy of living, the chimera of happiness,
ethical antinomies, the possible and the impossible, the tragic and the comic,
setting deeds on a cosmic orbit, etc., etc. - are all integrated within a
system of obsessions and relations which confers a timbre with polyphonic
nuances upon his literary approach, attitude and manner. Specialists in
literary sources discern in this system universal as well as national points of
reference, ancient as well as modern, Oriental (particularly Indian) as well as
European (particularly German). Undoubtedly bookish as a stimulus, it
nevertheless changed into an authoritative personal vision on the scale of
synthesis. Summing up - at the level of the 19th century, the century of the
nations' awakening - attitudes which are at the same time Homeric, Ovidian,
Horatian, Dantesque, Goliardic, Illuministic, pre-romantic, romantic,
pre-Raphaelite - variants of heroic poetry of various types, of melancholy, of carpe
diem, of the cathartic elegy, the impact between the celestial and the
telluric, the euphoria of the Dionysian liberating man from servitudes, the
consciousness of demophily, the tear and the voice of revolt, serenity as well
as the urge to action, political wisdom, the return to immemorial beginnings,
to the genesis of the world, when the non-being became being, when reality was
metaphorized in mythology and when man imagined himself as deity, the species
disseminating itself into typologies, surviving through mutations, interferences
and adstrata, through synchronies, through associations, but more especially
through dissociations and assimilations, through absorbtions. A process of
ineffable complexity, apt to be outlined at the height of Eminescu's horizon
only in the perspective of the epic. The constellation of history asserting the
latter in the premonitory penumbra of fortuna labilis, of memento
mori, of triumphant Evil. On the other hand, the same history validating
the fact that a wise (and proud) Romanian hospodar (like Mircea the Old in Third
Epistle) may give a scathing rebuff to the mightiest figure of his day -
the Sultan who had no intuition of the elementary truth that he would come up
against ("What stirs here in this country, be it river, breeze, or
oak"). That confrontations were battles. That they revealed ideals and
heroes. That ideals nominalized freedom, equity, ethics, democracy. That the
heroes - as exemplary, repressive or generous entities, legendary in a
traditional way or merely supervening to the scale of hypothetical values -
threw out into bold relief definitions of the national spirit. That the
situations of conflict conjured up also evolved under the sun of
significations. Of implication in the dialectics of history, of making the
latter stand out in the perspective of the desirable future ("for your
past, a future worthy of our nation"), of reiterating ancestral virtues,
of outgrowing blasι attitudes, easygoing conventionality, frivolousness and
wantonness, hypocrisy, the cohort of undermining venial sins, whatever
capitalist "civilization" brought in its wake, estranging man from
his own essence.
Eminescu's poetry is nothing but a plea for
dis-alienation. For liberating the individual as well as the community from any
servitudes. The premise being the identification of existential contradictions,
reducible to the schema Good-Evil, to the variant possible-impossible, to that
of "will" and "can", of being aware of limits as well as of
discerning beyond them the fascinating continent of revelations geometrized by
eyes capable to discern the fantastic. Of being a magus travelling among the
stars, in an attempt of deciphering the beauties as well as the laws of the
cosmos, of imagining (as in Hyperiori) the dramatic idyll between an
earthly woman and an astral spirit, of observing that antitheses characterize
both the visible and the invisible elements of the macrocosm and microcosm. But
also of being a Dionysus (or a Hyperion) for whom happiness {id est fulfillment)
does not necessarily involve the flight towards demiurgical heights, but rather
the realistic satisfaction offered by elementary human dreams. In the first
place, through escape in the midst of Naaire. Or, to put it more accurately:
reintegration within Nature. In the forest, on the borders of a lake, under the
cascade of linden-tree blossoms, on the shore of the sea. Where everything
throbs with vitality, where biological rhythms appear to be sempiternal, the
Uranian is reflected in the Neptunian, the ocean claims descendence from the
celestial, beautifully penning in time and space a status of the human
condition, both real and desiderative. A status, which Eminescu expresses in
his oxymoron: "painfully sweet". A syntagm so difficult to convey,
owing to its polysemous inflexions, however we referred to some proposition of
Schopenhauer's, related in its gamut of problems. While offering a deeper
grounding for the relation between these terms, in fact Eminescu invites one to
a transcendentalization of living. Which - on an erotic plane -is translated
into the fairy-like vision in Calin (fragments from a tale), into that
of the revolt in Mortua est, into the suavely diaphanous one in So
Fresh and Frail, into a call like "Oh, come to the wood!", in the
symbol, of the "sky-blue flower", in that of "Prince Charming of
the Linden Tree", in a synthesis-poem like If Branches..., - to put
it tersely, in survival. In love. A feeling, which is quite
defining on the scale of safeguarding moral values. Through its human essence.
Through its perenniality. Trough its enigmatic nature. Essentially heroic.
Heroic even when love could be styled anti-love. When it is sublimated into
hatred, scorn, curses. When the dialogue turns into a diatribe-monologue, and
the image isolated pro toto is Delilah, as in Fifth Epistle. Because,
in this case, by denying, the dream asserts something. The dream, that is the
ideal. The ideal, that is the detachment from alienation. As the moon is within
Eminescu's landscapes, which for the most part are benighted. The
all-conquering moon. Empress of all waves, of the silver forests, "the
queen of night", of Life and Death.
With Eminescu, death is a leit-motive. Itinerant.
Loaded with traditional atomic charges. Placed under the shield of the most
diverse heraldic valences. Man, objects, vegetation, the fauna, rocks - all
acknowledge its mastery. And yet, an aphorism of immortality - all "die
only to be born again". To be born, to live and to perish, making up the
trichotomy of time itself. As duration, through resumption. The same in all seasons
of mankind. It is not fortuitous, I think, that in Eminescu's vocabulary there
is an obsessive recurrence of the idea expressed by the word the same. The
same equalling the eleatic utterance of changelessness, of fatality, of
laws and rules, but also of death's impotence. Existential dynamics outclassing
-century after century - the prospect of the Apocalypse. Validating - again
century after century - the idea that the same spells Life, Progress.
That life and progress, like love and patriotism, enter the polysemy of the
concept of dis-alienation.
A concept, which renders Eminescu topical to an extent which nobody, can
deny. The topicality of his para-temporal presence. Of the hunger for the
ideal. Of the thirst for non-evil. Of the yearning to discover "the word
which expresses the truth". Of the belief that the latter is also
expressed by "life's prose", as well as by its opposite, that the
sense of life is self-perfection, that the future of the community is again to
find the very Self. Where the ethos converges upon the ethnos. Catching a
glimpse of the portrait of the human personality painted in infinitesimal spots
of a myriad colors. Sharing the consciousness of the Self. Contemporary to
absolute Time.
Discontented. Restless. Walling itself up as if
with myths. Freeing itself through lucidity. Through romantic irony. Through
the paradoxical identity between "to be" and "not to be".
Imagining the aggressor forest in Macbeth no less than the idea of
Puck's and Ariel's beauty. And (why not?) that of the Dark Lady in the Sonnets.
Making one's mark as the Shakespeare of Romanian poetry. A Shakespeare to
whom - while being aware of the tribulations in his biography - negligible one,
after all - we acknowledge the kinship of genius. In whatever exists as such.
Anticipating the judgement of value. Stating that Eminescu is a Shakespeare.
And yet that Eminescu is not a Shakespeare. Very much as he is neither a Byron
nor a Shelley or a Lermontov... Nor... Because he is Eminescu. Unique.
Appreciated by Romanians as such. As a summit and a creed.
Half a century after Eminescu's death, one of
the youngest poets of that time, Mihai Beniuc, exclaimed in an anthological
poem: "We, young poets all, / can never vie with Eminescu". The
exclamation certified not the iconolatry of one generation but of several
generations. Not the worship of a few people, but that of an entire nation.
Transsubstantiated rather recently by an even younger successor, Marin Sorescu,
in a thrilling hymn (They Had to Have a Name) dedicated to the man who
equaled the nominalized with the anonymous:
There was no Eminescu.
There was only a fine country
On the shore of a sea,
Where the waves tie white knots In the uncombed beard of a king-
Like waters, like flowing trees In which the moon had its round nest.
And more particularly there were some simple people
Whose names were: Mircea the
Old, Stephen the Great,
Or plainer still: shepherds and ploughmen,
Who- of an evening, around the fire -
Enjoyed reciting poems;
"The Ewe-Lamb" and "Hyperion" and "The Third
Epistle".
But as now and then they heard
Their mastiffs barking at their sheep/old,
They left to fight the invading Tartars
And the Avars and the Huns and the Poles
And the Turks too.
There were moreover deep forests
And a youth who would talk with them,
Asking them why they swayed without a breath of wind?
Also there were some linden-trees,
And the young couple who knew
How to make their blossoms snow
Into a kiss.
And some birds or some clouds
Which kept floating over them
Like long, soft-moving plains.
And since all of these
Had to have a name,
One name alone,
They were named Eminescu.
AUREL MARTIN
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