Among the passages in Eminescu’s poetry that are very difficult, if not impossible, to interpret, I would like to draw attention to the ending of ‘Mortua est!’ It was published by Eminescu 1 in Convorbiri literare, 1 March 1871, and commented on (with extensive quotations) by Titu Maiorescu 2 in his study ‘Direcția nouă…’ in the same journal, the same year, 15 May, by the same author 3 in the volume Critice, 1874, after which it appears in the first edition 4 from 1883. Here, then, are four sources (printed texts), and no two are alike. The first corrections (to punctuation and terminology) were made by Titu Maiorescu in the study cited from the journal; we find this interesting, as it reopens the debate on the relationship between Eminescu the poet and Iacob Negruzzi. Indeed, the poet sent Mortua est! from Vienna, accompanying it with a much-quoted letter 5 in which he asks the editor of Convorbiri: ‘Delete whatever you deem fit to delete’. Maiorescu’s corrections (from his study) arrived just two months later and concerned matters of substance. We may infer that Iacob Negruzzi did not touch upon these matters; therefore, the text bears Eminescu’s approval. Having corrected it once, Titu Maiorescu would correct it a second time, in 1874, and a third time, in the first edition of 1883, and even a fourth time, in the second edition6, where he separates the last two lines with a blank space, as if to emphasise their importance; the text thus remains unchanged in the other editions by Maiorescu.
It is true that the versions in Convorbiri literare, which we consider to have Eminescu’s endorsement, are not found in any of the surviving manuscripts of the poem. This is, however, no cause for concern: the final manuscript, from which the text was compiled, is missing from almost all the posthumous editions. We know that Eminescu sometimes made corrections in the galley proofs (corrections, that is to say, revisions to the text, changes to terms, punctuation and asterisks).
In short, the choice is ours, so to speak: if there is another meaning in the text printed with Eminescu’s endorsement, and if this meaning adds something further, the matter is worth discussing; if not, it remains for us to either retain or nuance the ‘contemporary’ atheism of the young poet, as ‘perceived’ by many critics on the basis of this ending to the poem Mortua est!
I quote the last four lines from the first publication:
Is there any meaning in the world? You, with your smiling
face, did you live specifically to die like this?
If there is meaning in this, it is also yours;
on your pale forehead, ‘God’ is not written
The term that interests us is ‘a tĕu’, written as two words and with an ‘-e’ ending. Quoting the text two months later, Titu Maiorescu corrects it to ‘ateu’, the word as we know it today. A year later, on 1 December 1872, Eminescu would publish 7, also in Convorbiri literare, the short story Sărmanul Dionis, featuring the well-known poem in which the equally well-known line reads: ‘Ah! Atheists, do they not fear hell and its spirits — the bats?’ We should also note that in the manuscripts of the poem Mortua est! the natural term atheist is found.
Perhaps this ‘a tĕu’ would not have caught our attention, and we might have regarded it as a typographical error or a correction by Iacob Negruzzi, but the punctuation with which Titu Maiorescu, upon reprinting, marks the context compels us to revisit it. Firstly, he places a semicolon at the end of the line:
If there is any meaning in this: he is twisted and an atheist,
On your pale brow God is not written
When he revisits the passage in Critice (1874), he replaces the colon with a comma and removes the final -u throughout (sens, ‘ntors, scris). In the first edition, the final ‘-u’ remains omitted, but in place of the comma at the end of the line we find a pause mark (thus, it requires a conclusive meaning, which the colon had originally provided). Also in the first edition, the three ellipsis points in the first quoted line: ‘Is there any meaning in the world?… You, smiling face’ (which do not appear in Critice, 1874, where, instead, there is a comma as follows: ‘You, smiling face / You have lived a certain life…’) Maiorescu seems to be constantly reinterpreting the passage, as if dissatisfied with the possibilities offered by punctuation and the text itself. As a natural reaction, he encourages us to interpret it in turn.
What is important in the passage, of course, is the inverted sign. We find it again in Egipetul (1 October 1872): “The magus, guardian of the resbunara, read the inverted sign”; in Letter III: ‘to turn back from this moment on your path’. In Mortua est! it is explained more clearly: reversed meaning, that is, the opposite. In this case, the passage must be reinterpreted, and the two adverbs—namely and in this way—understood in the context of the reverse meaning: ‘You lived specifically so that you might die in this way’ does not mean to ‘die in this way, in this manner’ (young, beautiful), but strictly: ‘you lived so that, whilst living, you might die’; the purpose of life is death; the world moves in reverse, from life towards death; one lives specifically, in a particular way, in order to die. Only this meaning sheds light, from the end, on the text above:
I see dreams made flesh chasing after dreams
Until they stumble upon graves that lie open and waiting
Life is a dream: a familiar theme, yet one which Eminescu takes to its ultimate consequences. And only in this way, returning to the term ‘a tĕu’ from the first printed edition (and only from there!), do we find the etymological meaning: the privative ‘alpha’ means ‘devoid of’. This meaning, says the poet, is devoid of God; it is impossible for God to place the inverted sign in the world, to be for death, when He is life. There is no rebellion here, merely an observation, with this margin of safety: ‘De e sensu intr’asta’, that is, ‘if (and only if) there is meaning, then it is not divine’ (because God wills life, not death). The poem concludes with the Hamlet-like dilemma which it debates, incidentally.
Far removed from this, however, is the atheistic meaning, which implies opposition to God (and has led to atheism, a school of thought, indeed an attitude). Eminescu is closer, rather, to the historical meaning: as far as we know, the early Christians were called ‘atheists’, in the sense that they had no god (the name of their god being hidden; see the well-known symbolism); see, in Romanian, ‘a man without any god’, where ‘god’ has taken the place of ‘zeu’ (and, therefore, should not be capitalised as ‘God’).
However, having only just reached this point in our explanations, things become more complicated. Indeed, why does the poet place an accent on the ‘e’ in ‘a tĕu’? If it is a mark for a short vowel, it means he does not want the stress on the ‘e’. If it is a sign for –ă, it means he wants it to be read as ‘a tău’, rhyming with the following ‘Dumnezeu’. It would be a ‘bad rhyme’, and with that we return to Titu Maiorescu’s study from May 1871. The critic states that, of the poems published by Eminescu to date, Mortua est! is ‘the best’, but he nevertheless observes that here too ‘there are flaws that must absolutely be corrected’. These ‘flaws’ are: ‘overuse of the word “pală”’, ‘at times, thoughts and expressions that are too commonplace’, ‘bad rhymes’. Bad rhymes in Mortua est!? Perhaps sting/plâng, the only one cited by the critic. ‘Tău/Dumnezeu’ would, however, be a poor rhyme; the critic corrects it to ‘ateu/Dumnezeu’.
To reiterate, we consider these to be arguments that Eminescu intended the original text as we have it in the first edition. The problem, however, is that the pronunciation/recitation, in the case of split words formed with a privative alpha, requires the stress to fall on this initial ‘a’. The spelling ‘a tĕu’ is read as ‘à tĕu’. Both the privative alpha and the accent on the ‘e’ indicate this. For this reading to work, however, the rhythm requires an extra syllable in the preceding foot, hence: e’ntórsu and à tĕu, with the stress on ‘o’ and the final ‘-u’ pronounced. Such a rhythmic sequence will, in turn, require the following in the next line: ‘nu-i scrisu Dumnézeu’, with the natural stress on ‘scrisu’ but the final ‘-u’ pronounced, and an unnatural, shifted stress on ‘Dumnezeu’. We would not have insisted on this, but we noticed that in the second edition of the poem, in Critice (1874), Titu Maiorescu removes the final -u throughout, and there is no longer even the purely theoretical possibility of such a reading.
This reading, however, is consistent with the aforementioned historical tradition regarding the concealment of the name of the supreme god: it can be concealed through silence, or by avoiding the correct name ‘8’. This reading is also consistent with the ideas in Poor Dionis, the short story published by Eminescu in 1872. At one point, Dan has the audacity to ponder the divine, and then: ‘Vum! The sound of a gigantic bell — the death of the great, the collapse of the heavens — the vaults were cracking, their blue dome was splitting, and Dan felt struck by lightning and engulfed in smoke in the boundless void’. Up to this point, we are in the atmosphere of Mortua est!:
It may be that the vault above will shatter
That nothingness will fall with its vast night
The continuation, however, brings back into focus the magic of the name that concerns us: Dan-Dionis utters half the name of the supreme god, ‘and a voice resounds behind him: “Wretched one, is this what you have dared to think? ‘You are lucky you did not utter the whole word…’9 Thus, in Poor Dionis, the character is saved because he stopped halfway through the word; in Mortua est! we can understand, by deducing from the logic of the events (or from what we call the reality of the text), that the shift in emphasis avoids that same contact with the true name of the deity. The next occurrence of the term ‘10’ in Convorbiri literare is in the poem Înger și Demon (Angel and Demon), dated 1 April 1873, where it is written as follows: ‘Ah! all those thoughts directed against the world, / Against the written laws, against the order / Clothed in God’s name…’. Of course, the natural stress is evident in the rhythm, but the full name is not written out.
All these editorial explanations (we would not even dare to call them a ‘demonstration’) actually find their basis in Anghel Demetriescu’s 1874 critique, which we shall examine 11. Among the many absurdities of this pedantic philologist, we find there a few observations on rhythm and stress in verse which can give us a measure of how Eminescu’s poetry was understood by his contemporaries – the only thing that really interests us, after all. He quotes it with alterations (it seems everyone wants to alter Eminescu’s verses, ever since the poet’s debut):
A dream that softens its wing in bitterness
Thus passed the world’s sorrow
and comments: ‘On which syllable does one place the stress in the phrase “tre” or “cut”? If placed on “tre”, the verse is undoubtedly correct, but the pronunciation will be distorted, and the poet’s licence cannot extend that far’. The verse, we recall, is: ‘Astfeliu ai trecut de al lumii otar’ (not ‘Ast’fel, d’al’). We understand that in those days the final -iu dictated the stress: àst-fel, but astféliu, which Anghel Demetriescu refuses to accept (he takes issue with the spelling). He himself, however, goes on to quote a satirical magazine of the time, and it is this that catches our attention: ‘The verses remind us of what a joker wrote in Perdaful 12, a satirical publication published in Iași’. This is followed by two stanzas from the parody in Perdaful (under ‘Mortus est!’ and ‘Emperor and Proletarian’), from which we quote, with the emphasis as given in the satirical magazine:
To be or not to be? Is it a pun, a tale
concocted by mortal ancient historians?
For ‘to be’ means that which is not;
‘not to be’ is a dance of innocent wives
that sometimes appears in the stars and in the light
Anghel Demetriescu continues: ‘Although the joker from Perdaful strives to demonstrate, through the verses we have reproduced, the ramblings of the poet from Convorbiri, we for our part confess that we are far from blaming him to such an extent.’
We are not interested in the so-called scientific truth of these contemporary critiques (although the matter deserves attention and ought to be known), but only in the fact itself: Eminescu’s contemporaries read Mortua est! whilst attempting to place stress on words, altering the poet’s own stress patterns. It was, in a way, a discussion; people asked questions. It is sad that Eminescu himself did not respond to these criticisms (I am not referring to My Critics, but to newspaper articles). It is strange that those discussing the matter avoid precisely the final line with that particular spelling which requires an accent on the ‘a’. Be that as it may, this spelling must be retained in an edition of Eminescu’s works: the entire bibliography consulted and cited above consistently suggests that it reflects the author’s intention. It is, in essence, what editions of classical Greek or Latin authors refer to as a ‘hapax legomenon’ – a word that appears only once in an author’s work or even in the language itself.
Let us, however, examine the punctuation of the poem to see whether the meanings are consistent with this spelling. Firstly, line 22: ‘Why did you die, angel with the pale face?’. It was Titu Maiorescu who introduced the comma after ‘angel’, a feature retained by all subsequent editors: in Convorbiri literare this comma does not appear, the meaning being ‘you died as, in the likeness of an angel’. The situation is repeated in line 66: ‘Au moartea ta înger de ce fu să fie?’, from Convorbiri, becomes, with the vocative comma introduced by that same first editor: ‘Au moartea ta, înger, de ce’. But there are other meanings, and logic compels us to distinguish the poet from his editors. Twice the poet says something; twice the editors interpret it in the same way, yet differently. In short, following the logic of the spelling ‘tĕu’ mentioned above, and in the context of Eminescu’s debut in Convorbiri literare with angelic poems, the dilemma of the poetic soul in Mortua est! is whether or not it has to do with a disguised angel, whether the ‘angel’ or the ‘demon’ has died. The apostasy in Venus and Madonna (‘apostate—my heart’) or in Angel and Demon (‘he—an apostate soul’), or in Guardian Angel (‘You are a demon, child…’), as a continuous oscillation between the angelic and the demonic in human life in general, this apostasy is ‘yours’, that is to say, it has not yet been sealed by God, defined by one side or the other, named; an ontological argument, so to speak, is put forward for this apostasy: the angels themselves conceal their true nature, and so, the poet says, he does not know whether this being is an angel or a demon; yet, because the divine signs point in this direction, it is more likely to be a demon.
At this point in the argument, I am entitled to refer to line 15 of Conversations: ‘When the spindle is heard, the skein of spells’, corrected in the first edition to ‘When the spindle is heard, the falling of spells’, and thus having become the standard reading (Eminescu’s commentators discussing, in particular, a manuscript line: ‘When the spinning of the times is heard’—superb, of course, but dating from well before the publication date: generally, forms from around 1866 are used to supplement the 1871 printed version, a difference of four years!). I reproduce my editorial note verbatim (I quote myself for authenticity’s sake, knowing full well that this edition, with such a small print run—that is to say, an academic one—could not have reached Mr Dorel Vișan, for example, before I offered it to him myself, and not without a heavy heart at being left a little poorer for it): ‘The skein of spells cannot be a soft skein of wool. Since we have ‘tocs’, for ‘tocsin’, meaning: alarm bell, siren, we must accept the shrill noise of spells/witches. ‘Caier’, written as ‘caieru’, following ‘pept’ in the previous line, comes from ‘încaier’, ‘încaierare’ (literal meaning: a scuffle, a tug-of-war over hair/a skein). It refers to the tangle, the entanglement, the skein of spells at the stroke of midnight. The moment is clearly captured in Melancholy: ‘The stroke of midnight strikes’ (the belfry, the translucent demon). See also verse 2 here: ‘A bell’s toll in the holy hours’, with the observation that ‘the holy hours and the skein of spells’ stand in the same opposition as ‘bell’s toll’ and ‘tocs’, following the pattern of Angel and Demon. The manuscripts offer no solutions (they include the form ‘S-aude torcându-se-al vrăjilor caër’, which reinforces ‘tocs’ but draws attention to the spelling ‘caër’), nor can the journal be suspected of having introduced such a pretentious neologism: ‘tocs’. It is the author’s intention. The grammatical meaning: when the ‘tocs’ of the ‘caier’ of spells is heard, this ‘caier’ being, in fact, the ‘tocs’ itself—the alarm bell. In earlier manuscript versions, the passage has more pronounced magical connotations: ‘When the earth magically opens’, whilst in Memento mori we find: ‘The sun-kings clash’.
I would add: through this magical clamour, demons pass to and from Heaven; here, perhaps, they steal a holy hour…
Given the text’s many imponderables—many of which have been unnecessarily obscured by subsequent editions—I cannot really see where there is any room left for atheism in Eminescu’s Mortua est! Is the poet an atheist if he discovers and asserts that the demon reverses the sign, dissimulates, and mimics holiness? Is this dissimulation atheistic? Does he capture the exact moment of the ‘entity’s’ transformation from angel to demon—the one he was mourning—and is he now ready to laugh at himself? Any comprehensive interpretation must take into account, however, of the partial meanings, as in Lucretius (IV, 500): when you cannot fathom the ultimate truth, set your mind to unravelling, at least as clearly as possible, the truths that emerge along the way.
- 1
M. Eminescu, ‘Mortua est!’, Convorbiri literare, 1 March 1871, pp. 15–16.
- 2
Titu Maiorescu, ‘The New Direction, I.’, Convorbiri literare, 15 May 1871, pp. 85–90; 15 September 1871, pp. 217–227.
- 3
Titu Maiorescu, Critice, Bucharest, Socec, 1874. It should be noted that the author alters the text itself, not just the quotations, in this volume compared with Convorbiri literare. In the second edition of Criticele (Socec Publishers, 1892), he further alters Mortua est!, removing the three dots from the verse quoted thus far, as follows: “Why... Is it not all madness?” Of course, current editions of Criticele restore the quotations in accordance with the Perpessicius edition. The lack of a critical edition of Titu Maiorescu’s Criticele necessitates these checks, making the first printed version—that in the journal—particularly important.
- 4
M. Eminescu, Poems, Socec & Co, Bucharest, 1885, p. 69.
- 5
The letter, dated 11 February 1871, in I. E. Torouțiu and Gh. Cardaș, Literary Studies and Documents, 1, 1931, p. 319; the comments on Perpessicius, in M. Eminescu, Works, Vol. I, p. 99.
- 6
M. Eminescu, Poems, Second edition, Socec & Co Publishers, 1885, p. 69.
- 7
M. Eminescu, ‘Poor Dionis’, in Convorbiri literare, 1 December 1872, pp. 329–340; 15 December 1872, pp. 278–385. The poem, on pp. 333–334.
- 8
A general linguistic phenomenon: D. Caracostea points out that in Romanian, for example, the name ‘Lucifer’has been preserved in the name of the star known as Luceafăr precisely because the accent changed and the nomen/omen connection was no longer made) (in the west, the name—being synonymous with that of the supreme demon—was lost due to the prohibition on uttering it). (Quoted in Lucian Chișu, Prejudecata Caracostea, M. L. R. Publishers, 2002, p. 103).
- 9
O., vol. VII, p. 254.
- 10
M. Eminescu, ‘Angel and Demon’, Convorbiri literare, 1 April 1873, pp. 16–18 (the term is used in its full form in all editions).
- 11
G. Gellianu, Anghel Demetriescu, ‘Literary Sketches. The Poems of Mr Eminescu’, Revista contimporană, 1 March 1875, pp. 268–288. The text, heavily revised (and no longer allowing for the discussion that follows), also appears in Anghel Demetriescu, Works, edited by Ovidiu Papadina, Bucharest, ‘Carol II’ Foundation for Literature and Art, 1937. It is not included in the Corpus of Critical Reception of the Work of M. Eminescu, a critical edition by I. Oprișan and Teodor Vârgolici, Saeculum Publishing House, I. O., Bucharest, 2002 (3 volumes). See also note 3 above: in the absence of a critical edition, it becomes essential to consult the first printed editions, a situation specific to Eminescu’s work.
- 12
Perdaful was published in Iași between 1873 and 1887. In the Academy Library, the collection has numerous gaps (the issues cited by A. D. are, of course, also missing).