Grant that one day my soul, beneath the Tree of Knowledge,
May rest beside you, at the hour when upon your brow
Its branches shall spread like a new temple!
Charles Baudelaire
When the earth, the sky, the air, the whole
world Were among those that never were,
Then You alone existed, so that I ask myself:
To whom is the god to whom our hearts turn?
Mihai Eminescu
There are silences in which one sees
, in every receding
human shadow, some troubled Divinity.
Eugenio Montale
At random: Les Litanies de Satan, A Dacian’s Prayer, I limoni. Noica asks me: what did Baudelaire have to bypass in order to reach Eminescu? Stăniloae, in a manuscript: Eminescu is too lofty for the Romanian people; Coșbuc is the representative figure. Eliade welcomed the publication of Luceafărul in Sanskrit. Montale, on whether he believes in God: it is a personal matter. And is the poet, in turn, a personal matter for God? Let us look to Eminescu.
‘It has been nearly two thousand years since it (the Gospel) lifted peoples out of darkness, shaping them on the principle of love for one’s neighbour; two thousand years since the biography of the Son of God has been the book by which humanity is raised. The teachings of Buddha, the life of Socrates and the principles of the Stoics, the path to virtue of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, although similar to the teachings of Christianity, have not had such an influence; nor have they elevated mankind as much as the Gospel, this simple and popular biography of the meek Nazarene whose heart was pierced by the greatest moral and physical suffering—not for Himself, but for the good and salvation of others. A Stoic, too, would have endured the torments of Jesus Christ, but would have endured them with pride and contempt for his fellow men; and Socrates drank the cup of poison, but drank it with the indifference characteristic of the civic virtue of Antiquity. Not indifference, not contempt: the suffering and the full bitterness of death penetrated the heart of the sensitive Lamb and, in those supreme moments, love took root in His heart, andbrought his earthly life to a close by asking His Father in heaven to forgive his persecutors. Thus, to sacrifice oneself for one’s fellow human beings—not out of pride, nor out of a sense of civic duty, but out of love—has since remained the highest form of human existence.” (“Timpul”, dated 12 April 1881.)
… “We, the Latin people of the Orthodox faith”
… “Throughout the ages, a model of religious tolerance”
… “The Church is the mother of the Romanian nation”
… “Let us become monks, for we are not made to live amongst wolves.”
… “The history of humanity is the unfolding of God’s thought.”
… “Morality is to the soul what health is to the body!”
… “Nationalism is a bad sign in a people.”
… “The whole of human life is a life of labour”
… “For nearly two thousand years we have been preached to love one another, yet we tear one another apart…”
In the magazine Luceafărul (20 September 1999), the following were listed amongst Eminescu’s religiously inspired works: … Poor Dionis, Archaeus, The Avatars of Pharaoh Tlà, Old Joseph, Cezara, and the following poems: Letter I, Letter V, The Epigones, I Do Not Believe in Jehovah, God and Man, Priest and Philosopher, Prayer, Anthropomorphism, Memento mori, A Dacian’s Prayer, Shine Upon Me, Ta twan asi, Demonism, Mortua est, Life, What a Sad Soul, The Story of the Magus Travelling Through the Stars, Angel and Demon, Confession, Melancholy, O, My Poor Cell, etc.
In his study Eminescu’s Christianity, Nichifor Crainic refers, with particular emphasis, to the neglected works, first and foremost: ‘Luceafărul is a poem; it is the quintessentially Christian poem of Romanian literature.’…‘The figure of Hyperion is that of a celestial androgyne, as I have shown in Nostalgia for Paradise, where I analysed it in comparison with Leonardo da Vinci’s John the Baptist and Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. The androgyne, a neutral being in whom the opposing sexes are nullified within the passionless realm of paradise, represents in art the highest creation of human genius. By creating Hyperion, Eminescu takes his place amongst the geniuses of universal art. This alone would suffice to reveal the superior level of the poet’s spirituality. But, rising above Hyperion and above the hierarchies that constitute the created world, Eminescu’s genius soars to suggest to us the presence of divinity itself.”
In Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, Ardhanariswara – half-woman, half-god – is the union of Shiva and Parvati, who becomes his wife following the slaying and resurrection of Kama – Cupid.
Crainic does not make Mortua est the antithesis of Luceafărul nor of its negation – ‘If there is any meaning in this, it is twisted and atheistic / On your pale brow, God is not written’ – the opposite of the grandeur of the angel who, as in the Bible, falls in love with a mortal woman. In the poem ‘To My Friend F. I.’, which dates from roughly the same time as ‘Mortua est’, a belief in the survival of the soul is evident. In Cu mâne zilele-ți adaogi, the Queen of Sweet Mornings transforms death into an illusion, ‘a treasurer of lives’. The conclusion of Crainic’s poetic hermeneutics: ‘When Eminescu confesses in prayer, saying: “I no longer believe in anything and I have no strength”, it is as though he were repeating in other words the words from the Gospel: ‘I believe; Lord, help my unbelief!’ A genius in the image of God, preserving the fervour of adoration beneath the ruins of his soul; above his philosophical reflections hovers the flight into the divine light of the Morning Star.”
We, too, presented an Eminescu situated between Baudelaire and Tagore in our undergraduate thesis The Myth of Zalmoxe in the Poetry of Mihai Eminescu and Lucian Blaga (1966), Baudelaire and the Romanian Poets – Correspondences of the Poetic Spirit (1973), Sanskritikon, including Eminescu’s Cosmology between the Veda and the Edda (2002), Mantra Eminescu (2011), etc. We present some concluding excerpts.
‘Luceafărul’, a poem more about immortality than about cold genius, presents three main aspects. Hyperion, as is well known, exists, and the temptation of life determines when he no longer wishes to exist, and when he should remain in his own world, immortal. Cătălina, a modern and unseemly Dochie, possesses the sublime will to surround herself with immortality (the girl in the golden garden even wished to clothe herself in it: ‘Give me your immortality as a wedding gift’). The star’s path is circular: ‘it left a deep trail in a dream / To take hold of the soul /…/ It blazed ever brighter / And shot forth like lightning, / It plunged into the sea’ etc. The birth of the morning star from the sky and the sea, from the sun and the night, is simply likened to involuntary springs. Cătălina loses sight of them. The third attitude, that of Cătălin, is the opposite of Hyperion’s. Cătălin renounces birth and immortality:
We shall lose our longing for our parents
And the dream of morning stars.
Hyperion, bearing his immortality, improvised pointless births; Cătălin wishes to remain unborn, though mortal. The house-child, however, steeped in erotic life, arouses revulsion at his marivaudage, which is all too close to the longings of the heavens. Through these subordination of the characters to their relationship with immortality, the poem takes on distinct facets, and that which is not Luciferian is laughable in a tragic sense. In the Dacian poems, immortal life competes with universal genesis and extinction… Sarmis, Decebal, Arald, ‘the child-king of the fir forests’, Dochia, Călin the Mad, and most of Eminescu’s mythical heroes, indeed, exist as exemplars of unending tragedy. The most terrifying crossroads for the tranquillity shattered by the convergence of worlds is also the one most readily representable in fantastical or symbolic terms: life and death, planted within the same—let us call it—archaeu. Between life and death lies the delay of immortality; yet immortality is neither life nor death, but, at times, both, polarising the Dacian cosmos. Expressions of immortality, whether as a return to life or a departure towards death, are numerous in Eminescu’s poetry. Two are particularly fascinating, namely: the magical words of the magus in Strigoii – …‘And grant him, Zalmoxe, the seed of light’ – and the opening of the poem Mureșan, published separately by Maiorescu – ‘Midnight strikes on the brass bell’.
Returning to the myth of Zalmoxe as interpreted by Eminescu and Lucian Blaga, several conclusions impose themselves regarding both the god-prophet and the relationship between the two poets and the spirit. The infinite invention of gods, the myth within a myth, in Eminescu’s work, reveals absolute immortals, rendered dispensable through their Spinozist identity with nature. In Lucian Blaga’s work, the gods—slayed by their prophetic bearers, these relative deities contaminating life with the absolute—halt a trajectory of divine genealogy. Zalmoxe, the chthonic seer, guides the Blind Man from the heavens towards his destiny. Eminescu’s Uranism and Neptunism are supplanted by a new assessment of existence, with slumber within myth. Zalmoxe’s awakening, within Lucian Blaga’s pagan mystery, is the consequence of the shepherds’ transformation into priculici, of the hunchbacks’ sarcastic verve, and of the collective will to kill. The prophet’s survival, leading to eternalisation, weaves together paradisiacal visions with apocalyptic tranquillity (hearths, myths, light, sleep). Similarly, Eminescu creates continuous paradises, however hellish they may be (Euthanasius’s Island, the depths of the seas, Dacia, etc.).
Eminescu’s god Zalmoxe becomes humanised through his association with another god: Joe humiliates him, Odin offers him exile in Valhalla (Memento mori). Spells, like curses, either reconcile or separate the world and the god, whilst the heroes aspire, to good effect, towards the divine condition, whilst remaining true to themselves. The prophet Zalmoxe harbours disgust for the unreality and cruelty of the gods, hatred for ephemeral myths and, deified daily, returns to the deepening of earthly destiny within earthly time. The mystical Oedipus, whom he directs away from himself along the paths of mankind, moves the secret absolute towards the heart of the intangible universe.
The quintessential essence of Eminescu, expressed through Zalmoxe, lies in the tragic creation of the unfathomable: the world, immortal beings, torn apart by the limits of immortality at the centre of cosmic harmony. Immortal life (The Twins) rivals the genesis and extinction of all things, through the expression of the undulating ‘man-spring’. Călin the Mad hurls the bomb of justice towards the heavens, just as the Thracians hurled the earth above their spears. But the possibilities of the spring rise above Thracian rites through their projection into the absolute, to the point of anthropomorphisation (I Have but One Longing Left). The water before genesis, the water of baptism (“In magical or mystical solidarity / baptism, in the pre-Christian meanings / of man’s relationship with water, confers upon him new possibilities of ‘germination’, of a new birth’ / Mircea Eliade, Locum refrigerii, in Zalmoxis, 1, 1938), thirst—all are circumscribed by immortality, beginning with the pain of birth, felt by the Thracians and predestining the paths of powerlessness: death in immortality, the curse, life.
For the prophet Zalmoxis, isolation in life and in death speaks not of a cosmic principle, but of a subconscious and ontological one. The Strabo-inspired man, purified of the slavery attributed to him by Strabo, as well as of the will to deification, dares, metaphysically, to identify the Thracian way of life with the great Blind One – the god. Whilst the non-romantic Zalmoxe, drawn by Eminescu from pagan mythology, brings to mind the oscillation of the Arghezian spirit around Christian divinity, Lucian Blaga’s prophet, bearing upon his shoulder God’s helplessness and awkwardness, creates the human essence in the abstract. Hence, the implication of Zamolxian paganism in Lucian Blaga’s subsequent debates on divinity and the world humanises the nuances of the absolute. The functions of the spring and the curse, and immortality, pertain to the great Blind One; Zalmoxe merely reveals them. Miron Costin’s epilogue (drawing on Geste française): ‘By being born we die; by dying we turn to ashes’, reaches visions that are profound in their scope.
Eminescu and Blaga, through this shared leitmotif—interpreted in a distinctive manner—converge, regardless of the causality between the two works. The same myth has generated poetic attitudes akin in spirit; thus, their free comparison is not contrived in the realm of ideas.
To read Eminescu without thinking of Eminescu is not a sign that one has thought of Baudelaire, in a fluid state of Luciferian correspondence between states of mind, causes and effects of lyricism—perhaps of verse itself. The reader’s eye finds common ground with the verse, with the columns of the iamb, finding its rhythm to receive the harmonies of substance, the song that pierces the abysses, but also to receive the willing loss of self, the search within the encounter, a source of echoes. The reincarnation of the lyrical self surrenders; the reader, suddenly modest, seeks another reader: duality calls for a higher unity of two readers and two authors who take each other’s place, who are nobody, never were, and have become poetry. The thought of the poet, replaced by that of poetry, gives the sense of a sin.
A parallel reading: Correspondences / Venice. A doctrinal sonnet, a mournful one. A second genesis, a past extinction. The noun of the aesthetic assertion – La Nature, the absolute sepulchral verb: ‘It has died out’, yet even these forms of beginning shall correspond, for both nature and extinction epically reunite the first genesis through the memory of music guarded by the temple and life:
La Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes let confused words escape…
The life of majestic Venice has faded;
you hear no songs, you see no ballroom lights.
The ascent of correspondence thins – plunging it into infinite sadness – the pillar of the departed being of the Venetian city, a sibylline harbinger of drownings where the forests no longer send forth their symbols.
What begins in words ends in scents, which sing from a paradisiacal realm, answering in the Byzantine-Venetian tradition: ‘To the sweet bride it would give the breath of life’; they are not, and never were, those ‘vivantes pilliers’, nor man, but Okeanos, nor the temple, now in ruins, but the priest, who was the temple, or the name of the temple surviving to herald the return of death or the futility of death through life. A suggestion bursts forth in the tone of the longest echoes from metaphysical distances:
There are fresh scents, like the flesh of children
Do not raise the dead – it is in vain, child!
Eminescu’s ‘Correspondence’ expresses a paradise that communicates only to itself; Baudelaire’s, on the other hand, spring from the very heart of the supreme hell. An apophatic path, in the spirit of Eminescu’s harmonies, breaks through to Baudelaire’s metaphysics of evil. An excess of purity – when it comes to ‘correspondence’ in the sense of poetic harmony – meets an excess of morbidity, such that neither poets can draw near, by their very nature, nor universes, but rather their clarity and definability.
Two interpretations that lead elsewhere, pitting Eminescu’s Romanticism against Baudelaire’s formal, Parnassian Classicism: the latter’s modern predestination, the former’s astral immobility. Moving from Baudelaire to Eminescu, one either forgets the former or perceives the latter only in terms of a mutually defining opposition, of a critical disqualification: the systems constructed around one of the two bodies of work crumble with a clamour whose resonance points towards a necessary commentary—not necessarily unifying, nor theoretical—denying a dual, opposing source. Whether you think you knew Eminescu or not, whether you could discover Baudelaire or not, the turning towards one or the other, or even towards both, might lead to nothingness, when one discovers an ordinary path—one of reading, of history read, made, accomplished—perhaps, it is true, even invented, traced over utopia. On the incompatibility, intuitively suspected yet critically reconciled, on decadent or decanted romanticism, and on the rediscovery, through an ancestral correspondence, of the harmonies of the innate verb—this underpins the perspective of ageing through renewal towards the nuance of eternity, embraced with sincerity and conviction.
The study dedicated to Eminescu represents for Arghezi what the Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe represent for Baudelaire, including as an aesthetic and complementary vision of their personalities, yet after nearly a hundred years and, as if on purpose, in a spirit of pious retrospection (‘our outdated piety’), intended to restore the poetic thrill that a certain, unique and great poet left as his legacy. Whilst the French poet, in theorising about poetry, transcribed phrases from Poe without quotation marks, Arghezi will paraphrase his own verses, attributing the meaning of the paraphrase to Eminescu (“Eminescu’s woman is never the wife, remaining exclusively the lover”, in the well-known line: “fiancée for ever, wife never” etc.). We might venture to speculate that, in his own transcriptions, Arghezi in turn transcribes critical ideas from Baudelaire. Yet we see them—originated and regenerated after their long evolution—emerging from a single, vast crucible that is the Arghezian spirit, in an apparent, revolted alienation from the self: the discourse on poetics.
Modernity, even in its classical form, allows Rimbaud’s Hamlet-like cry to be modern to resound within Arghezi’s poetics. Its projection and reflection from Eminescu’s world engraves upon it an inexpressible Romanian originality. In his poetic confession, Arghezi suggests, insinuates and constructs, with a naturalness of approach to the subject that has the air of detachment, and with a forgetful volubility in the face of the impossibility he has taken on. His essay would be a sermon, were it not for the way it veers towards satire to breathe life into a state of mind, intermittent like volcanoes (if it were to end where it began), were it not to split into a profession of faith. An individuality sealed within itself, expressing itself only magnetically, trampling upon its ‘outdated piety’ and satisfied pride – the act of sharing the genesis and fate of poetry in eternity is portrayed authentically. A confession by Eminescu no longer resonated in that era. Eminescu himself will be heard all the more clearly as the one speaking of him distances himself from him, in order to draw closer to the listener here, with the message, with his ‘translation’. The confession is symbolic; our piety – outdated. The great certainty is poetry, its will and its total fulfilment, from the inaccessible whim of genius to dilettantism (‘the love of writing is the beginning of talent’—not merely an Eliadean definition, but also a specific awareness of the condition of literature.
The confessional nature of Eminescu’s work calls for the poetic spirit rather than the critical spirit. The genius’s contemporaries bear false witness.
Amita Bhose’s students have long savoured him in the original; Professor Tagore was even able to avoid the taste of death by having her ashes scattered in Bucharest near Eminescu’s grave, dispersing into the cosmos of both Orpheus and Tagore alike. The doctrines of the third millennium will not be able to avoid what was imposed upon the philosopher N. Bagdasar in 1938: the contrast between European civilisation—now following the same materialistic American trend—and the Indian-Eastern culture of the soul, of the inner self. Whilst the incorporation of Tagore’s thought into Romanian culture in the 1920s and 1930s may have been dismantled by Tagore himself—who had become Sovietised—the third and fourth Tagores will, time and again, be the first, the true Tagore, even if India were to disown Tagore as a mother disowns her son, he would still send shivers down the spines of Romanians, tragically at the cost of India becoming acquainted with Eminescu—banished from his own country and deconstructed in a Romanian key—and through formalising demythologisations, a Vishva Bharati could be founded in the names of Tagore and Eminescu, the poet of India and the poet of Romania would set an example of advaita (nonduality).
How would one define a Romanian Indologist of Eliadean, Eminescian, Brâncușian origin, etc.? They have used the terms ‘Indo-Eminescology’ and ‘Indo-Brâncușology’. Now that Eliade is living in Calcutta, I realise the overwhelming latent potential of ‘Indo-Eliadology’—a field that is, this time, not so much Indo-Romanian as universally– Indian-Romanian – rooted in traditions that are as deeply internalised and lost as they are revealed in our new sensibilities and intellectual approaches to Indian studies. Comparativism, etymologism, Indo-Europeanism, anthropologism, aestheticism, medicinism, etc., are among the key terms that might characterise formal studies in Romanian Indology. The hermeneutic trends introduced by Eliade and applied by Sergiu Al-George have alternated with analytical concerns on specific topics, ranging from non-violence and Miorița or Eminescu and the Veda to the younger generation’s in-depth studies of Shankaracharya or Vedanta. Translations, particularly from Sanskrit, are gaining ground alongside those via an intermediary or retellings, with demand for Indian literature of all kinds exceeding what specialists can supply. Commercial amateurism is flooding the market with an impression of opulence that is difficult to dispel. The Romanian collection at the National Library in Calcutta is neither catalogued nor accessible. Several thousand volumes representative of Romanian culture also make way for Indological contributions, foremost among them Volume XIV of Eminescu’s Works, in which Franz Bopp’s Sanskrit Grammar is published in his own translation; the numerous examples are in Devanagari, written in Eminescu’s own hand in the twilight of his creative life or, according to Amita Bhose, the editor of the Grammar, during his early years in Berlin.
Statues of Eminescu seem to surround us everywhere, relief-like shadows in marble and bronze of his memory, of the enduring Romanian genius. Drawing on depictions of the poet aged 19, 27 and 39, and on Eminescu’s infinite universe, almost all our sculptors have portrayed his likeness.
The first of these is Ion Georgescu, if we disregard the mask created by Filip Marin. Ion Georgescu produced two effigies and an academic, commemorative, non-poetic bust.
In contrast, Dimitrie Paciurea’s early-20th-century project – which was shattered whilst being transported for exhibition abroad – marked the beginning of a quest by Romanian sculpture itself to achieve universal significance. Records show that Paciurea’s Eminescu possessed a spirit and dimensions that were titanic, Michelangelesque.
Half a century later, Gheorghe Anghel was to emerge, perhaps, as the answer to that project, to all the projects for statues of Eminescu. Oscar Han and Ion Jalea, Romul Ladea and Cornel Medrea, Ion Vlasiu, Ovidiu Maitec – but who has not erected monuments to him, many of which are well-known and have entered the history of our art, both old and new? The works of no value have been lost to oblivion or reduced to mere anecdote.
In Ion Jalea’s work, the poet’s face and the spirit of rebellion come together in all the figures of the bas-relief Emperor and Proletarian. In Oscar Han’s work, Eminescu’s eyes gazed into eternity, into the pure spirit of beauty. It has been said of Cornel Medrea’s bust that it bears no resemblance to the model – an imaginary one – yet it remains an Eminescu.
A work shaped by the celestial expanses of Luceafărul is the immortal bronze sculpture by Gheorghe Anghel, which seems to be perpetually awaiting the breath of Eminescu’s endless being.