The Image of Light in Eminescu’s Poetry (II)

‘The Core of Light’

Among the more challenging passages in Eminescu’s posthumous poetry, I find it interesting to discuss, in this context of the metaphor of light, the placement of the comma after the first line of ‘A Dac’s Prayer’. The punctuation in Eminescu’s poetry varies from editor to editor – and in the case of the Maiorescu editions, the 11 which the critic edited, there are notable changes and reversals. In practice, the Maiorescu editions were never brought together in one place – until Șerban Cioculescu’s effort in the 1970s – and the Library of the Romanian Academy is the only place where they are all preserved in this way. It was known – or, rather, suspected – that there were differences between them, but these had not been highlighted or catalogued. The Ibrăileanu–Lovinescu controversy during the interwar period is well-known: the critic from Viața românească pointed out dozens of errors in the edition of Eminescu’s poems published by Lovinescu – to which the latter calmly replied that he had done nothing more than reproduce Maiorescu’s edition. The matter remained buried in periodicals, and the current editions of the two men’s works do not resolve it, but rather complicate it further. Indeed, it is clear from our discussions that E. Lovinescu uses Maiorescu’s 11th edition – whilst Ibrăileanu checks his work against the 6th edition. Dialogue is impossible – each of them believing that his own edition is the correct one. It should be noted, however, that Lovinescu’s edition also contains its own errors (typos, oversights) in addition to those in the 11th Maiorescu edition on which it is based. The punctuation, however, does not deviate from that established in this edition by Titu Maiorescu. We shall thus find the two lines from A Dacian’s Prayer with this comma between them: ‘When there was no life, nothing immortal, / Not even the seed of life-giving light,…’ Ibrăileanu himself uses the same punctuation, as do G. Călinescu, C. Botez and Perpessicius – and this is how the text has come down to us, where we find it with this comma at the end of the first line in anthologies, popular editions and school textbooks.

The point is that, in his first four editions, Titu Maiorescu does not include this comma – and that the poem was published by Eminescu himself in Convorbiri literare, on 1 September 1879, also without that comma. It is worth emphasising this by comparing the texts. The verb form comes into play here. Our text implies, according to the comma, a repetition: ‘when there was no life’, when there was nothing immortal, when there was not even the life-giving seed of light. It is a sequence of descriptions. If, however, we revisit the text from Convorbiri literare and from the first four Maiorescu editions, and if we emphasise ‘nor’, in accordance with the punctuation, in a statement such as: ‘When there was no life, nothing immortal / Nor was the seed of life-giving light”, this implies the following line of reasoning: whilst there was no life, whilst there was nothing immortal (and) nor was the seed of light life-giving. The emphasis on the adverb ‘nor’ in the flow of recitation draws the verb closer to it. Thus, almost everything changes – because, grammatically speaking, the expression ‘life-giving’ is no longer an attribute of ‘the seed of light’ – but rather a predicative noun. In other words, the core of light was, it existed – but it was not life-giving. Yet this is precisely the logic of the poem and the meaning of Eminescu’s cosmology. The core of light is the arche, and one cannot imagine (conceive of) the moment prior to its existence; categorical light cannot disappear from the universe – nor can it be that it did not once exist: in its state as arche, it is eternity itself. To become a source of life, however, death must first exist in the universe. Cosmogony thus begins with death, just as the day begins with the night. The Dacian in this poem, however, imagines a time when there was neither death nor immortality; that is to say, he creates this pair of opposites. But it seems somewhat absurd: how can there be neither death nor life without death (immortality)? – And between them, not even the seed of light be (yet) a giver of life?

Let us note, for the time being, the state of the text in the manuscripts – whilst observing that these will never provide us with the final answer, but merely a suggestion. Manuscript 2306 1 gives us this version: ‘Back then there was no death, nothing immortal / Nor was the seed of light the Ruler of the world’. Again: the seed of light existed, but had not yet become the Ruler of the world. This mental pattern fully justifies the definitive form found in Convorbiri literare and in the first four Maiorescu editions. Surprisingly, however, manuscript 2260 2, where the poem is titled Nirvana, has a comma between the two lines.

The same manuscript underlines the words ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘yesterday’ and ‘always’ with a single line. The text in Convorbiri does not underline them, whilst the text in the Maiorescu editions retains ‘azi’, ‘mâne’ and ‘ieri’ in italics, to which it adds ‘unul’ and ‘totul’ from the following line. Just look at all these complications… Furthermore, from the ninth edition onwards, Titu Maiorescu has, instead of ‘For one was all and all was one’ – ‘For one was all…’ (followed only by G. Adamescu, Murnu and the aforementioned E. Lovinescu; this is a reading with philosophical implications, which is why it enjoyed its prestige – but it does not belong to Eminescu) – thus, the subject becomes one; he was (not all, not they were one). We shall conclude: since the final text, the one in Convorbiri literare, does not include the underlinings from the Nirvana manuscript, it is logical to assume that this final text also omits the comma after the first line. Furthermore, the mental framework of the earlier manuscript is authoritative. That comma could have been inserted by someone else in the manuscript – or by Eminescu himself, whilst experimenting with different forms. We must uphold his last express wish, as set out in the poem’s first publication, just as Titu Maiorescu did in his first four editions. We have no choice but to ‘think the real’, as Parmenides tells us, that is, to rack our brains to discover what the poet meant, rather than inserting commas into the text to impose a logical-didactic meaning.

As for me, as an editor, I retain the text from Convorbiri and understand it within the context of the interpretation of the ‘aura of light’ in Luceafărul. This, however, refers to the text of Luceafărul published in the Almanahul România Jună, which differs considerably from the Maiorescu editions, and even from Convorbiri literare; but the Almanac has Eminescu’s endorsement because the poet chose it – and it is credible because, in a note in the introduction, the editors state that they will respect the authors’ original writing. We therefore have this hapax legomenon (a word used only once in an author’s work) in Eminescu’s text, in Hyperion’s address to the Demiurge: ‘Restore to me the halo of immortality / And the fire in my gaze’. I’ve said it before: you can go over the text 10 or 20 times and not spot the difference; you read it as it’s stuck in your memory: ‘the halo of immortality’. It is, however, ‘nemurie’: it is not a typographical error, because two letters would have had to be omitted, not just one. The term is reproduced verbatim by the magazine Dunărea in Brăila, where Al. Djuvara republished Luceafărul in June 1883, following the Almanahul România Jună. It must be borne in mind – although it does not appear either in Convorbiri literare (where, however, the poem was published in July 1883, without the knowledge or consent of Eminescu, who had withdrawn from public life on 28 June 1883) nor in the manuscripts (as far as we were able to consult and decipher from the vast collection of manuscripts at Luceafărul) – nor, of course, in the first edition; We shall return to this word. Eminescu appears to have created the pair ‘nemurie / nemurire’, somewhat similar to the German pair ‘umsterblich / unsterblich’ (Mr Dan Pop draws our attention to this, for which we thank him). To be more precise, he could have used the genitive form with three ‘i’s: al nemuriii nimb; this would have been preferable, though not mandatory. We note the gerund form in Creangă: nemurind. Professor Elena Popescu draws our attention to the fact that, in Geniu pustiu, Eminescu uses the term visărie alongside visătorie (such observations are extremely important, and we cannot thank our friends who bring them to our attention enough: dictionaries do not include them, and we have investigated, for ‘nemurie’, only the manuscripts of Luceafărul). It is, therefore, a possible compound term coined by Eminescu, by no means a typographical error.

‘Nemurire’ means, strictly speaking: ‘non-dying’, that is, to live through a cosmic cycle—an eternity—without death; see the condition of the ‘Flying One’ in Călin. ‘Nemurie’, however, means non-involvement in the cycle of life and death, existence outside this cycle, in eternal repose. It would indeed be Hyperion’s very name: ‘He Who Walks Above’. Yet he offers precisely this aura of immortality – for a moment of love, for an eternity, a cosmic cycle. In eternity he will, virtually, lose his name, becoming Cătălin, the counterpart to that of his chosen one. Eminescu’s cosmogony cannot be fully understood without this ‘eternity–eternity’ dichotomy, eternity signifying an infinite succession of eternities. Eminescu may create the pair ‘immortality / immortality’, but he does not create a counterpart for ‘the immortal’. In ‘A Dacian’s Prayer’, however, when he says that there was nothing immortal, things become clear: as there was no death, there was neither immortality nor eternal life. The Dacian refers to the very beginning of beginnings, not to a segment of an age (as in Hyperion’s case), but to the state prior to the first age.

The punctuation oversimplifies things to an unacceptable degree, making the text simplistic rather than simple. Sometimes, however, it is combined with changes to certain words. Here is how the text appears in the Almanac: “You are my very immortality / In exchange for a kiss; / But I want you to know likewise / How deeply I love you; // Though I may be born of sin, / Receiving another law / I am bound to eternity, / Yet I wish to be set free.”

Hyperion converses with Cătălina in her dream. Hyperion offered the Demiurge “immortality” – whilst Cătălina asks him for “immortality”; these are different levels of the same idea. Otherwise, it is only natural: the girl asks him, “Be mortal like me”; she realises she is facing a Flyer, such as Călin, and asks him to renounce his immortality in favour of eternity, to live a human life amongst humans. Hyperion, however, is not a Flyer, a ‘fallen angel’ – or, at least, not yet. This is what he wants from the Demiurge: a moment of love, an eternity, a cosmic moment of immortality (the condition of these angels in love in Eminescu’s poetry is, in a way, the same, from The Angel and the Demon to So Fragile). The girl, however, asks for more – this very immortality. He realises, therefore, in this inner line of reasoning, that he would face a three-stage fall: he would first lose his immortality—that is, the aura of eternity—in order to enter into immortality, that is, into an eternity, a time of love – which he would also lose, to become a mere mortal, a man of the earth. This line of reasoning, which I have reproduced in the original punctuation as found in the Almanac, follows. Since Maiorescu, however, the text has been altered in its punctuation and in the treatment of ‘Yes’, so that we now have: ‘Yes, I shall be born of sin, / Receiving another law. / I am bound to eternity, / Yet I wish to be set free’. Perpessicius had the courage to make a partial emendation in his 1939 edition: ‘Yes, I shall be born of sin, / Receiving another law / I am bound to eternity, / Yet I will set myself free’. In his second edition (1964), however, Perpessicius reverts to the simple text we have today (I prefer to rewrite it here, asking that you compare the versions carefully): “Yes, I shall be born of sin, / Receiving another law; / I am bound to eternity, / Yet I wish to be set free”. This was the version used during the interwar period by Ibrăileanu and Călinescu – from whom Perpessicius had diverged by adopting C. Botez’s bolder punctuation.

However, to understand the meaning of ‘eternity’, the statement between the commas—which encompasses lines 2–3 in the Almanac version, as well as in those of C. Botez and Perpessicius’s 1939 edition—must be interpreted as follows: ‘Receiving another law / I am bound to eternity’. It follows that Hyperion understands that he will have to receive another law, namely one that binds him to eternity. In our current punctuation (following Maiorescu), the meaning is rather nonsensical: I shall be born of sin, receiving another law – that is, I shall follow human law by being born of a man and a woman, a law other than my own. It is redundant, simplistic. It continues, still in our current text: I am bound to eternity, yet I go to free myself (to the Demiurge, of course). This ‘I am going’, this powerful, heroic inner resolve, is further reinforced by the adverb in the statement at the beginning of the stanza: ‘Yes, I shall be born of sin’. In other words, Hyperion had already made up his mind before the debate.

However, it is precisely this ‘yes’ that is not an adverb; it is not followed by a comma and should not have been altered from its original position. I have before me a similar poetic text, which I hasten to transcribe. It is the poem It’s Raining…, by G. Bacovia, first published in Românul literar 3. Needless to say, dear readers, that in today’s editions of Bacovia’s works this adversative conjunction has also become an affirmative adverb, again through the insertion of a comma after it. Here is the original text: “Yes, it’s raining like I’ve never seen before…/ And heavy, dormant cowbells, / How they ring beneath weathered eaves! / How they ring in my silent soul! // Ah, the weeping of the cowbells when it rains! // And what a nuisance to the mind! / What a primitive, muddy day! / A sick girl next door / Shouts at the rain, laughing…// Ah, the weeping of the bell when it rains! // Yes, it’s raining… and it rings out humbly / Like all that is love and hate / With a sad, hushed melody, / A child can be heard nearby. // Ah, the wailing of the cowbell when it rains! // What tales the cowbells tell! / What a world so devoid of dreams! / … And how can one not weep in the abyss, / Yes, how can one not die and go mad… // Ah, the wailing of the cowbells when it rains!" How linguists change the language, how they change poetry, how they change the fabric of ideas… Returning to Eminescu’s Luceafărul, I recall that after this inner “but…” of Hyperion, the poem continues with the playful scene between Cătălina and Cătălin. It is here that our very word reverberates. First in Cătălin’s thoughts: ‘But how beautiful she became…’ – then in Cătălina’s exclamation: ‘Well, what do you want, dear Cătălin!’ – and again from her: ‘But I don’t even know what you’re asking of me…’ One might speak of a veritable complex centred on this adversative ‘but’ – arising from Hyperion’s inner, mental debates and extending into the living reality of mortals. Psychologically speaking, Cătălina takes up this hallmark of Hyperion’s inner thought as if it were a reminiscence from a dream. To cut through so much hesitation, to melt so many difficult questions into a categorical, glorious, chivalrous ‘yes’ – I do not think that is exactly a sensible thing to do.

We started with light – and ended up with words and punctuation. It is, in a way, only natural: we must also shed light on the text, not merely search for the term itself within it.

Light, sweet light

Among these manifestations of light in Eminescu’s poetry, we must also pause at the passage in Satire IV which describes the transition from day to night and which is greatly, very greatly altered by the author’s punctuation. Here are the verses from our current editions, which feature in so many anthologies and school textbooks: ‘The moon… the moon rises in its fullness, rising so pale / And from shore to shore a path of flame stretches, / Which she, the golden child, daughter of eternal mist, / Spreads across a swift-fading sea of tiny waves; / And the more her sweet light grows clearer, / The more the waves of water, the more the shore seem to grow, / The forest seems ever larger, as if drawing nearer / Along with the moon’s disc, ruler of the waters”. There is, indeed, a particular use of the comma in Eminescu’s work – if we were to consider only the one in the final line: it is meant to indicate that it is the forest, not the moon’s disc, that reigns over the waters. The meaning can be none other than that the forest’s shadow has completely covered the water. It is water that has banks, like a lake – but also waves, like a river; yet it is neither a lake nor a river; Eminescu’s favoured body of water in poetry is the ‘iaz’, that is, what we would today call a reservoir with a sluice or weir, the poet paying particular attention to the ‘iezătură’, the place where the water flows out towards another reservoir. If we recall the poem Lacul (The Lake), even there the water ripples in white circles, so it is moving, and the boat has oars as well as a rudder, so it is being propelled. Here, in Satire IV, we have verses that indicate a truly vigorous flow of water: ‘You could cast aside the rudder and cast aside the oars, / Let them carry us, of their own accord, wherever they take us’. Please note, if you would, the form ‘rapesi’, which modern spelling rejects. Earlier, Eminescu writes: ‘ce pe-o răpede’nmiire de mici unde o așterne’, also corrected today to ‘ce pe-o repede’nmiire’, a phrase that is difficult to pronounce due to the jerky repetition of the vowel ‘e’. When inserting the vowel ‘ă’ in this series, the poet was paying close attention precisely to euphony. Earlier, in the first line, he had used this ‘ă’ once more in a somewhat atypical position – removing it from its typical position, as follows: ‘The moon… the moon is whole, it rises so gently’. We have, as transcribed above: iese, bălaie; that is, we have modernised the grammar by altering the euphonic system – for it is indeed a system in which ‘e’ alternates with ‘ă’ for the sake of a beautiful pronunciation. The result: that impossible, cacophonous expression ‘ce pe-o repede-nmiire’, which makes us either bite our tongues or turn our lips inside out, as I. E. Torouțiu would say. It should be noted that Eminescu also uses the form ‘repede’, but in certain contexts he uses the ‘ă’ vowel, as here for euphony – or in De câte ori iubito, where line 5 reads ‘Iar peste mii de sloiuri de valuri răpezite’ (likewise, modernised today as repezite). I do not know if there is necessarily a clear difference in meaning, but ‘valuri repezite’ (rushing waves), as we have today, suggests movement, real waves, whilst ‘valuri răpezite’ – perhaps by association with snow, let’s say – suggests frozen movement, the frost that has frozen the waves in motion.

Returning to the text in Satire IV, I would point out that the manuscript uses the grammatical forms: iese, bălaie, repezite. This is not, however, the first time the manuscript differs from Convorbiri literare. It is easy to say that the magazine had its own spelling, as has been said before, and to return to the manuscript as an expression of the author’s intent – but it must be noted that here, as in so many other places, Convorbiri literare follows a euphonic, that is to say, intentional, pattern. No one can convince me that Eminescu wanted his work to be read or recited cacophonously: ‘ce pe-o repede-nmiire de mici unde’ – especially when we have the examples above, which show how elegantly he shaped his phrasing around vowel alternation. What is in the manuscript – these are draft versions, hastily jotted words on paper – the final touches are those in the first printed edition supervised by the author. When Convorbirile was being published in Iași, the galley proofs were sent by post or courier to the authors in Bucharest for proofreading, as we know from Maiorescu’s letters.

Let us return, however, to the forest that reigns over the waters: how shall we represent this image? But… how, I wonder, shall we represent the image from line 5 of the quotation above: ‘And the sweeter the light becomes, the clearer it grows?!’ Does the sweet light of the moon, that is to say, grow clearer? But does the moon have light when it is called ‘She, the golden child, the dream of eternal darkness’? The moon is a dream of darkness; that is to say, it is illuminated by other stars, their shadow is its light, and eternal darkness deludes itself, dreaming of golden light. The moon might become clearer, since at the start of the passage it is ‘balaie’ – that is, murky – and by the end it will be a ‘disc’ – that is, so clear that you could pluck it from the sky… The text states, however, that the moon’s sweet light becomes clear, a highly convoluted situation. Here we must accept the punctuation used in Convorbiri literare, which is not, however, supported by manuscript 2282 4, namely that comma so full of meaning: “And the sweeter the light, the more it clears; / The more the waves of the water, the more the shore seems to grow”. The moon, therefore, becomes clearer, as we have understood above, namely: it becomes clearer the sweeter its light. It follows that ‘i’ in the expression ‘lumina-i dulce’ is a verb, not a pronoun as in the poem’s current punctuation.

Here, then, is a unique passage in Eminescu’s poetry: ‘the light is sweet’, meaning that it grows sweeter. We thus escape thus, the paradox into which Titu Maiorescu had entangled this passage by removing the comma – and we understand that this is a description of the phases of the moon as the light from the cosmic realm softens, that is, becomes equal to the darkness. We realise that this is that time at dusk which the poet is so fond of. We immediately make the connection with another passage where, once again, a Maiorescu-style comma has caused us much headache, from the poem Leave Your World Behind. It is again about the light of late evening. The current text reads: ‘The blue heights / Cast their horizon upon the hills, / Revealing to our gaze / Stars in the heavens, stars in the waves’. The comma after the second line is Maiorescu’s; in Satire IV, the passage quoted above, he had omitted a comma – here he inserts one. It is not a matter of compensation; things unfold according to the needs of each individual passage, but this symmetry serves a mnemonic purpose, in the sense that it guides us from one passage to the next. Maiorescu introduces a sense of causality into nature; the peaks part to reveal something to man, with the specific aim of revealing it. It is like a demonstration in which the pastel scene follows Horace’s rule: man sits by the hearth, uncorking the Falernian wine, whilst the surrounding nature unleashes itself to delight him. Maiorescu was probably familiar with Vasile Alecsandri’s pastel. A genuine Eminescu poem says more; the image is built upon the linguistic expression ‘the heavens open’, the blue heights are immense heaps of heavens that stretch their horizon outwards, over the surrounding hills, and the gaze naturally takes in both the cosmic maximum and the cosmic minimum. The protagonist of Lasă-ți lumea is the lake – and it too is bathed in moonlight in a special way: ‘Behold the lake… The full moon, / Gilding it, passes through it, / It, illuminated by her light, / Feels its own solitude. // Trembling with ripples of foam…” (and here Maiorescu – followed by his editors – omits commas, as we have observed…).

We return to this and emphasise: the light bathes the lake horizontally and then penetrates it vertically, down into its depths, causing it to tremble, and the effect is that the lake feels its own loneliness. Eminescu’s pastel painting suggests that cosmic love is immense, gigantic; light creates it and, wherever it penetrates, gives rise to solitudes, that is to say: it causes the cosmic elements to feel their categorical solitude, to define themselves / individualise themselves. Love does not mix, dissolve or disturb – but is self-knowledge through light, illumination. Faced with this vast cosmic tableau, man shivers; he is even a little frightened. Cosmic love is far more intense than human love; in the cosmos, the human couple seems like a mere toy—small and humble, even timid.

These are the things, however, that genuine Eminescu’s poetry tells us – not the text wrapped in commas or punctuated by the necessary commas, as the case may be, which we use today. We seek the light in Eminescu’s poetry – and we have many veils to draw or to part in order to enlighten ourselves.

The First Light

The culmination of these discussions on light is Eminescu’s cosmogony, and the key texts are Satire I and ‘Luceafărul’ – to which I must return; indeed, as I hope has been understood, such returns are inherent to this mode of analysis: for the very method I have adopted presupposes them, whether for reinforcement, refinement or nuance – or even for refutation where appropriate. As for Satire I, we must first move beyond the irony that shrouds the ‘old teacher’. But it is also in Satire I that we find the conclusion of an ‘eternity’ from the sequence imagined by the scholar: ‘The sun, which today stands proud, he sees it sad and red / As it closes like a wound amongst dark clouds, / As all the planets freeze and hurl themselves rebelliously into space, / They, freed from the constraints of light and the sun /.../ Dead time stretches out its body and becomes eternity”. This ‘rebellion’ of the planets, this breaking free from the reins of light, is Eminescu’s contribution to the ‘Big Bang’ theory. A cosmic era, an ‘eternity’ (in the sense of Satire I, ‘an entire eternity’) is consumed by the complete burning up of the stars – after which the ‘planets’ become rebels. Light no longer has the power to restrain, no longer rules the ‘whims of the world’, no longer has a ‘ray’ (‘For there was a darkness like a sea without a ray’). This is not, therefore, the definitive end of the world, but merely the conclusion of a cycle – after which another will begin, the next ‘eternity’.

We cannot help but draw a parallel with the Demiurge’s speech in Luceafărul: ‘Should a sun go out in the heavens / Another sun shall rise again’. In Mortua est!, the poet was sceptical: “When the suns go out and the stars fall / I am inclined to believe that all is nothing.// It may be that the vault above will shatter, / And nothingness will fall with its vast night...” Here, nothingness is not kenos, a void, an emptiness – but has substance; it is ‘something’. Unlike the suns that fade and reignite, being pulsations of light that are consumed and redefined – the ‘stars’ fall and the ‘planets’ hurl themselves rebelliously into space. Hyperion is, as the Demiurge says: ‘We have neither time nor place / Nor do we know death; And you, Hyperion, remain / Wherever you set’. He possesses this condition of a rebellious planet; he can escape the constraints of light, and probably wishes to escape them – yet he does not dissolve, nor does he fade away into (after) eternity. In this sense, the Demiurge’s words are very important: ‘Ask of me – my first word’ This first word is the convention, the covenant, the ‘binding’: the Demiurge summons the planets to begin a new eternity/eternal existence, binding them in the first word.

And furthermore: in this sense, the two verses we find in the Titu Maiorescu edition are true, in the spirit of Eminescu and, perhaps, written by Eminescu himself: ‘You are of the very first form, / You are an eternal wonder’. Indeed, Hyperion is part of the world of the planets; he does not fade away like the suns, but ‘rises’ together with this ‘whole world’, participating in the Demiurge’s First Word. When Titu Maiorescu reprints, in all his editions, the Preface to the first edition, he consistently refers to it as the ‘Preface to the first edition’, perhaps precisely to uphold this ‘first form’ – and perhaps even to claim it for himself.

By virtue of this theoretical insight emerging from an analysis of Eminescu’s cosmogony and cosmology, I have retained, in my edition, the reading from the Almanahul România Jună, that hapax legomenon of Eminescu’s: ‘nemurie’. Hyperion’s wish is this: “Restore to me the halo of immortality” (I repeat: all other editions have “the halo of immortality”; only D. R. Mazilu notes in a footnote that the Almanac has “the halo of immortality”, but makes no further comment; again: the Danube retains ‘nemurii’5).

‘Immortality’ and ‘immortal’ refer to life without death, life continuing into eternity. What, ultimately, does Hyperion want from the Demiurge? To be a ‘Flying One’, like Călin, for example—that is, to remain immortal amongst mortals. To be granted ‘a time of love’, an erotic eternity. Immortality, however, refers to the cycle of life and death; it means non-involvement in this cycle, not entering the circle, a state above it, moving above it. Hyperion relinquishes this aura of immortality, giving up his status as a planet—which affords him the ability to pass from one eternity to another—and asks, in return, for immortality amongst mortals. In this sense, the Demiurge cannot grant his request, for in the next age he will be missing a planet, and the world will not be able to re-establish itself in its entirety according to the original word. It follows once again – if we may call it that – that the ‘free will’ of the planets means they may or may not participate in the covenant. The Demiurge possesses the gift of persuasion through wisdom, but he does not issue commands; he cannot compel. Hyperion could have fallen, in the sense that he had—and still has—this power—but he is persuaded to remain in his halo. What convinces him? Fate, luck. He understands that under no circumstances does he have access to these: ‘What does it matter to you, clay figure / Whether it be I or another’. With Eminescu’s punctuation (which we have analysed; see the notes, as well as another text of ours below) – if he were to take on a form of clay, if he were to be born of sin – nothing guarantees that he will be by the side of this being whom he now loves, that she will recognise him as the image from her dream, and that she will love him. He may be just another immortal amongst mortals, like Călin – destined to seek and to find. This is what convinces him to give up – and to be at peace with his immortality. The light keeps him wisely in check.

The Case of the Clay Face

We believe that, after so many examples of editions failing to do justice to Eminescu’s genuine text, the time has come to remind the kind reader of a few matters pertaining to our approach, that is, to ‘method’ in the sense of the word (from meta and odos, ‘guidance’). Firstly, by restoring Eminescu’s original forms and punctuation, we do not expressly wish to impose or subject to a trial of intent the successive spelling reforms of the last century. We merely wish to distinguish the poetry from everyday language in terms of its written form, with the aim of preserving the musicality, the internal rhetoric of the text, and the external typography of the writing – that is, everything pertaining to the artistic beauty expressly intended by the author, be it Eminescu, Alecsandri, Macedonski or any other classical Romanian poet. Punctuation, on the other hand, reflects the meaning intended by the author and must be understood, not corrected. As early as 1828, Ion Heliade Rădulescu stated in Gramatica românească: ‘But whatever language has its own orthography, the one that has fared best is the one that has been subject to fewer rules; punctuation alone has remained constant and is the same across all languages, for people think in much the same way, and their pauses and breaks in speech are the same. The most subtle and thoughtful aspect of orthography, and one that does credit to the human spirit, is punctuation: it separates and clarifies our thoughts, shows their sequence and relationship, and enables us both to understand and to make ourselves understood in our writings; and it alone fulfils the purpose for which the rules of spelling were devised, all the more so in living languages. All the rest is nothing but pedantry and a deficiency in human thought and spirit, that is to say, a sign of ignorance of the purpose of orthography”6 Returning to our own language, we can say that punctuation is guided by marks – which, in principle, serve the same purpose as road signs: left, right, forward, backward, etc. It goes without saying that these universal conventions are more important than any individual’s skill in handling the vehicle and, in this sense, we shall understand, as Heliade did, that spelling and all the rest are nothing but pedantry; that is to say – learnt without purpose, without ‘end’ – they amount to mere adornment.

It is one thing, however, to discuss matters in general terms – and quite another to specify, to speak of the significance of punctuation at a particular moment or in the work of a specific writer. This shift away from the general has justified the changes to punctuation in Eminescu’s poetry – with claims that in one place a Germanic logic can be glimpsed, in another the poet was not paying attention, and so on. The changes were made tacitly, that is to say, new meanings were imposed on the text without warning – which leaves us, today, when we try to compare, feeling very confused: how is it possible that the author (Eminescu, but also Alecsandri, Macedonski, etc.) would have highlighted something, only for his editors to have removed it, and so on?

Of the thousands of examples (which can be found in our editorial notes), we shall discuss just one here: Hyperion’s words at the end of Luceafărul. Our current text, established by Titu Maiorescu and tacitly accepted by all editors, is as follows: ‘What does it matter to you, clay figure, / Whether it be I or another?’ In the Almanahul României June, where the poem was first published (and the Almanahul României June includes a note under ‘Introduction’ stating that it preserves the contributors’ texts) – the second comma for the vocative case, as well as the question mark at the end, are missing: “What do you care, you clay figure / Whether it be me or another, // Living within your narrow circle / Fortune favours you. / But in my own world I feel / Immortal and cold.” The differences are enormous: the Maiorescu version adds: “what do you care, you clay figure; you are a clay figure” – whereas the genuine text reveals Hyperion’s dilemma, that earlier “Yes, I shall be born of sin” of his (meaning “Yes, for a gift, indeed”, see a previous text of ours). This meaning in the Almanac is virtually identical to that in manuscript 2275 B, which Perpessicius reproduces in Volume II of his edition, under ‘7’ versions and variants: ‘It makes no difference to you, clay figure / Whether it be I or another’. Rather than despising or blaming the woman, it is more productive, I repeat, to consider this observation by Hyperion, which leads him to renounce being born of sin by showing him that in doing so he would be submitting to fate, to chance: what does it matter to you whether I or another shall be a form of clay? Hyperion would descend amongst men, take on a body, a form (appearance) of clay – but then, how would Cătălina distinguish him, how would she tell him apart from another, since he would resemble them all, as the Demiurge himself tells her: ‘Do you wish to be counted as a man, / To resemble them?’; see the reverse situation in By the Lonely Poplars: ‘For today you resemble them all / In your gait and bearing’ – where the woman has disguised herself from an angel as a human.

This is the place, here, to discuss briefly the significance of the main character in the final pentad of Eminescu’s volume. In ‘Letter I’ there is that scholar about whom we can never say we have spoken enough. He removed God from creation – and in His place set ‘that point of motion’, the positivist theory of the century; he, in fact, this scholar, launched and sustained positivism, the philosophy of this godless universe. In Letter II, we see the condition of the creator in this godless universe, created within the philosophy of positivism. Here, the author applies the poetic art found in Venus and the Madonna – where the poet, as master of discourse, can turn evil into good, ugliness into beauty, and lies into truth, and vice versa: the imaginative recreation of the world lies entirely within his responsibility. Aware of this power of the word, the creator in Letter II has no choice: whatever he says, however he uses the word, he is at fault because, with the sacred absent from the world, criteria are lacking, judgement is biased, there is no hierarchy, and so on. He is another incarnation of the magus, but a magus aware of the limits of his condition. The only necessary course of action would be to refrain from any creation, to break the pen. The theme will be revisited in My Critics. In Letter III we encounter a quite special play on words: the struggle between Mircea and Bayezid is one for the coat of arms; in effect, Mircea brings within his sphere of influence all of Bayezid’s great attributes, beginning with the towering tree from Osman’s prophetic dream (which becomes Mircea’s emblem) and ending with the lightning bolt from Bayezid’s epithet (which becomes the crown of the territory). Mircea’s discourse is complemented by the actions of his army – the apotropaic motif being dominant in the poem. This type of struggle reduces, halves the infinite possibilities, polarises the universe into victors and vanquished – but in the ‘modern’ era, under the conditions of positivism as a philosophy of life, the struggle becomes a parliamentary debate, a game, a comedy: still a ‘double’ (because it involves actors and spectators) – yet ineffective for moral concepts, incapable of recreating the sacred in the world. Letter IV speaks explicitly of a sick Demiurge, ensnared in the game of species perpetuation, a god living within the experiences of mortals – whilst Luceafărul, the next stage, the fifth, restores the sacred to the world by forbidding the mingling of the divine and the human. Luceafărul is a gloss given to the gods, a set of commandments to keep them pure, unmingled with mortals.

One may ‘comment’ on this scenario as one pleases, but its structure is more or less this – and here the author’s constructive intention is clearly evident. Placing Letter I in the script in place of Letter II simply signified giving priority to discussing the condition of the creator (the poet) over that of the positivist scholar: where does the ‘story’ begin – with the master of words who can do as he pleases with goodness, beauty and truth – or with the one who established the theory of the new world? From the Word (‘In the beginning was the Word’, John) – or from the Number (‘In the beginning was the number’, Pythagoras)? The poet hesitated – and finally decided on this order for the poems: Word – Number. Of course, then, that fifth Letter, Delilah, could only be a variation on the affliction of both the Demiurge and the Creator at the same time, and thus a commentary on Letter IV – so it had no place in this structure, or perhaps it did, but under special conditions, involving the reconstruction of the entire conclusion of the volume. Dalila could even have been the second part of Letter IV, just as Letter III has a second part. Of course, ultimately, these poems, published in Convorbiri literare under the title Letters, are very aptly named Satires in the volume: all four are, in essence and context, scathing satires. The satirical nature is, however, very evident in the poet’s original punctuation – and is obscured in the punctuation of the first edition compiled by Maiorescu: a further reason—perhaps a decisive one—to believe that the editor either failed to understand or sought to obscure the meaning of these poems.

I have chosen this example of punctuation at the end of Luceafărul with the specific aim of illustrating the difficulties involved in comparing texts of this kind. Indeed, after dozens of successive comparisons between editions and manuscripts, I still failed to notice this Maiorescu comma, which seems to have slipped through the cracks, and in my 1999 edition of Luceafărul, I did not comment on it. It was only during a routine review of the text intended for Bucovina literară – the journal that had published such philological observations of mine for several years – that it, as they say, caught my eye. It is a firm observation: the text of Eminescu’s posthumous poem has been etched into all our memories following repeated early readings; it has become, in a sense, like a groove on the gramophone record of our poetic memory, and we almost instinctively reject anything that alters the path, the true markers that accompanied the path taken by the author.

It is, in equal measure, a warning: such oversights are inevitable. Perhaps this is also why the punctuation of a text – especially that of a classic text – must be jealously guarded. Guarding the text should be the editor’s primary function – rather than constantly wondering how they might make changes without being noticed. This is how I. L. Caragiale understood the purpose of an edition.

• 1

  O.II, p. 75

• 2

  O.II, p. 81

• 3

  G. Bacovia, ‘It’s Raining…’, in Românul literar, 25 March 1907.

• 4

  O.II, p. 343.

• 5

  We shall return to the word ‘nemurie’ on other occasions, but I must say that Mr Dan Pop, a Germanist with a great passion for Eminescu, has drawn my attention to the fact that the poet apparently creates the pair ‘nemurie / nemurire’, somewhat similar to the German pair ‘umsterblich / unsterblich’. Ms Mioara Dugneanu, a distinguished researcher at the National Museum of Romanian Literature, whilst discussing this point, tells me that, to be more precise, the poet could have used the form with three ‘i’s for the genitive: al nemuriii nimb; it would have been better, but not essential. For Old Romanian, Gheorghe Bulgăr noted the meaning ‘nemurie = many clans’. I came across the gerund form in Creangă: ‘nemurind’, whilst Professor Elena Popescu draws my attention to the fact that Eminescu, in Geniu pustiu, the term ‘visărie’ alongside ‘visătorie’ (such observations are extremely important, and we cannot thank our friends who bring them to our attention enough: dictionaries do not contain them, and we have investigated, for ‘nemurie’, only the manuscripts of Luceafărul). It is, therefore, almost certainly a compound coined by Eminescu, and by no means a typographical error.

• 6

  Ion Heliade Rădulescu: Romanian Grammar. A critical edition by Valeria Guțu Romalo, Eminescu Publishers, 1980, pp. 33–35.

• 7

  O.II, p. 408.