English readers’ interest in Mihai Eminescu’s life and work may well find a modicum of assistance in the present sampler of translations from his poetry—and the comments attached to them — mostly from more inclusive perspectives from the history of European ideas. Eminescu’s tug of war throughout his young adult education in Schopenhauerian scepticism and late romantic sentimentalism is evident in everything he wrote, be they „epistles” or simple jingles. It is quite possible as well that the burden of undecidability at the heart of Eminescu’s poetics may go a long way towards explaining the appeal to the like-minded, politically and esthetically conflicted audiences it held during his lifetime and later. The 5 poems by Eminescu herewith are clearly better illustrations of the long European tradition of poetry as a privileged locus for existential irresolutions rather than as indicators of Eminescu’s own convictions
regarding life, love and his fellow countrymen in seasons of transition.
Translating this emblem-like selection into English I undertook as a means of communicating to the romanian-less reader a sense of the pace with which Eminescu’s subject matter is broached within a particular poem’s aparent design on the page. Hopefully the translation may be able to hint at other modalities—Shifts in imagery? Frames and range of allusion? Noticeable linguistic or typographical patterns?—through which his vocabulary makes any statement whatsoever. The reader may need to be reminded that, profoundly unlike English, Romanian is a notoriously rhyme rich language.
For the benefit of English-savvy Romanians—who are not few—I am appending two of the most beautiful poems of the English language that are rhyme-free; for the sheer enjoyment of their reading:
John Milton (1608-1674) : : On His Blindness
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
John Keats (1795–1821)
O Thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm tops ’mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge—I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.
Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889)
Cu gândiri și cu imagini
Înnegrit-am multe pagini:
Ș-ale cărții, ș-ale vieții,
Chiar din zorii tinereții.
Nu urmați gândirei mele:
Căci noianu-i de greșele,
Urmărind prin întuneric
Visul vieții-mi cel himeric.
Neavând învăț și normă,
Fantezia fără formă
Rătăcit-a, vai! cu mersul:
Negru-i gândul, șchiop e viersul.
Și idei, ce altfel împle,
Ard în frunte, bat sub tâmple:
Eu le-am dat îmbrăcăminte
Prea bogată, fără minte.
Ele samănă, hibride,
Egiptenei piramide:
Un mormânt de piatr-în munte
Cu icoanele cărunte,
Și de sfinxuri lungi alee,
Monoliți și propilee,
Fac să crezi că după poartă
Zace-o-ntreagă țară moartă.
Intri nuntru, sui pe treaptă,
Nici nu știi ce te așteaptă.
Când acolo! sub o faclă
Doarme-un singur rege-n raclă. *
My thoughts and images
have inked countless pages
both in life and in my books
ever since my greenest youth.
Should you follow my thoughts’
trail you’ll find errors without fail:
in pursuing my life’s mark
I did fumble in the dark.
With no standard and untrained,
my vagrant fancy unrestrained
wandered off along the way:
thoughts all black, the verses lame.
Ideas, which most things inform,
churn under my brow and throb
between my temples; ideas I dressed
up far too richly, yet mindlessly.
They are such hybrids, Egyptian
Pyramids-like. Or like a stone
memorial in the mountains,
with small and humble icons,
Sphinxes in long rows or colonnaded
causeways leading you to believe
that behind the gate lies a whole
country dead, prostrate.
Should you walk in, you climb a step,
you don’t know what to expect;
except for one single torch, and under
it, one lone king lying in state.
* The modesty topos of the lengthy, upening build-up are a way of providing contrast to the drama of the conclusion; lest we forget the 19th Century, in Europe and elsewhere, was a time of widespread and undisputed indentification between kingdoms and divinely anointed royalty in pose-like stances.
De mult mă lupt cătând în vers măsura,
Ce plină e ca toamna mierea-n faguri,
Ca s-o aştern frumos în lungi şiraguri,
Ce fără piedeci trec sunând cezura.
Ce aspru mişcă pânza de la steaguri,
Trezind în suflet patima şi ura –
Dar iar cu dulce glas îţi umple gura
Atunci când Amor timid trece praguri!
De l-am aflat la noi a spune n-o pot;
De poţi s-auzi în el al undei şopot,
De e al lui cu drept acest preambul –
Aceste toate singur nu le judec…
Dar versul cel mai plin, mai blând şi pudic,
Puternic iar de-o vrea e pururi iambul.
Long have I struggled in my verses for the beat
that’s as sweet as autumn honey in the comb,
one that I would reel out in long neat lines sailing
past the mid-verse pause with infinite aplomb.
The exuberant beat that I sought out ought
to arouse passion, or hatred, in the soul; or
the sweet tones that fill your mouth whenever
shy Love crosses the threshold.
I can’t really say if I discovered it here at home or
whether in it, you can hear a stream murmuring
the preamble of a genealogy of its own—a
bit much for one man to judge. But, for a fulsome line
that’s decorous, meek and also a strong one
too, if it so agrees—now and forever, take the iamb.
* * *
Cum negustorii din Constantinopol
Întind în piață diferite mărfuri,
Să ieie ochii la efenzi și popol,
Astfel la clăi de vorbe eu fac vârfuri
De rime splendizi, să le dau de trampe,
Sumut o lume ș-astfel ochii lor fur.
Dactilu-i cit, troheele sunt stambe,
Și-i diamant peonul, îndrăznețul.
Dar astăzi, cititori, eu vă vând iambe,
Și mare n-o să vi se pară prețul:
Nu bani vă cer, ci vremea și auzul.
Aprinde-ți pipa și așază-ți jețul
La gura sobei, cum o cere uzul;
Citește cartea ce îți cade-n mână
Și vezi de nu-i mărgăritar hurmuzul,
Ce-n mână-l ai de-acum o săptămână. **
Not unlike Constantinople traders who show
off their wares in the marketplace to catch
the eye of both commoners and lords,
at the wordsmiths’ fair I too am after heights
of splendid rhymes with which to barter; I call up
whole worlds trying to catch their sights.
Dactyls are my broadcloth, trochees are calico,
the brash paeonians are my diamond. This day’s
special, beloved reader, I hawk an iamb.
The price should not seem high; I am
not after your money, but your ear
and your time. Light up, then,
sit back, as custom requires, curl by the fire,
read the book that came to hand, consider, also,
if the baroque gem you have been thumbing
through, a week now, is not, in fact, a pearl.
** The first few bars of the iamb poem are aporetic. The speaker is a questing craftsman in search of a rhythmical passe-par-tout while he is actually using it! Poems reflecting on their own tropes, meters, search patterns—inventio; and eventual „fall” into a publication!—are particularly popular with minds drawn to structures ranging from word play to plain showmanship. The striking metaphor of the poet as a dealer in fabrics is true to the etymology of weaving, in all IndoEuropean languages, and its cognates in such words as the „weft” of cloth making, and its thread-by-thread resemblance to hymning. And for the record, the „Negustorii” poem is a lightly prolongued sonetto caudato.
Sonet
Sunt ani la mijloc și-ncă mulți vor trece
Din ceasul sfânt în care ne-ntâlnirăm,
Dar tot mereu gândesc cum ne iubirăm,
Minune cu ochi mari și mână rece.
O, vino iar! Cuvinte dulci inspiră-mi,
Privirea ta asupra mea să plece,
Sub raza ei mă lasă a petrece
Și cânturi nouă smulge tu din liră-mi.
Tu nici nu știi a ta apropiere
Cum inima-mi de-adânc o liniștește,
Ca răsărirea stelei în tăcere;
Iar când te văd zâmbind copilărește,
Se stinge-atunci o viață de durere,
Privirea-mi arde, sufletul îmi crește. ***
A Sonnet
Long years have come and gone, and more are
rolling in, since the blessed hour we first met;
I still keep thinking back to how our love began,
you big-eyed marvel of the cold hands.
Come back to me. With sweet words
inspire me. Turn your gaze towards me,
let me bask in its beam; and out
of my lyre do draw new songs for me.
You have no conception how my heart
calms down around you: being close
to you is so like the rising, in silence, of a star.
And when I watch you, child-like,
smile, then lifetime-long hurts vanish
the fire is back in me, my soul expands.
*** The motif of blessings bestowed upon the day and hour of the lovers’ first encounter was of venerable antiquity among the stilnovisti. Love lyrics, from Sappho onwards (φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν || to Catullus, Ille mi par esse deo videtur) are weighted by the projection of a near divine epiphany. The tone is no mere expression of feelings. The crushing ponderousness of the event can be traced to Euripides, and more specifically to the scene in which Phaedra is devastated by the love she experiences at the sight of her stepson Hippolytus in a public ritual. (Bernhard König, Die Begegnung im Tempel: Abwandlungen eines literarischen Motivs in den Werken Boccaccios (1960). In a self-sacralizing vein Christina Rossetti considered herself to be a descendant of Laura, no less („. . . Benedetto sia ’l giorno, et ’l mese, et l’anno”) in her article on Petrarch in the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857-1863).
Privesc oraşul furnicar –
Cu oameni mulţi şi muri bizari,
Pe străzi largi cu multe bolţi,
Cu câte-un chip l-a străzii colţ.
Şi trec foind, râzând, vorbind,
Mulţime de-oameni paşi grăbind
Dar numai p-ici şi pe colea
Merge unul de-a-nletelea,
Cu ochii-n cer, pe şuierate,
Ţiindu-şi mâinile la spate.
S-aude clopot răsunând,
Cu prapuri, cruci, icoane, viind,
Preoţii lin şi în veştminte
Cântând a cărţilor cuvinte.
În urmă vin ca-ntr-un prohod;
Tineri, femei, copii, norod;
Dar nu-i prohod – sfinţire de-apă,
Pe uliţe lumea să nu-ncapă;
Se scurg încet – tarra bumbum –
Ostaşii vin în marş acum,
Naintea lor tambur-major,
Voinic el calcă din picior
Şi tobe tare-n tact ei bat
Şi paşii sună apăsat;
Lucesc şi armele în şir,
Frumos stindarde se deşir;
Ei trec mereu – tarra bumbum –
Şi dup-un colţ dispar acum…
O fată trece c-un profil
Rotund şi dulce de copil,
Un câne fuge speriat,
Şuier-un lotru de băiet,
Într-o răspântie uzată
Şi-ntinde-un orb mâna uscată,
Hamalul trece încărcat,
Şi orologiile bat –
Dar nimeni mai nu le ascultă
De vorbă multă, lume multă. ****
I’m looking at the anthill city
—folk past count, bizarre
abutments, wide streets,
arcade after arcade. On each
corner there stands a strange type.
Faces laughing, as they pass by,
chatting, hurrying on. There goes
someone, cool, easy going, stylish,
hands behind his back, his eyes
sky-wards gazing, suavely
whistling. Of a suddena church
bell tolls, and priests
with crosses, banners, and holy
icons, chant out the writing
in their books. Youths, women,
children, with a multitude behind
them, just like a cortege,
though really not a cortege;
it is the day of the Hallowing
of the Waters—the streets can barely
contain the throng slowly
pouring in—tara ta boom—and troops
marchings in lock-step. The strapping
drum major is goose-stepping to the snare
drums’ beat, all pounding in time, all
planting down heavy feet upon the ground.
Shiny rifles march in ranks under unfurled
flags, filing past, now—tara boom boom—
they turn a corner, and are no more
to be seen . . . . A girl with a child’s face
walks by. A frightened dog is on the run,
a nonchallant thieving street boy whistles too
is whistling; then a beggar stretches out
a shrivelled hand at a crowded cross
road. A porter passes bowed down
by his load. The clocks strike the hour but
who can hear them. what with the endless talk
and the many many folk
**** Iconographic precedents for panoramic genre pieces are to be found in Jacques Callot’s Impruneta Fair (1138 people, 45 horses, 67 donkeys, and 137 dogs; 1622); James Ensor, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, wide brush strokes making no distinction between people’s faces and their masks. Musicologically, the analogy of cataloguing is there in Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874 [publ. in 1886] and Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, 1911. Literary precedent is to be found in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), and Émile Verhaeren, Les Villes tentaculaires, 1895, all quasi–operatic parade, as recently as modern French songs’ invitation to la foule Parisienne. The morphology of the idiom aims at snapshops of the heart of city life” live.” Hence fragments of city architecture, large and small gatherings in motion, an excentric or two, animalsll, instrumentalists, derelict individuals, a cathedral, and physical laborers. The wide-angle point of view is an attractive anticipation of the emergence of the kindred genre of street photography.
