The Last Romantic

By Roy MacGregor- Hastie

 As I noted in the introduction to my anthology of contemporary
Romanian poetry Every Romanian writer acknowledges his debt to
Eminescu often referred to as the Romanian Shakespeare, the
poet of his countrys national consciousness, the sitting bard at the
time of his countrys liberation from centuries of Turkish rule...
Certainly, in the period of less than a century which has elapsed
since Eminescus death, the library of domestic writings about the
man and his works has become almost suspiciously large.
Yet in the English-speaking world, the Romanian national poet s
virtually unknown.
Does this mean, at the best, that Eminescu is so Romanian as
to be unintelligible to readers in Britain, America, the
Commonwealth or, at worst, that the Romanians, in the afterglow
of liberation, felt they had to have a Shakespeare and so huffed
and puffed the most likely candidate?
Faced with this sort of question, the comparatist, and the
enthusiast, turn to the rest of Europe to try to discover some critical
consensus. Here we come up against a problem peculiar to the
literature of minority languages. There are few non-Romanians
capable of reading, much less speaking (and so hearing the sounds
of the music of the poetry) the language, and those who tend to be
diplomats, traders, and journalists, not categories renowned for literary
sensibility. The Leavis-Batenson-Wilson type of critic, where at all
interested in literatures other than English, French, German, and now
Russian, tends to restrict his interest to areas in which the foreign
literature has had an obvious impact on the national. The work of
Romanian writers like Tzara (founder of Dadaism) and Ionescu tends to
filter throught to him, anyway, via French. A translation into it is to be
sold to the Anglophone critic. Perhaps the selling is even more difficult
than the translation, for literature in translation still tends to be treated as
a novelty in Britain and America, notwithstanding the fact that Chaucer
(with whom Eminescu has some affinity) published three times more
translation than he did original work. The Times Literary Supplements
noted in 1969 that according to the UNESCO Translation Index Britain
made a very poor showing indeed in the field. No Nobel prize for literature
has ever been given to a translator, though the Swedes, who award the
prize, for the most part know the prize-winning authors only in translation.
Yet in a literary and academic world of constant shifts of emphasis and
reshuffling of criteria, it seems to many that the ability to pass through the
translation barrier and emerge as literature is prima facie evidence that
the work translated does posses the quality of universality.
 If the criterion of translatability is a valid one, then Eminescu
deserves a place in the canon of European literature. Of the magazine
Literary Conversations for June/September 1939, 945 pages are taken up
with references to and comments on the influence of translation of
Eminescu in other literatures. The first translations of Eminescu in other
literatures. The first translation of his work appeared in German, in the
anthology Rumnische Dichtungen during the poets lifetime and the book
ran to three editions before his death in 1889. The first Italian translation
(of a sonnet) was published in 1887 in the anthology Il Libro Damore ; this
anthology enjoyed a great commercial success and was expanded to four
volumes, volumes II and IV containing more Eminescu. In 1890 N Eminescu
poem was included in the magazines Szilagysomlyc and Russkaya Mysl.
The first volume of Eminescus verse in the translation was into German
(1892), to be followed by Margareta Millers French Quelques Posies in
1910. A section of the poets verse, essays and short stories, Gedichte,
Novellen, came out in German in 1913 and in Swedish in 1920. Poems by
Eminescu were included in Romanian anthologies in Spanish (1920) and
Yiddish (1921) translation, and the first volume of poems in Slovak
appeared in 1927 (together with a translation of part of Eminescus novel
Barren Genius) and in Albania in 1929.
 It was in 1929 that Sylvia Pankhurst discovered Eminescu in
some English versions of his poems done by I. O. tefanovici.
With some time on her hands after her recent victories in the
war for womens emancipation, and full of enthusiasm, she
commissioned more draft translation from tefanovici and
reworked them into English version of her own. She was in fact
so enthusiastic about her discovery that she was able to
communicate some of her excitement to George Bernard Shaw,
who contributed a preface to the Eminescu collection Miss
Pankhursts political flair was more notable than her skill as a
versifier and, mercifully, the book sank without a trace into the
shallows of the secondhand bookshops and dustbins.
Throughout the next four decades, selection from, and
volumes of, Eminescus work were published in many
languages other than English. Rafael Alberti, introducing a
volume which appeared in Buenos Ares in 1965, was probably
the first major poet to give Eminescu European ranking,
drawing a poet of favourable comparisons with Bcquer.
About EMINESCU
Eminescu has often been linked to other geniuses of world lyricism although as yet the
world literary conscience has not accepted him at a level of a Goethe, Pushkin, Byron, Victor
Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mayakovsky and others The explanation lies in the difficulty of
finding translators at the level of the original.
Mihai Eminescu was born on 15 January 1850 at Ipotesti, being the seventh child of
Gheorghe and Raluca Eminovici. He had, then, four brothers and two sisters, and was to
have two more sisters and another brother. Mihai may have attended the village school at
Ipotesti. In the antum of 1860 he went up to the Imperial and Royal Gymnasium at Cernui,
but seems to have tried of this by Easter 1863.
He had already adopted the surname Eminescu as sounding more Romanian and a
picture of him (to quote G. Calinescu) as an astral, long-haired youth, his head full of
patriotism , tradition and the simple dignity of Nature. In January 1866 Mihai was deeply
affected by the death of his former teacher, Aron Pumnul, a romantic figure who had taken
part in the 1848 revolution. Then he composed a funeral ode which he published, together
with six others by his contemporaries, in a pamphlet entitled Pupils little tears.
 The first of Eminsecus poems appeared in The family was If I Had and was
fallowed by five more poems scattered throughout three issues of the magazine. In
any event, he joined a company of travelling players run by Caragiale. From 1868
until the summer of 1869, he worked at the National Theatre in Bucharest. During his
theatrical career he continued to contribute poems to The family, and also drafts
for a novel (Barren Genius) and other prose works.
Mihais father persuaded him to take up his studies again and in the autumn of
1869 he registered as a student in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Vienna.
He continued to write, longer poems, and sent these on the advice of a friend to the
magazine Literary Conversations, published by the Iassy literary society Youth.
During 1870 the magazine accepted his poem Venus and Madonna, and he started
work on his epic Panorama of Vanities.
By the summer of 1872 he seems to have tired of Vienna. In any event, he left
the university with a diploma and registered as a student in the Faculty of
Philosophy of Berlin. Here it is perhaps useful to recall that Eminescu had been
bilingual since his days at the German-speaking Gymnasium at Cernui. In
September 1874 Eminescu became an external student, and was appointed chief
librarian at Iassy on the recommendation of his literary admirers. All this time he was
writing poetry, short stories, contributions to a literary dictionary- and working to a
translation of Kants Critique of Pure Reason.
 He also fell in love in 1875 with the Moldavian poetess Veronica
Micle, then a married woman, who was to be his great love and
mistress until the end of his life, and, after the death of his mother
in 1876, probably the strongest female influence in his life.
In 1876, possibly because of the highly publicized liaison with
Veronica Micle, possibly because of the advanced ideas on the
nature of education he was dismissed from his post as schools
inspector and from then on lived by his writing.
The next three years of Eminescus life were probably the
happiest. His poems, poetry readings, and literary-social life went
well and Veronica was amiable and exciting. For Literary
Conversations he wrote a series of short stories which seemed
likely to establish him as master of a literary genre peculiarly
popular in Romania. From October 1877 he wrote a considerable
amount of drama criticism, which was very well received.
Eminescu was essentially Audens vertical man, and in
political life it is necessary to be happily horizontal from time to
time. He was in fact a misfit in the capital. As G. Calinescu writes:
A rover by nature, he wore shabby clothes through poverty and
lived under low ceilings whose plaster peeled off through leaking
roofs, moreover taking pleasure not devoid of bitterness in nursing
his misery.
The end.