This letter is the triumph
of the organic vision in our
poetry. D. Caracostea 1
The impetus for the present study was the search for Aeschylus in Letter III; whilst perusing Eminescu’s poetic works, I found that the father of Greek tragedy was familiar to our poet: images from Agamemnon or The Persians, metaphors from The Seven Against Thebes are scattered here and there, especially in his posthumous works, attesting to Eminescu’s preoccupation with details and structure. In the manuscript versions of Letter III, however, the examples suddenly multiply and, whilst the images do not persist into the final version, the poem instead takes on an increasingly rounded form in the spirit of Aeschylus’s work; the traces of its proximity to the text fade away one by one, whilst the overall vision draws ever closer to Aeschylus’s conception of the world. This leads us to seek material evidence of Eminescu’s engagement with the great predecessor’s sphere of ideas. Such evidence, however, is either lacking or very scarce. We may cite, amongst the lectures held at the Berlin ‘Friedrich-Wilhelm’ University during Eminescu’s studies, according to the Litterarische Centralblatt (1873–74; cf. Perpessicius, O, II, p. 271) and Haupt’s Perser des Aeschylus (who can be none other than C.G. Haupt, the son-in-law of the renowned Aeschylus scholar C. Herman and the editor of the latter’s works). We are also aware of a statement by Vlahuță 2 from 1894: ‘The poet advises me to translate The Seven Against Thebes into verse and praises the serenity and grandeur of the classical tragedies’. Also cited (G. Călinescu 3) is the political article ‘Pătura superpusă’, in which Eminescu recalls (not without connection to the poem, as we shall see) Aeschylus’s heroes and the names of characters scattered throughout the poet’s manuscripts. These are, as far as we know, the objective references to Aeschylus’s name. We cannot know to what extent Eminescu was familiar with his work – in the original or in some Latin or German translation.
At the beginning of the last century, several critical editions of Aeschylus’s plays were in circulation; some of the most valuable were in Al. Odobescu’s library, others in that of St Sava College or in the former Central Library; listing them here would be out of place – and the chance of guessing which one the poet actually consulted is minimal. We would be falling, out of scholarly pride, into the same error as our predecessors: it was believed, for example, that one could identify the edition of the Iliad that served as the basis for Eminescu’s attempts to translate the first canto. G. Călinescu opined: ‘The text used appears to be derived (sic) from a Greek-Latin edition by Clarke, *Homeri Ilias: ex recensione Samuelis Clarkii, S.T.P. Glasguse, Londini 1814 (this refers to the 10th edition of the work, n.n.). The poet transcribes five lines in Greek, which we also reproduce here with the spelling corrected; he then indicates the pronunciation using Romanian letters and, finally, breaks the phrases down into their constituent parts, placing the Latin translation alongside them’4 In Mss 2266, which the commentator discusses here, the poet does indeed transcribe five lines from the Iliad in impeccable script. He makes a single accent error – Dίos instead of Diós – whilst G. Călinescu, in an attempt to correct his spelling, makes no fewer than three mistakes: he renders almost all the words in the juxtaposition without accents, and in the Latin transcription following Clarke – no doubt through carelessness – he incorrectly copies ‘plurimes dolores’ instead of ‘plurimos dolores’ (plural accusative) and ‘prematurae’ instead of ‘premature’ – minor errors, of course, but ones that have been retained in all editions of the work to date. A consensus had been reached amongst editors regarding the Latin translation of the Iliad as early as the Renaissance – and, therefore, the identification of a specific text with no other clue than that of the colophon has no scientific basis. What must rightly be noted regarding the poet’s attempts to render the invocation to the Iliad in Romanian is the accuracy of the terminology: the traditional Latin translation of the epic is a great achievement by scholars – a semantic and etymological rendering of the text, respecting, wherever possible, even the tense of the verb in Homer: it is a benchmark translation. Yet Eminescu seeks precisely such an exact equivalence in Romanian, going so far as to achieve symmetry between the words in the text (“menin aeide, thea” = “sing me of the wrath, Muse”), aiming for a scholarly translation – a response to the translations of the time that strayed from the meaning (we are referring specifically to the French or German translations – which, for example, the poet rejected!). Hence his desire to consult Luther’s Gospel or other examples of accurate translations; hence the need for a ‘Homeric Lexicon’ (the poet writes in the margin: ‘Ich brauche ein Lexicon zu Homer’, proof that he had used a simple ‘Greek-Latin’ dictionary and felt the need for a specialised one that renders the traditional meaning of Homer’s words in Latin); note also the Romanian expressions inserted by the poet amongst the Latin words in the manuscript in question, which are etymological (for the Greek ‘iftimos’, for example, he gives the meaning ‘animosus’ = ‘inimos’). Such an endeavour is colossal – but by no means the product of a mentally deranged mind! Through the aim he pursues and his search for the precise tools of his trade, the poet shows us that he possesses the necessary theoretical grounding to tackle a Greek text. If we cannot prove that he knew Ancient Greek – it is all the more difficult to prove the opposite, that he knew it not at all! (Of course, we are referring to a moderate level of knowledge, necessary for tackling a text; having studied Bopp’s Sanskrit grammar as a young man, it is impossible that Eminescu did not at least turn to Greek and Latin morphology to compare them with Sanskrit forms.)
Eminescu is seeking precisely an exact equivalent in Romanian, going so far as to ensure the symmetry of the words in the text (“menin aeide, thea” = ‘sing me the lament, Muse’), aiming for a scholarly translation – a response to the translations of the time that strayed from the original meaning.
Among the editions of Aeschylus, he could have cited that of the German Gotfrid Schutz, a comprehensive work integrating the Latin commentaries of Stanley, Abresch, Bloomfield – and which, precisely because of its very rich and accessible documentary material (in scholarly Latin), enjoyed many reprints in the last century. But, of course, true connections cannot be established from the outside in, but rather through the comparative method, by carefully examining the text.
In the case of Letter III, certain textual similarities have led some researchers 5 to conclude that Eminescu was familiar with Herodotus through the Romanian translation preserved at Coșula Monastery (edited by N. Iorga in 1909). The similarities are numerous, and not only in this poem. Thus, in variant B of Letter III we find the expression ‘they begged for earth and water’, just as in the Coșula manuscript (V, 18; Iorga retains the traditional division of Herodotus’s text in his edition). The explanation for the Thracians’ prosperity: ‘the land and waters are their friends’ (VII, 47) is reminiscent of Mircea’s line: ‘Everything that moves in this land, the river, the branch / Is a friend to me alone…’ (Aeschylus says the same of the Greeks: ‘The earth itself fights as an ally alongside them’ and explains: ‘Being too numerous, the barbarians die of thirst and hunger on Greek soil’). Eminescu’s verse: ‘Wines that darken the earth at Rovine in the plains’ appears to be an etymological adaptation of the expression ‘darkness of peoples’, ‘so many darknesses of people’ (one ‘întunerec’ = one million people, a semantic calque from Old Slavonic, based on the Latin-derived verb ‘to darken’ from ‘intunebricare’). The motif of ‘darkness’ is more extensive in the poem, and a line such as: ‘The horizon darkened by arrows flying from all sides’ (in variants: ‘The sun darkening the horizon’) is linked to a passage from Moxa’s chronicle: ‘so Mircea Voivode and his forces clashed, and there was a great battle whilst it grew dark, until the sky could no longer be seen for the darkness of the arrows’6). Without calling into question Eminescu’s actual source, we suggest the possibility of a plurality of sources, bearing in mind in particular the manuscript variant (“The sun darkening it…”) and the similar passage in Herodotus: “Another spoke of the Persians’ arrows and how they cast darkness over the sun, / From somewhere / they said, without fear: ‘Friend, you tell us well, for we shall fight in the shade, not in the sun’” (VII, 226). Eminescu is undoubtedly referring to a syncretism of sources: in Moxa himself we are dealing with the borrowing of a commonplace from Antiquity – and not just any commonplace, but one established through an anecdote (the ‘joke’ is greatly facilitated by the similarity the ancients drew between the sun’s rays and arrows: see the discussion of the ‘plague’ that Apollo sent upon the Achaean army at Ilion; it is referred to as a ‘shower of arrows’ and a ‘shower of rays’, for example. It is, however, worth taking this opportunity to draw attention to the limitations of the comparative-historical method: take, for example, the well-known Homeric metaphor ‘dolihoskion enhos’ = ‘the spear beneath the long shadow’ and Eminescu’s expression ‘spears glint long in the sun’: we shall never know whether Eminescu is expressing Homer ‘in the negative’, bringing out the ‘long shadow’ of the spear by stating the cause: ‘glint long’; however, the fact that we are in Homer’s company is evidenced by a line such as this: ‘The shadow of death stretches ever wider and wider’; by setting aside the ‘material evidence’, the poet preserves the Homeric spirit, the ‘shadow/light’ dichotomy. In the same vein of ‘darkness’, the line: ‘Blackening the entire horizon with their tens of thousands of shields’ may be an allusion to the ‘myriad’, a unit of measurement for the Persian armies in Herodotus (groups of ten thousand soldiers – a ‘miriad’ – were formed, and the groups were counted). Otherwise, the shields gleam, they may ‘dazzle’ – but they do not ‘blacken’ the horizon (unless we are referring to the blurring of vision in the face of an overwhelming mass of people, in the face of ‘swarms’ of peoples – but the image, in this context, is not a visual one); on the contrary: the large number of soldiers is emphasised twice, once through the allusion to darkness (= ‘darkening’) and the second time through the mention of ‘myriads’. In both images, the predominant role is, in fact, played by the other term, ‘the horizon’: the first time, Bayezid was referring to the knights of the West (‘Blackening the entire horizon with their tens of thousands of shields’) with the clear intention of exaggerating their number to magnify his victory; the second time (“Darkening the horizon, arrows come from all sides”), the poet refers to Mircea’s army: the situations are similar – in both instances, Bayezid is at the centre, attacked from the ‘horizons’ – but the effect is the opposite, brought about by the two weapons brought into play: the shield and the arrow: ‘What drives them into battle? What did that West intend?’ They attack seeking to possess (“They sought to pluck the laurels from your iron brow”) whilst defending themselves (the image of the shield) – Mircea defends himself (“I defend my poverty and my hardships and my people”), whilst attacking (the image of a shower of arrows); the symmetry is absorbed into that natural animism into which the Romanian ruler is integrated. He substitutes the horizontal terrain – ‘the river, the branch’ – the very foundation of existence – for the vertical pavise of the Crusader knights, which stands like a wall, like a ‘barrier’. The conflict between Bayezid and the Crusaders is horizontal, expressed in length, whereas that between Bayezid and Mircea is vertical, expressed in height. The Crusaders’ ‘horizon’ will thus be pushed back, advancing ‘like forests of spears and swords’, ‘like a high wall of shields’ (variants: in the final text – ‘So that it may stand before me like an invincible wall’) against a conqueror who is identified with the hurricane (“To face the hurricane raised by the Crescent”), who holds in his name the “wall” (Bayezid) and thus possesses magical power over the real wall – whilst his epithet is “the lightning” (Bayezid-the-Lightning), the symbol of the hurricane – whilst the Wallachian ‘horizon’ has a spherical dimension, acting upon the same conquering centre from top to bottom through a ‘shower of arrows’, through ‘hail’, etc. Between these two images, the poet uses the term ‘horizon’ to describe the invading army: ‘They come, darkening the earth at Rovine in the plains’, anticipating the unfolding of events desired by Bayezid, the ‘spreading out’ (‘Spreading out in swarms, they pitch their great tents’), the sultan’s vast, expansive spaces – but, building on this determiner, he simultaneously heralds the ‘horizon’ through a specific term: ‘Only in the distant horizon does the oak forest resound’. The ‘horizon’, associated with ‘echo’, foreshadows a distant boundary not so much in length as in height, a vaulted space.
Returning to the older texts, we note another series of terms adopted by Eminescu from Coșula’s translation. Even in Egipetul we find the expression “pe câmpie nisipiți” – often corrected, precisely because it is more difficult to understand – into “pe câmpie risipiți” (Eminescu’s manuscripts retain both forms). The expression appears several times in Coșula’s handwritten translation: ‘the fortress has been further reinforced with clay, whilst the church, remaining just as it was at first, appears like a mirror’ (II, 148); ‘they made an island by sifting the water with ash and earth’ (II, 140). In Eminescu’s work, therefore, the expression may mean, strictly speaking, ‘having their houses built on the plain’, in the desert, thereby altering the meaning of the preceding line: ‘Large Bedouin families roam wildly through the desert’; it refers to a ‘journey’ through time, to a particular form of resilience (through the construction of these ‘sandy’ dwellings in place of the gigantic stone houses). Here, then, is the verse: ‘And in the Nile, only the sandy wasteland is watered’. In Herodotus we find, regarding the Nile: ‘when the waters of the Nile rose by a mere 8 cubits, they were sufficient to water the whole land of Egypt’ (II, 13) and: ‘When the water is added, it waters the land where they are, and as soon as the water recedes, they are sown’ (II, 14). The poet means, therefore, that even today the sandy wilderness is watered by the Nile, only that there is (simply) no one left to sow; no one makes use of this divine gift of Egypt any more, as the way of life of the present-day population has fundamentally changed. Reading the poem from its original sources clarifies the meanings; our joy would be short-lived if we were to stop merely at what we understand from a ‘modern’ reading. Staying within the same family of terms, here is a sandstorm described in the translation: ‘whilst the army was at the Oasis and amongst the Ammonites, and they were all eating, the south wind (Notos) struck with great force and intensity, and huge waves of sand were raised; and thus that sand buried them all, and not one escaped’ (III, 26). It is the common belief of the ancients (see also Aeschylus’s ‘Suppliants’) that Egypt may be buried by the sand carried by the winds – with only the Nile, the sacred river, maintaining the balance. This is also the idea behind Eminescu’s poem: the desacralisation of the river brings about, as a punishment, the sandstorms that cover the monuments. The imbalance in the ‘earth and water’ formula—arising from the disregard for the second fundamental element and the exaggerated importance accorded to the first—leads to ruin: the magus, the ‘guardian of vengeance’ (‘Erinyes’ in Greek) to punish the ‘debauched priesthood’, the ‘blood-stained kings’, etc. – ‘they misread the sign’ causing discord amongst the elements, the wind, the hurricane that stirs the sea into turbulent forms. Bayezid himself, as a ‘hurricane’, as a representative of chaotic aerial movement, is nothing but a punishment, an Erin, for the crusading knights who act against the elements (‘The sea trembled in terror at the sight of their ships’, etc.).
Here, then, is the image from Memento mori: ‘And on the harvested fields I saw proud maidens / Carrying the golden sheaf of wheat upon their white shoulders. / Others, wishing to cross the water with their bare feet, / Lifted their white skirts, blushing and smiling / Disturbing the surface of the clear river with their smooth calves’ – and the Coșula manuscript: ‘So Chiros was greatly angered by the water / Ghindis / for it had caused him harm and he boasted; thus he would make it so shallow that even the women could cross it without getting their knees wet’ (I, 188). The context refers to the wealth of the Assyrians: ‘and the leaf of wheat and oats is four fingers wide, whilst the stalk of maize and sesame is as tall as a small tree’ (I, 192). We might also suppose that Eminescu drew on our own folk literature, but we must ask: what purpose would there have been in transposing an image from folk literature into a text about Lebanon, when this very image is found, in essence, in Herodotus’s account of those same places? The same argument put forward in connection with Moxa’s chronicle – that it refers precisely to the Battle of Rovine – we now invoke in favour of the father of history. Returning to Cyrus, we note this motif of hatred towards a river, which is also characteristic of Xerxes’s hostility towards the Hellespont; in the poem The Life of the World, Miron Costin retains of Cyrus only the memory of this hatred and the connection with Queen Tomyris, of whom more will be said in the present study. Of course, the similarities with Eminescu may well be coincidental; yet they are striking and demonstrate, if not necessarily a direct borrowing, then at least an extraordinary memory of common literary tropes. We find it difficult, for example, to compare the image from The Emperor and the Proletarian: ‘Winter gardens, greenery / Summer festivities, the Alps with their icy peaks: / They turn night into day and close the eyes of the day” – with a passage from the same translation: “… he made many candles and lit them. These caused night to come instead of day, so that they might live for twelve years. And they drank and ate, never parting day or night, and revelled in the woods and groves. And wherever he heard of a beautiful walk, there he would go, to find joy, all the while hoping the spell would pass" (II, 133). It is a common trope of ‘decadence’ – and we believe Eminescu had Salustius in mind rather than anyone else.
The poet’s practice of noting down in a Fragmentarium what he particularly liked from his readings is well known. He would later use the images or expressions he had noted in various contexts. In Memento mori we find two lines that demonstrate his ability to synthesise metaphors and expressions that have become commonplace in scholarship: ‘There stand savage blacks with their stone axes /…/ A wolf’s head is their cap, bear skins on their shoulders’ – where the ‘wolf’s head’ is the well-known emblem of the Dacians, whilst ‘bear skin’ reminds us of Porphyry’s no less well-known gloss on the name of the god Zalmoxis (‘zalmos’ meaning ‘bear skin’ in the Thracian language). Given the concentration of imagery in such narrow contexts, might we not consider that, with regard to the ‘blacks’, the poet has in mind Hasdeu’s famous studies of the time on the Basarab coat of arms – the three black heads (Arabs)? (Hasdeu, who complains that Eminescu uses his ideas in his political studies!) In constructing a mythological history of human civilisation (in the manner of Lucretius, for example), Eminescu selects specific, Romanian realities, as if wishing to suggest that the primitive homeland of the Indo-Europeans (or, more broadly, the cradle of history itself) lies in the ‘paradise of Dacia’. Indeed, in Letter III, in the description of the battle, we find the line: ‘On their land, it seems to them that the whole sky is crumbling’ (which, from a stylistic point of view, defines the vertical dimension of the conflict between Bayezid and Mircea) – a striking resemblance to Strabo’s account of the beliefs of the Celts in the Adriatic Gulf (Celtic tribes scattered and later absorbed into the Thracian mass): they declared to Alexander the Great that they feared nothing in the world except that the sky might fall upon the earth (Strabo, VIII, 3, 8). Indeed, this fear of the Celts was not their own. The Dacians themselves would hurl arrows at the sky, threatening it, before a storm – and proverbs of the sort ‘The sky is falling on…’ exist among the Greeks, the Latins and the Romance peoples alike (and we Romanians, following in our ancestors’ footsteps, have an alliterative form, now disguised: ‘the sky is falling on’ – from ‘Cadit [ruit = crumbles] caelum’). Applied to the invading army, this fear proves to stem from the place itself, by this complex of elements – ‘dough’, as Eminescu puts it in his political articles on the ‘man-nature’ unity in the history of the homeland – as a specific form of self-defence, as an organic reaction to repel the foreign. Its agent is, as in the religion of the Dacians, the arrow, and the effect manifests itself gradually: first the ‘horizon’ narrows from the sides, then the ‘clouds’ of arrows and hail raining down upon the earth, threatening total destruction and the transformation of the aggressors into ‘nothing but water and earth’: ‘And striking them from front and rear, like the north wind and the frost / Upon the earth, it seems to them as though the whole sky were crumbling’. This is the supreme expression of the alliance between the soil of the homeland and the liberating army.
We return to Herodotus to quote, not without interest, Queen Tomyris’s message to Cyrus, which bears a strong resemblance to Mircea’s first reply to Bayezid: “O King of the Medes, desist from the scheme you are plotting, for you cannot know whether they will be willing or not. And if you desist, you may rule your own land, whilst we shall be left to rule the territories we now hold. But if you refuse to heed me and make this agreement, and wish to do everything to ensure you find no peace, and if you have a great desire to test yourself against the Massagetae as well, cease from the labour of building bridges, for we shall provide you with a route from the river into our land, a three-day’s journey, and thus you may come to us. And if you so wish, grant us passage for three days’ journey through your land, and you may do as you please, for we shall leave you to your own devices.” (I, 205; for the ending, see variant B, v. 204: “So you wish there to be a battle? You have chosen it! Let there be battle!”). The events take place on the River Araxos, near the Aral Sea: Cyrus, wishing to conquer the territory of the Massagetae, proceeds strategically by first building a bridge across the water – whilst Queen Tomyris proposes open battle. The motif must have been repeatedly echoed in the depths of Asia, since it endured right up to the days of Vasile Alecsandri, in the folk ballad The Tatar (published by the bard in Albina românească, 25 March 1843, with the subtitle ‘old song’): of course, slightly altered, ‘well’ adapted by the collector. It is a speech by a Romanian to the Tatar across the river, a speech which, in the poet’s interpretation, becomes an interior monologue before becoming a ‘national’ song:
Hey, Tatar, hold your horse
, Hey, Tatar, pull in the reins,
Hey, Tatar, leave the bank, Do
not try to cross the river,
For, by the cross of the holy law!
Of the two of you, across the border,
Nothing, truly, will come of it,
Hey, Tatar, hey, Tatar!
/../
Hey, Tatar, where’s your sword?…
O Tatar, where is your horse?
O Tatar, where is your pride?…
Did I not tell you not to cross the bank?
This is the cause of the dispute between the river-dwellers (who have become rivals), present both in Queen Tomyris’s speech and in Eminescu’s dialogue between Mircea and Bayezid. Since antiquity, the plans have changed: Cyrus attacks from the south, the ‘Tatar’ attacks from the east; these shifts, in turn, add new elements or disrupt the original fabric of the plot. The aggressor is urged to stop, to mind his own business or (in Eminescu’s version) to turn back – but, as is characteristic of the archaic layer, the defender does not boast, does not overwhelm the aggressor with the glory of personal deeds, etc., but appeals to the abstract concept of ‘fate’ (‘written’, in Eminescu’s words), which is unpredictable. Equality in the face of the future is proposed as a chain of events flowing logically from one another or according to a hidden, divine logic, and particular emphasis is placed on the unforeseen—on what can happen to anyone at any time, without warning.
In Book IV, 127 of Herodotus, we find another speech, this time by Idanthirs 7, king of the Scythians, addressed to Darius (events are taking place much further west than those involving the Massagetae: the Persians, on their imperial march, are heading towards Europe): ‘My situation, O Persian, is as follows: I have never, not even in the past, fled out of fear of any man; nor do I flee from you now, nor do I do anything different from what I did when I was at peace. And as for why I am not fighting you now, I shall explain it to you. We have neither fortresses nor sown fields which, for fear they might be ruined, would prevent us from waging war against you. And if you wish us to reach those places more swiftly, we have our forefathers’ buried treasures; go and find them, and dig them up, and then you will see: shall we fight for buried treasures? But before that, without cause, we will not fight. As for this war, this is my answer to you; as for tribute, land and water, I shall send you the gifts that are rightfully yours to receive. And since you have said that you are my master, I tell you to weep” (the episode that follows, concerning the gifts to Darius, is elaborated upon by Eminescu in Gemenii).
As for the first part of Idanthirs’ speech, let us recall that, in similar terms, the resistance of the Romanians throughout history was explained, in the year 1658 (this is precisely the time to which Iorga dates the manuscript translation of Herodotus that we are using) the monk Paul of Aleppo was told about the resilience of the Romanians throughout history: “We have these mountains and forests as our castles and fortresses, against which no enemy can prevail. Had it been otherwise, and had we had cities within our territory, the Turks would long since have driven us out of it’8 Let us then recall that, at a moment of great crisis, when Xerxes’ armies had invaded Hellas, conquering city after city, the Athenian strategist Themistocles persuaded his citizens to leave the walls of the city of Athens by uttering the famous words: ‘The city is where its sons are’ (the words are recorded by Aeschylus in The Persians). What for Idanthirs (and in the traditional Romanian mindset) represents a way of life is also borne out, in extreme situations, in the case of a civilisation such as the Hellenic one, for example, which flourished through its cities.
We do not know to what extent Eminescu fully appreciates the second part of Idanthirs’s speech, concerning the tombs of the forefathers. As a keen scholar of his country’s history, the poet is, of course, aware that the first Moldavian princes, for example, did not choose their burial sites in the capital fortress, but in market towns and even remote villages so that their remains might not be discovered and desecrated by barbarian invaders. What is needed is something hidden, a ‘spiritus loci’ – as Idanthirs puts it – to maintain cohesion, to bind man to the land through his connection to his ancestors, that is, to himself. This is the moment to dare, at the risk – indeed, with the desire – of being contradicted. We can find allusions to this in the line ‘Remain in the holy shadow, Basarabs and you Musatins’, or in Mircea’s words: ‘I would never wish for you to come to know us’, which precisely expresses the idea of the Scythian king. We know that, following the voivode’s participation in the coalition at Nicopolis, as a punishment, Bayezid came to Wallachia to seize the relics of the two saints – Paraschiva and Filoteia – which Mircea had purchased, with the sultan’s consent, from south of the Danube and brought to his realm (perhaps also to strengthen the Orthodox faith against the trend towards Catholicism). The relics of Saint Paraschiva are indeed taken by the sultan (and will only later be purchased by Vasile Lupu for the ‘Three Hierarchs’ Church’) – but not those of Saint Filoteia: the prince probably had time to hide them somewhere ‘beyond the Argeș’, as the poet 9 puts it. She is, without a doubt, the ‘Lady’ to whom the son of the ‘stately prince’ sends his note of thanks for the victory:
Something hidden is needed, a ‘spiritus loci’ – as Idanthirs means to say – to maintain cohesion, to bind man to the land through his connection to his ancestors, that is, to himself.
From the Valley of Ruins
we speak, Lady, to You
, Not with our mouths, but through the book
, For You are so far away.
We beseech You, O Great One, to
send me through someone
What is most proud in Your valley:
The forest with its plumes
, The eyes with their brows;
For I too shall
send What is most proud among us:
My army with its banners,
The forest with its branches,
The high helmet with its plumes,
The eyes with their brows.
And know that I am well,
For, giving thanks to Christ,
I kiss you, my lady, most tenderly.
Many details in the poem suggest that it may refer to a Christian saint. Firstly, Mircea’s threat invoking the martyrdom of Jesus Christ: ‘If not, I shall exchange your crown for a branch of thorns’ (whereas the sultan had demanded submission using a phrase customary amongst Christian princes: ‘I have come to make you bow down to me’ – a demand which Mircea categorically reduces to the level of the ‘tribute’ demanded by the barbarians in antiquity. ‘No,’ says the prince, ‘you have not come in the name of the Christian faith but, like other barbarians who have come this way before, to demand “land and water”’) – then, the religious terms used redundantly in the very spirit of the conflict itself, which is, we repeat, vertical in nature, between the divinity and the aggressor – the ruler being merely the instrument of cosmic vengeance, the one who invokes and provokes it. With regard to this letter, the issues raised seem, as it were, destined to remain unsolvable. Without delving into dry matters of ‘criticism of criticism’, we recall that the young gentleman ‘speaks’ to his beloved, ‘Not from the mouth, but from the book’ – and in the manuscript versions of the poem: ‘A book with four corners / Written with my own tears / With tears running down the sides / A fiery pearl in the middle’. Now, this is the standard definition of the Bible in folk literature. The young gentleman ‘speaks’ from the Bible; that is to say, he conducts a thanksgiving service for victory following the classical Latin and Hellenic model, or following the example of Stephen the Great who, after the Battle of Vaslui: ‘For which victory Stephen did not take pride, but fasted for four days on bread and water and commanded throughout his realm that no one should dare to attribute that victory to him, save God alone, even though it is a well-known fact that the victory on that day was due to him alone’ – as the Polish historian I. Długosz notes, not without some astonishment (in Gheorghe Șincai’s translation 10). Two reasons led Eminescu to remove this definition of the Bible from the final text: firstly, amongst the common people, the simple word ‘book’ refers to the Bible; secondly, the definition appears in folk literature primarily in folk dirges – yet the young gentleman announces an absolute victory, with no casualties. The portrait of the Lady in the fortune slip is organised around the main elements of Byzantine iconography: ‘the eyes and the eyebrows’. The first response to the rhyme – ‘The forest and the glades’ – forms an interesting semantic symmetry (‘glades’ – an allusion to ‘eyes’ in the first line; see the expression ‘forest eyes’, which means precisely ‘glade’). The atmosphere of the fortune slip evokes those time-honoured ‘glades’ and groves, with guardian deities, icons, etc., perpetuating a millennia-old cult 11. The phrase ‘the forest, brother to the Romanian’ is replaced by another: ‘the Romanian, brother to the forest’; a symmetrical repetition of elements suggesting the mirroring of one in the other, their merging. However, this does not happen of its own accord, as in a primitive pantheism: nature has its own ‘neural centres’ towards which man turns, protecting them, concealing them (as in Idanthirs’ discourse), and activating them. Moreover, the phrase ‘Send me… that I too may send’ echoes, in a reversed form, the elementary structure of the archaic Latin prayer to the deity (the principle of ‘Do ut des’: ‘I give to you so that you may give to me’) – and is found in our funeral laments:
But I shall pray to you
to send me the little shirt
on the whistling wind
through the depths of the earth
, and I shall wash it
white for you and wipe your cheek
with it, so that you may see my sorrow12
Family members implore the deceased to remain pure, in the garments in which he was laid to rest, to maintain a connection with the world above and to share in its ‘grief’, to ‘see’ them so as to comfort them. For the same purpose, Darius is summoned from his grave in Aeschylus’ The Persians; the phrases used by the chorus are strikingly similar to those in the Romanian funeral lament (a strange word also appears there: the king is insistently addressed by the title ‘baden’, a term unexplained in Greek and considered to be of Persian origin; our dictionaries list ‘bade’ as having, naturally, ‘unknown etymology’!). The parallels continue in the oracle: in the line ‘My army with its banners’, the term ‘army’ takes the place of ‘eyes’ and, respectively, ‘poems’. In the poem, the army is depicted in circular forms: there is mention of ‘clusters’ of horsemen who ‘swarm at a signal’, ‘fill the field’, and surround the enemy forces, destroying them. The entire battle evokes the process of clearing a field of crops: the forces of evil are singled out (order is brought to the chaotic disorder of the invasion), surrounded and destroyed. In one version of the poem, at the end of the battle, as night falls, the soldiers light fires at the edge of the camp – to consecrate the purified territory and mark its boundary. The sentries stand by the fires with their spears stuck in the ground (as in Homer) and call out, dozing: ‘I see you, I see you!’. The phrase, spoken just like that, twice, forms part of the night watchman’s repertoire as he guards the crops: it is not thieves the watchman fears, but the evil, unseen spirits, whom he summons and threatens in their very essence: ‘I see you, I see you!’, thereby nullifying their effect and driving them away. We recall Eminescu’s conclusion regarding the Basarab and Mușat families: “With plough and sword you extended your domain / From the mountains to the sea and the blue Danube.” The plough is the agricultural tool that breaks up the earth, turning it over to make it ready to receive the seed of the new growing cycle – the sword is the weapon that defends and watches over this purification. In such contexts, the ancients would offer prayers to the deity (Mars Pater) to preserve the order created by man amidst the chaos of the field. An orderly development of the estate, through successive purifications (the Battle of Rovine being one of them) in harmony with the cosmic order. The expression ‘by plough and sword’ may have a ‘history’ of its own: these two instruments are far too important not to have formed a pair. In Aeschylus’s Suppliants, we learn of the prophet-healer Apis of Naupactus, who comes to rid the land of the Pelasgians of the monsters that devour living flesh (grieving over the first bloodshed amongst men, Gea brought snakes to her breast to bite her, soothing her pain). The process of purification: Apis slays the monsters with his sword and then ploughs the earth. Afterwards, he builds roads, making the land habitable for people. We might be tempted to believe that Eminescu took Aeschylus himself as his model – but we know, on the other hand, that the motto ‘ense et aratro’ (‘with the sword and the plough’) also belonged to Prince Carol I. This would not be the only allusion to the prince in the poem: whilst Eminescu allows room for irony in Bayezid’s words: ‘At Nicopolis you saw…’ (Carol watched, not without envy, from the left bank of the Danube the Battles of Nicopolis) – he nevertheless preserves, on the other hand, in the poem as well as in his political articles following the War of Independence, at least one of the prince’s sayings, “the book of the ages”, from a daily order issued to the army upon the capture of the Grivița redoubt.
The plough is the agricultural implement that breaks up the earth, turning it over and preparing it to receive the seed for the new growing cycle – the sword is the weapon that defends and watches over this purification.
- 1
D. Caracostea, ‘Eminescu’s Symbols’, a lecture delivered at the Romanian Academy to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death. (in D. Caracostea: Studies on Eminescu, edited and annotated by I. Dumitrescu, Bucharest, 1975, p. 138)
- 2
Al. Vlahuță, Selected Writings, edited by V. Rîpeanu, E.P.L. 1963, vol. II, p. 425: ‘Memories of Eminescu’; ‘the serenity and grandeur of classical tragedies’ is a common phrase used by Vlahuță, we believe, to define classical tragedy, and not specifically Eminescu’s attitude towards Aeschylus, whose work is difficult to categorise under the term ‘serenity’.
- 3
G. Călinescu, The Works of Mihai Eminescu, E.P.L. 1969 / 2nd ed. /, vol. I, p. 379.
- 4
G. Călinescu, The Works of Mihai Eminescu, E.P.L. 1969 / 2nd ed., pp. 375–376.
- 5
See, amongst others, C. Poghirc, ‘Classical Echoes in Eminescu’s Poetry’, in Studii clasice, X, 1968. Eugen Cizec provides a careful analysis of this translation in Studii clasice.
- 6
This is noted by P. Cernovodeanu in his study ‘Eminescu and Romanian Chronographs’, published in Caietele M. Eminescu.
- 7
The name is composed of ‘Ida’ and ‘thyrs’ (staff, club). In M. Eminescu’s Dictionary of Rhymes, edited by Marin Bucur and Victoria Ana Tăușan, Bucharest 1976, we find among the rhymes ‘Agathyrse’ (p. 261), ‘Agatirs’ (p. 395), ‘Agatirz’ (p. 434) etc., whilst the definition of ‘tyrs’ is given in Luceafărul: ‘And he holds in his hand a staff / crowned with reeds’.
- 8
Quoted in Constantin C. Giurescu, ‘The History of the Romanian Forest from the Earliest Times to the Present Day’, 2nd ed., Bucharest, 1976, p. 46. Eminescu frequently quotes Paul of Aleppo, particularly in his journalistic writings, in connection with Matei Basarab, at whose court the Western traveller had stayed.
- 9
In this regard, Eminescu was unable to consult Bishop Melchisedec directly.
- 10
Gheorghe Șincai, The Chronicle of the Romanians, edited by Florea Fugariu, with notes by Manole Neagoe, B.P.T., 1978, p. 175.
- 11
An interesting analysis of the ancient cult of groves in Romanian literature, with particular reference to Eminescu, is provided by Cornel Mihai Ionescu in Teiul sofianic (in the volume Palimpseste, published by C.R., 1979, pp. 53–76). We should mention that we have drawn on many suggestions for our interpretation from the author, among whose students we were fortunate enough to be counted.
- 12
We have taken this folk lament from Marin Preda’s Moromeții, ESPLA, 1955, p. 83.