The source of light
Eminescu describes his room in several poems and letters which, taken together, can paint a picture of the ideal space for work and rest. We say ‘ideal space’ because it seems to be the same, even though the locations are different – and indeed the cities are different: Iași or Bucharest, perhaps even Vienna for Noaptea (1871). The atmosphere, however, is the same everywhere: a nocturnal ‘interior’. The room as a space seems to catch the poet’s attention at the moment when ‘Tired of work, I seek my bed at night’. Even if the moment itself of taking a break from work is important, we shall first be interested in something that precedes it, namely the light in the room: since he is seeking his bed, it follows that the worker has switched it off. As in Letter I: ‘When, with weary eyelashes, my breath fell upon the lamp’.
For this verse I have combined several editorial traditions, and, in the search for the object itself—the source of the light—these must be distinguished philologically. The first printing of Letter I, in Convorbiri literare, 1 February 1881, uses the term luminare, as in the manuscripts. The word is preserved in this form in all 11 editions by Titu Maiorescu (1883–1911) and in the edition by G. Bogdan-Duică (1924). I. Scurtu (1909), however, changed it to ‘lumânare’, and following him, G. Ibrăileanu (1933, with an ‘î’) and Perpessicius (1939 with an ‘â’, 1964 with an ‘î’) retained this form. Today, ‘lumânarea’ has become the standard form, particularly through the drawings and engravings accompanying Eminescu’s text (the best known being Ligia Macovei’s drawing) – although G. Bulgăr (1999) and, following him, we ourselves (2002) have restored the original term. We must understand that blowing out a ‘lumânare’ – as we still do today on someone’s birthday or in churches – is one thing, whilst blowing out a ‘luminare’ is quite another; that is, it may refer to the source of light in general: a lamp’s flame, a lantern, wood, town gas, a candle, etc. Letter I refers to a lamp, and we shall show why. First, however, let us recall the atmosphere of the poem ‘The Night’ (1871, ten years earlier). Today’s current editions read: ‘The candle is extinguished in the house… sleep is warm, languid, gentle’, the term ‘candle’ having been first introduced into the text by Titu Maiorescu in the sixth edition (1894) – and subsequently retained by all subsequent editors (with the exception of G. Bogdan-Duică, who adheres to the text in Convorbiri literare). It was also G. Bulgăr who restored the original term, but these restorative editions go unnoticed in textbooks, anthologies, published editions, etc. Let us pause, however, and reflect: how can one see, at night, in a room, a candle… that is unlit?! It is this paradox that the editors leave Eminescu in by changing a single letter in a single word, from ‘i’ to ‘â/î’. It is clear that we are dealing with a linguistic expression; ‘luminarea-i stinsă’ means exactly what ‘lumina-i stinsă’ means today. The expression has a different meaning from the words of which it is composed.
Just imagine, dear readers, what it would mean – what it actually means – to modernise words in a mechanical, mass-produced way; how many linguistic expressions are lost, and how many paradoxes we read, think and experience. Unfortunately, all these linguistic situations must be tracked step by step. We have done this in our synoptic edition, but I shall revisit the ‘coded’ demonstrations found there in the form of footnotes in a more explicit and accessible manner, so that we may understand – on the one hand, the very broad possibilities the Romanian language offers for expression, and, on the other hand, the way in which we ourselves, over time, narrow these possibilities, how we exhaust them through standardisation and prescriptive rules. Eminescu’s room does, of course, have a candle as a source of light – see The Musings of Poor Dionis, where the bulbous carafe is now only good for a candlestick – but the dominant source of light for creativity, for work in general, is the lamp, as we see in Solitude (1879): ‘Late at night, when the lamp is burning.’
For the image in Noaptea, what is important, from a philological point of view, is the position of the apostrophe and the punctuation. If we make a little effort, even if it involves some guesswork, we can realise how each individual editor understands the image, the metaphor, the words. In Convorbiri literare we find the close apostrophe, the one indicating connected forms, and the expression is followed by an ellipsis, exactly like this: ‘The light is out in the house… his sleep is warm, languid, peaceful.’ In the first edition, Titu Maiorescu retains the term but widens the gap in the apostrophe, as for disjointed forms, and uses a comma instead of an ellipsis, that is to say, like this (I am being redundant because I am wary of typesetters and the computer that has ‘implemented’ the current spelling rules): The light is out in the house, his sleep is warm, languid, peaceful. The other editions retain, across the board, Maiorescu’s broad apostrophe, but revert to the ellipsis used in the magazine. It is clear to see: Titu Maiorescu is giving a description, listing what is ‘in the house’—that is, the light/candle, the warm, languid and peaceful sleep—strung together strictly in the same grammatical sequence. And what a strange sequence: something concrete, an object, alongside perceptible abstractions… What I mean is that these matters do not pertain to grammar or linguistics; they are not subject to the rules or norms that standardise language: it is simply a question of the sense of language as such, a synonymous expression for what is commonly called ‘philology’. When the author shortens the phrase and follows it with an ellipsis – it goes without saying that he isolates it, thus first creating the atmosphere, the light dimmed from within, and then the sleep and the dream; he thus remains consistently within the realm of abstractions, not mixing them with the concrete.
Returning to Letter I, there too it is a matter of the apostrophe. Maiorescu likewise adopts the wide apostrophe, creating disjunct forms: ‘sara suflu’n luminare’ – and establishes this type of apostrophe for all publishers. In Convorbiri literare, Eminescu uses an apostrophe that can be considered ‘medium’, that is, slightly smaller than the wide one but larger than the narrow one. Throughout his poetry published in ‘Convorbiri’, there are three or four forms of this medium-sized apostrophe, the most easily understood being the one in Letter IV: ‘They tell of themselves’, where we are dealing with a cluster of words, with an even cadence. In the image of the lamp, however, this apostrophe must be considered tight. Eminescu has many passages where he calls for an imitative reading—that is, in the manner in which the action unfolds—and we shall return to them. When, however, the text is written in a continuous flow: ‘the breath was fading in the lamp’, and you see the alliterative patterns ‘sa-/su-’; ‘a-u-u-u-a’ – the suggestion of a slow and continuous breath comes naturally. Conversely, the pause after the breath suggests rapid action. Consider the two objects in question – the lamp or the candle – and see how each is extinguished by blowing on it.
For an even better understanding of the difference between the meaning of words and that of expressions, here are two more examples from the same poems. Eminescu writes: ‘For when you draw the curtains to one side’ – and ‘From my sad brow you brush the strands to one side’. Note: in Noaptea (1871) there is a hyphen – in Scrisoarea I (1881) there is an apostrophe for într’o / într-o. But all editions follow Maiorescu’s lead, using the first, broad apostrophe: ‘the curtains to one side’, and ‘the locks of hair to one side’. So, what about the curtains: does he move them both to one (single) side? And what of the locks of hair: does he push them all to one side, as if parting them at the edge? It is clear that here the narrow apostrophe requires the words to be read together, and in the poet’s intention we are dealing with a linguistic expression: într-o parte = la o parte. Perhaps the room does not even have a window with two curtains; perhaps the plural ‘curtains’ refers, here, to a single fringed curtain or a very elaborate one, made of several layers of fabric laid one on top of the other – in any case, the meaning is that of revealing the dark interior space so that the moonlight may penetrate inside. And this meaning – is established solely by the apostrophe.
The Light from the East
But the question of light in the room is not unique to Eminescu. Let us trace it, again in the poet’s work, though this time surrounding a female figure in a room of a house with a veranda. Of course, we are referring to ‘The Veranda Sonnet’, a posthumous work by Eminescu first deciphered and published by Nerva Hodoș in 1902. As a text that alludes to the mystery of the relationship between the poet and Veronica Micle, it is worth re-reading. Here it is, in Perpessicius’s edition:
I stand on your veranda… The night is serene.
Above me, tree branches stretch out,
Large branches in shadow-flowers enfold
me And the wind stirs the trees in the garden.
But through your window I stand gazing
As you gaze with your eyes into the light.
You are weary, with your delicate
hand Unravelling your hair in a wave of gold.
You have cast it over your shoulders like snow,
Laughing as you unbutton your bodice at the breast,
Slowly you draw it up and blow on the candle…
Above me, stars tremble through the branches,
My eyes remain in the darkness,
And beside me the moon beats sadly against the windows.
The sonnet is dated 1879 by Perpessicius, based on the paper and handwriting – and this dating is accepted by all editors. We shall, of course, return to the candle – which is also a source of light here. For now, let us resolve (that is to say: settle!) the question of chronology. In the album she compiled at Văratic in the summer of 1889 from her own poems and those of Eminescu, Veronica Micle includes this sonnet and annotates it as follows: ‘You asked me to sing Schumann for you. How much you love music. It is one of those May nights that cannot be forgotten… You were gazing out into the garden, whilst I, by the moonlight, was deciphering the sad pieces you had asked for’1
Lovers of the convergence of the arts will be able to see for themselves whether Schumann’s music is evoked in the ‘Sonnet of the Veranda’. But which house with a veranda and garden is described in this sonnet? The one in Iași, at 4 Butului Street, the home of Mr and Mrs Micle? It is true that at certain times they rented this house, as they also had access to the official residence of Ștefan Micle, the Rector of the University. At one point, on 27 October 1877, we read in a letter from Veronica to the poet: ‘…I have written this letter outdoors, so closely am I being spied on by the people around me; one leaves, another arrives – it’s worse than staying in a hotel.’2 – This seems to describe the hustle and bustle of the university residence. In May 1879, Ștefan Micle was still in good health (he would die in August of that year, following a pulmonary congestion or a severe cold contracted whilst out hunting wild ducks), and the same large crowd of people surrounded his family. This picture certainly does not hold true for the spring of 1879 (that it is spring, as we can see from the blossoming trees), the Micle couple’s houses in Iași were crowded; there was no room here for the poet to sit on the veranda whilst the poetess played the piano. Nor do we even know, for that matter, whether these houses in Iași had gardens.
Of course, it is futile to construct literary history based on a poetic text. However, the fact that the sonnet can be dated to 1879 – thus pointing to that specific period in their lives – and the fact that Veronica provides the testimony mentioned above, reinforcing the impression of real time – this is what prompts us to press the point. Until August 1879, upon the death of Ștefan Micle, it is, in principle, extremely unlikely that Eminescu and Veronica would have met in private at her home. Occasionally – though very rarely – she is the one who comes into his room, as in the poem ‘Solitude’. Other meetings were truly secret; we have no way of proving them. We do know, however, that Veronica Micle had two other places, two houses where she would retreat – one of her own, in Târgu Neamț, and another belonging to her family, in Ungheni, near Iași. It was here, in Ungheni, that she received the news that her husband was dying. She would later bequeath the house in Târgu Neamț to Văratic Monastery on 16 October 1886 (a few weeks before Eminescu was brought to the monastery infirmary in the same town). As a young Moldavian noblewoman – she was the wife of the Rector of the University, arguably the most important academic and cultural post in the former capital of Moldavia! – Veronica spent many days out and about, visiting relatives and acquaintances, or going to monasteries – or perhaps to the little cottages she had left behind. A house with a veranda, a garden and a piano cannot be a monastic cell, so it remains highly likely that the two lovers met in Târgu Neamț – perhaps as early as 1879, or perhaps after that date, at any time up to 1888, except for those periods when it is known for certain that they were separated.
Octav Minar briefly describes the place, around 1924: ‘In a two-storey house, the upper storey of which has a veranda, lives the elderly Mother Fevronia Sârboaica, who took in Veronica Micle and in whose house the poet breathed her last’3 At that time, a ‘two-storey house’ meant a house with a ground floor and first floor, or, as it was also called, ‘a house with two rows of rooms’. This Mother Fevronia recounts, in her own words: “Every summer, around the beginning of July, I knew that I would be hosting Veronica, the wife of university professor Ștefan Micle, for a month”. During those days in July 1889, when she had retired to Văratec, the poet would go for walks, add to her album of annotated poems, receive guests, sing and recite. Mother Fevronia herself recounts: “One evening, after she had been wandering aimlessly all day through the fir forests of Văratec, without having had lunch, I saw her arrive at dusk, tired, pale, with bloodshot eyes, barely able to climb the few steps, and she collapsed onto a sofa on the veranda.” She recovered and continued her walks. On the last day of her life, 3 August 1889: “She invited all her acquaintances from Văratec, as she had never done before. She was in good spirits. She sang ‘Steluța’ and ‘Vezi rândunelele se duc’. Then she recited some of her own poems and some by Eminescu. Around midnight, the guests took their leave, and Veronica said she was tired and wanted to rest…” This seems to have been the spot where Eminescu used to gaze at the moonlight – whilst Veronica sought tranquillity.
On the other hand, relatively recent research confirms that Eminescu himself rented a house at Văratec Monastery between 1874 and 1889, and that Mother Benedicta (Zoe Dumitrescu-Bușulenga) tried to persuade the authorities to fund the renovation – apparently without success; and this house also has a veranda – but let us re-examine the literary text: ‘I am sitting on your veranda’, says the poet – so he is visiting Her… Both had summer (holiday) homes at Văratic Monastery.
Whilst this sonnet does not give us a precise address, it may, however, shed light on the lighting inside the room. The manuscript and the first publication (Nerva Hodoș, 1902) tell us about the lamp: ‘Slowly you light it and blow on the lamp’. It is the same expression we encountered in Letter I: ‘When, with weary eyelashes, I blew upon the lamp’. I have deduced that this refers to a lamp, perhaps the same one from ‘Solitude’ (‘Late at night when the lamp burns’) – and that the poet blows gently and slowly over the lamp’s glass shade or down into the burner, after lifting it from the stand holding the gas or lamp oil. Why, then, would the sonnet about her refer to a candle? One editor explains it precisely as follows: ‘Inside, the dreamer, beginning to undress, blows on the candle’s light and extinguishes it. Outside, the lover’s eyes in the darkness, beneath the stars flickering through the branches of the trees, beneath the moon glimmering sadly, in the dark windows, the sadness being that of a soul doomed to be alone’4”. I do not know how convinced the editor is that this is a poem of sadness: rather, he is simply repeating a cliché, as it is commonly said that Eminescu’s love poetry is sad. Further up, however, the text reads: ‘But through your window I stand gazing / As you gaze with your eyes into the light.’ It is hard to believe that this could be the ‘candlelight’, which is merely a flame that dispels the darkness over a small area. Here, the light floods the hair that flows ‘in a wave of gold’, allowing the wonder to be contemplated through the window, from the veranda. Inside is a source of light more vivid, more powerful than that of a candle – capable even of outshining the moonlight; see the ending: And the moon beats sadly against the glistening windows: when the light from within goes out, the moonlight no longer penetrates the window, no longer mingles with the light inside. Materially speaking, it is a lamp – a rather attractive one, in fact – whilst spiritually we cannot under any circumstances be referring to the man who is peering surreptitiously from the veranda at the woman undressing, etc.: it is a domestic scene, as Veronica Micle’s inscription also suggests. I note that this confusion between the lamp and the candle arises particularly from around the mid-20th century (Perpessicisus, 1956) – and I cannot overlook the fact that this is roughly when the era of electrification is also beginning: the new light, that of the electric bulb, is seen as the ‘antithesis’ to the older light, that of the candle; no account is taken of the intervening invention of the lamp, and street lamps, for example, are forgotten, even though they provided light that was perhaps just as bright, and in any case more restful than electric light. They were, however, for the wealthy, not for ordinary folk who collected and saved candle stubs for a rainy day…
From this sonnet by Eminescu, I particularly recall the image: ‘Large branches in shadow-filled blossoms enfold me.’ It helps me understand the grammatical function of the postposed apostrophe in old-style writing – not only in Eminescu’s work, but particularly in his. Take, for example, these two lines from Eminescu’s fairy tale Călin the Mad: ‘On the walls, proud icons painted in shadow seem / As though the faces within them were rising from the great forests.’ This, too, refers to the moonlight – which this time bathes the outer walls of a castle in white. I have reproduced the text as it appears in our current editions. In Eminescu’s manuscript, however, it reads: On the walls, proud icons painted in the shadows appear… The poet, that is to say, uses this somewhat unusual apostrophe: although the vowel ‘î’ from ‘în’ is dropped, and he should have written ‘zugrăvite’n umbră’, the apostrophe nevertheless follows the ‘n’. The poet writes—that is, links the words—in the way he wishes to emphasise the meaning. Indeed, one thing is one thing and another is another: as we have it, grammatically correct, it means ‘painted in the shade’ – painted and placed, situated, somewhere in the shade. What the poet intends, however, is something else: he says that these icons are painted with shadow; when spoken or recited, the second term is emphasised and read as a single, linked word: ‘numbră’. These are precisely the ‘flowers of shadow’ from the ‘Sonnet of the Veranda’. Although the poet tells us and repeats how he wishes to link the words, we lack the ears to hear him. The apostrophe was removed from written Romanian in 1953, during the same era of electric fervour I mentioned above. The point is that traditional Romanian orthography has three types of apostrophe: a tight one that joins words, a wide one that separates them – and, lo and behold, a postposed one, very common in old poetry, especially in Dosoftei’s work (but also very common in today’s free, so-called ‘popular’ speech). In addition to these, there is of course the hyphen, that is, the dash between words. Poor little hyphen – today it has taken on the functions of the language’s three natural apostrophes – and those of the old hyphen. The Romanian language is, after all, the only Romance language without an apostrophe in writing. Can anyone imagine French without this mark? Yes, but in the 1950s, the ‘electric’ years, wasn’t it the case that the light no longer came from the west…
‘Light’, as an expression
From the texts examined so far, it appears that in Eminescu’s time there were two terms, ‘luminare’ and ‘lumânare’, with different meanings. For a nineteenth-century person, an expression such as ‘to extinguish the light’ was impossible, as light was, still!, a cosmic principle and reality; they would say ‘turn off the light fixture’, thinking of the apparatus that produced light – which could be a lamp, a chandelier or even a candle. As we have modernised through the widespread use of electricity, we have ‘invented’ – but even in our everyday language, when we say ‘turn off the light’, we are referring strictly to artificial light, created by human hands and minds. The opposite action, ‘turning on the light’, seems, however, to be dominated by the word’s etymological meaning. Indeed, ‘to turn on’ comes from the Latin: ad and prehendere, with the primary meaning of ‘to grasp’. In Latin there is ‘apprehendo’ / ‘adprehendo’, but this has nothing to do with fire; it simply means ‘to take’ or ‘to grasp’, whilst the Romanian meaning not only sets us apart from other Romance languages but also preserves an interesting mythology (and metaphysics) of fire: when I light a fire, it does not mean that I am bringing the fire to the surface from a piece of wood, as if the fire were inside the object and I were merely bringing it out; no, the fire clings to something, it ‘ad prinde’; it exists in its own right, it has its own life, its own realm, its own substance – and it deliberately chooses to entangle itself in our reality, to consume it. The primary meaning is ‘to set fire to’ – to wood, or to anything else that burns. Fire is not created by man; it must be preserved, tended; if it goes out, as in the folktale of Călin the Mad, time stands still until the young man who failed to tend it runs all the way to the other realm, takes a spark from the dragons’ fire, and brings it back to rekindle it here.
To kindle the light, therefore, is experienced by extension from the custom of kindling a fire; it does not mean to create or to make light – but to connect it to our sight, to anchor it in our reality. Its existence in electrical current, in electrical wires, has become a matter of course for today’s technically-minded person – who ought to know, that fire was perceived in much the same way in its ancestral use: as an element in its own right, as one of the four elements of the world – which can be provoked, summoned, brought forth and captured.
If, however, we return to philology and attempt to broaden our knowledge base in order to draw as clear a distinction as possible between ‘luminare’ and ‘lumânare’, we shall see that matters are not quite so clear-cut. Generally speaking, theory is simpler than practice – and verifying one through the other is difficult in every respect. Take, for example, the following recollection by Ioan Slavici, which confuses matters quite thoroughly: ‘In the spring of 1883, however, he began to become more stubborn, and I, too, was no longer quite the same as before (…) It was his habit to read aloud whatever he liked, especially poems, and he made a great deal of noise when he wrote, walked about, recited, or banged his fist on the table; he was, in a way, at odds with the world to which he was addressing himself. I would bang on the wall; he would blow out the candle and calm down, but he was up to no good and wouldn’t go to bed. After a while, when he thought I’d fallen asleep, he’d light the lamp again and start grumbling all over again. I would then get up, go to him and ask him to let me sleep. (…) This was, for me, the first sign of the nervous condition that had taken hold of him”5 I have quoted from Ioan Slavici: ‘Memoirs’. During this period, Slavici sometimes wrote with ‘î’ and sometimes with ‘â’ (dânsul/dînsul, când/cînd, etc.). That is not what would bother me in the first place, but other things. Firstly, the fact that this memory, so important, is scarcely mentioned by biographers. It is one of the extremely rare accounts of how Eminescu created; we learn that he would recite his own poetry, interpret it rhetorically, was always dissatisfied, and would return to it. This highlights the particular importance the poet attached to the written text as a mirror of spoken poetry – that is, to punctuation, the placement of the apostrophe, stress patterns, etc.
Let us leave Slavici to his heresies, but we, who today have a richer understanding of Eminescu than his friend did in 1883 (because we can corroborate the endless fragments of information that Slavici did not possess), we must ask ourselves: what was it that Eminescu was so preoccupied with in the spring of 1883? The poet had not published any poems in Convorbiri literare since September 1881; Luceafărul had been finalised in 1882 and submitted to the România Jună almanac in Vienna. In the summer of 1883, he suffered the well-known stroke, which his opponents exploited – and in the winter, under the supervision of Titu Maiorescu, his volume of Poems was published, comprising, in addition to the 24 poems published in the meantime, some 40 new, previously unpublished titles. He worked intensively on these in the spring of 1883; they are poems of exceptional musicality, arranged and organised by the poet through his writing.
As previously noted, Perpessicius concludes in his footnotes—where he traces the countless versions and variants of these poems—that the volume of December 1883 was presented to Titu Maiorescu fully organised by someone else, leaving the critic with the task of preparing it for the press. Perpessicius does not say who organised it either, but it goes without saying that Eminescu himself is the architect of his own volume. In any case, Slavici tells us that in the spring of 1883 the poet was working intensely – and that he, Slavici, deduced from this manner of working the illness that would strike on 28 June. Could Slavici really not have known what his friend and lodger was working on?
We know today, from the collection published in 2000, of Eminescu’s letter of 8 February 1882 to Veronica Micle: ‘Titus has suggested that I publish my poems, and I have already taken from him the 1870–1871 volume of Convorbiri, which contains Venus and the Madonna and The Epigones…’6 Until now, I was only familiar with Veronica’s reply, in which she wrote: ‘I hear you are publishing your beautiful poems…’7 Published as early as the beginning of the 20th century, this letter of hers had been overlooked, despite being the sole evidence of the fact: yet, reinforced by his own letter, both constitute the true birth certificate of the first edition of 1883. We note, however: Maiorescu knew, Veronica Micle knew – how come Slavici had not yet learnt that Eminescu was working intensively on this volume?! Such publishing decisions are public knowledge; we cannot imagine that a book of this kind was being prepared in secret.
Just a few lines earlier, Slavici writes: ‘I was giving lessons at the Society’s Teacher Training College, at the “Elena Doamna” Home and at the Manliu Institute. On Saturdays, however, and on the eve of public holidays, when I did not have to be at my desk at eight in the morning, I would often sit with him and discuss matters of grammar, pedagogy, philosophy or history, through whole peaceful nights that cannot be forgotten. Usually, however, I would not let him stay, and it was enough for me to knock on the wall for him to blow out his candle’. In response to Perpessicius’s question—namely, as to who would have compiled the volume of poems that had come before Maiorescu—Slavici seems to reply that it was not him, that he had no idea what the poet was up to, and so on.
Throughout history, there have been sincere times, when documents, testimonies, public records, the press – in general, the written word – are easily understood, and one senses at every turn that they wish toconvey their content – and insincere, disingenuous times, when either people lack the courage or the desire to say what is happening in the world, or the writing itself is steeped in phrases, expressions and words with multiple meanings. Texts such as those above, by Ioan Slavici, must be interpreted – and understanding will be inferred and demonstrated. We cannot believe that he was unaware of what Eminescu was working on in the spring of 1883, nor can we believe that the poet’s nocturnal outbursts were evidence of a nervous disorder. Let us, however, set aside our preconceptions and judge fairly: Slavici knocks on the wall – and Eminescu blows out the candle. After which the poet ‘re-lit the lamp’. It is clear that Slavici is not interested in the light as such, that it did not shine through the wall to disturb his professional slumber. What bothers him is the effect of the light, the fact that it brings the poet into contact with his manuscripts, it ‘ignites’ Eminescu in his work. How, then, could Slavici see through the wall whether the lamp or the candle was lit in the poet’s room? Notice how he puts it: ‘he would blow out the candle (…) and light the lamp again (…) I would then get up, go to him and ask him to let me sleep’. Since he went to him, it would mean that he could see what was lit there—that is, the lamp. It is absurd, however, to believe that the poet first lit the candle and, after blowing it out, lit the lamp; why would one be quieter than the other? What Slavici means by ‘he would blow out the candle’ – ‘he would blow out the light, the illumination’ – and by ‘he would light the lamp again’ – ‘he would light the light, the illumination, the lamp again’. Anyone familiar with the terms understands ‘again’ to mean the repetition of the same action. You cannot take off your shoes and then, later on, take off your boots ‘again’, for example.
These are, therefore, linguistic expressions whose meaning has subsequently been unravelled into the words of which they are composed. Evidence of this is provided by Fr. Damé’s Romanian–French dictionary 8: in Volume II, published in 1894, he lists ‘luminare’ as a feminine noun with the meanings: 1. ‘the act of illuminating; of shining; to shine’ and 2. ‘illumination’, giving the example: ‘Luminarea-Sea’ – ‘His Highness’ (more commonly, in fairy tales, it is ‘His Illumination’). Immediately below this, ‘lumînare’ is listed with the meaning ‘cierge, bougie, chandelle’. Whether he forgot or corrected himself on the spot, in Volume IV of 1897, under the entry for the word ‘a stinge’, Fr. Damé translates precisely the expression used by Eminescu in Letter I: ‘after the candle had been extinguished – après qu’on eût éteint la lumière’ – precisely the expression that interests us: ‘after the light had been extinguished’ is equivalent to ‘after the candle had been extinguished’.
The Thesaurus Dictionary of the Romanian Language has not yet included the term ‘lumânare / luminare’, but for ‘to extinguish’ we see that the meanings are clearly distinguished, with reference to Heliade-Rădulescu (‘until the lights are extinguished’) or I. Ghica (‘I extinguished the candle’). I do not know how the honourable linguists or their esteemed female colleagues will proceed – but the principle of the dictionary is that terms are taken from editions, usually critical ones. However, in current editions the differences have been erased, the text has been smoothed out: will the Dictionary, as an institution, consider that older editions are better than the new ones and that author’s editions are the best?! That would be marvellous; it would mean that the Dictionary, too, is disregarding the history of Romanian textual criticism over the last 50 years and, in order to fulfil its purpose, is moving beyond the censorship of 1953. In this situation, however, we are dealing with a very, very varied corpus; what we call the Dictionary of the Romanian Language is a work that begins with the letter A and ends with the letter Z – but it cites editions from 1901 to the present day in a very, very time-bound amalgamated consensus. It is a work that is only now set to be reworked.
Let us remain with Eminescu, and look a little further up at one of the incarnations of ‘light’ that we have recorded. One says, therefore, ‘Your Highness’ as a translation of the French ‘Votre Altesse’. A person’s stature is not, therefore, necessarily judged by their height – there is another criterion: that of light. This time, it is the inner light, their own, but also the light that shines outwards. Here we see how, in this elevated language of the high court – of the Age of Enlightenment, if you will – light can be appropriated; it can have an owner. This is the opposite of fire, which, as we have seen, ignites from somewhere within its own chaotic essence, within things; the opposite, too, of electric light, which likewise illuminates a bulb or some other object – but from the outside. This brings us to Eminescu’s question, to which I do not believe an answer can yet be given: is man a light, or is he not? That is the question – which we shall explore as a question and, perhaps, something more – but by no means as an answer. ‘No one has yet reaped the full truth in life’, as the poet himself teaches us – we shall certainly not be the ones to contradict him.
Man as light
A high point of Eminescu’s pessimism can be seen in the categorical denial in The Emperor and the Proletarian: ‘You say man is a light / In this world full of bitterness and torment? / Not a single spark within him is pure and full / His ray is as filthy as the globe of clay / Over which he reigns supreme. These few opening lines hold the whole poem together, in the sense that the subsequent unfolding of the arguments is linked to them. To speak of a ‘filthy ray’, to deny even the human spark, the arche, candour and categorical fullness, is a lament of the being from its very depths. ‘World’ comes, in Romanian, from the Latin ‘lumen’, a compound of light: we might be led into the sweet delusion that the poet is, here, through a play on words, making a concession to dialectics, in the sense that the world as the sum of human beings is light – but the individual human being is not. Yet even this concession cannot be sustained. The comparison is clear and harsh: the globe of clay, the earthly globe, has no light of its own; it is illuminated from without by other celestial bodies, especially the sun and the moon. So too is the generic human being: he is ‘illuminated’ from without by concepts, by abstractions such as justice, religion, wealth, revolution, and so on. He sets fire, or kindles a fire (the revolutions throughout history) – but not from within himself, for he has no inner fire. Man is like a mirror, just as the clay globe is – or the Moon, which in other contexts is: She, the golden child, the daughter of eternal darkness. Darkness, the gloom – these are eternal; light is a fragment, it is chance, luck, that is to say, it depends on encountering an obstacle in the Universe that reflects it. In Satire I we find the well-known verses that define this state of light from without: Just as dust plays in the realm of a ray, / Thousands of violet threads that fade with the ray, / Thus, in the eternally deep night, / We have the moment, we have the ray, which still endures… / As it fades, all perishes; like a shadow in the darkness / For the chimerical universe is a dream of non-existence… The image is that of light passing through a slit—let us say: through a hole in a plank. The ray behind the slit, or the beam, captures within its body the tiny specks of dust that would otherwise remain unseen. Today, we have the image of a film projector’s lens on a screen, or the image of a torch lit in the night; in Eminescu’s time, these had not yet been discovered; the poets of the late nineteenth century (all the poets of the world, not only Eminescu, but he too) anticipated and foreshadowed them. On the scale of the Universe, this is the visible world: that which lies within the beam. This is life itself: that which is illuminated, that which is caught within the beam. In the same ‘Satire I’ we also find the picture of cosmogony as envisaged by that scholar who thinks only of the past and the future (‘At present, the thinker does not cease his musings’). Behold how the world fades away: The Sun, which today is 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, having escaped the reins of light and of the sun… We have discussed this passage before: the grammatical error in the last line could not be resolved by the editors; it remained, in practice, unnoticed: ‘from the reins of light and of the sun’. It should have been ‘and of’. Assuming a form such as ‘frân, frânuri’, meaning ‘reins’, the agreement is still incorrect. Commas would resolve this; they should be inserted, for example, as follows: ‘They, from the reins of light, and of the sun, escaped’ – thus, meaning: ‘and the sun’s planets’. We cannot correct this, however (nor has any editor done so), because Eminescu himself did not insert these commas anywhere in any manuscript of Letter I.
We shall move on, but retain the idea: thus, at the end of ‘eternity’, when a cosmic cycle comes to a close, light can no longer act as a rein or brake; it can no longer hold back the ‘planets’ – which become rebellious and hurl themselves into infinite space. This cosmogony tells us something very important, namely that the new cosmic cycle which will begin after the apocalypse will, in fact, mean the rebellious planets being caught once more in the brakes of light. Whether we like it or not, we arrive at Luceafărul and the words of the Demiurge: ‘Ask me for my first word’. This word does not mean some sort of ‘password’ or ‘magic formula’ – but simply an understanding, the sealing of a cosmic convention, a promise that the Demiurge will keep his word. Hyperion is one of the rebellious planets in space that came under the First Word and now, all of a sudden, wishes to break it, wishes to be set free: ‘From the burden of the black neighbour / Father, set me free’.
It is interesting to see whether Hyperion itself possesses an inner light, whether it is a light in its own right. His first portrait presents us with an intriguing image of a ‘beautiful corpse with lively eyes’ / ‘Which sparkle outwards’, suggesting that the star’s eyes truly ‘spray sparks’. The second portrait, however, reveals to us a ‘black light’, in the well-known stanza: Only the large and marvellous eyes / Shine with a deep, chimerical glow / Like two insatiable passions / And full of darkness. To shine does not mean to possess or produce light: even anthracite shines (see the political-journalistic metaphor ‘Luceafărul Huilei’). Hyperion holds the reins of light; he is a cornerstone of Creation, and so he reflects light. But he reflects the first light, the very first light. The Earth or the Moon, as Planets, receive light from all directions, a mixed, ‘dirty’ light, just like that of Man. On his journey towards the Demiurge, Hyperion: Saw, as on the very first day / How lights spring forth, / How, springing forth, they surround him / Like seas in which one swims; / He flies, his thoughts carried by longing / Until everything, everything, perishes. (Let us not forget that we are in the Poet’s philological chamber, and let us highlight the differences in the text as text. Today’s editions and school textbooks include a comma here: He flies, his thoughts carried by longing, / Until everything, everything perishes; thus it is an apposition or a comparison: he flies like a thought carried by longing; Eminescu’s genuine text omits the second comma; the meaning is that longing carries the thought until everything perishes; it is, therefore, a hierarchy, a causality: longing propels it; it is the primary cause. Be that as it may, we find ourselves in a dead end of thought from which we cannot escape without, in fact, defining light—or rather, without establishing its cosmic status. It holds the worlds together in coherence; it ‘wells up’ from everywhere as Hyperion approaches the first day, the day of the covenant. But what, ultimately, is it?
The passages concerning the status of light are highly controversial in the published editions of Eminescu’s poems; the ‘little comma’ inserted by Maiorescu and other editors wreaks havoc in this regard. Here are a few examples (we regret that we do not have the time to list them all; however, we refer you to our edition – where we believe we have not omitted a single one). Firstly, this one, from Lasă-ți lumea ta uitată (‘Leave Your World Behind’), the second poem in the first edition, which was unpublished as of 1883 (one of the many poems which I. Slavici attests the poet was working on day and night in the spring of 1883). Our ‘standard’ text, in Maiorescu’s punctuation: Behold the lake. The full moon / Shines upon it, passing through it; / It, illuminated by her light / Feels its own solitude... From the 7th edition onwards, Maiorescu inserts a comma after ‘gilding it’, a feature also retained by Perpessicius (Ibrăileanu, however, follows editions I–VI, as in the text above). ‘Convorbirile literare’, which publishes from the poet’s manuscript, reads as follows: ‘The full moon, / Polishing him, passes through him’. These two commas used by Eminescu draw attention to the two movements: one on the surface—a glint—and the other in depth—a passing through. So: the moon does not pass through the lake from shore to shore, gilding it, but first caresses its surface, and then ‘ignites’ it in its entire aquatic being, making it self-aware, making it feel its solitude. The next stanza: Trembling with the wave in the foam… This lake, seen from here, is alive; it trembles with joy, it feels its solitude. It is not a landscape described (‘painted’) here, but a causality, a drama of the cosmos. The examples we shall give below will show that, for Eminescu, the love of the cosmos is immense, overwhelming – and in the face of this resultant of the vast, expanding light, man with his earthly love becomes small, is truly overwhelmed, and stands in the corner of his soul as a spectator. The grandeur of nature lies in this love of the elements, in this way in which they are drawn to and ignite one another. Longing resides in the cosmos, not in the poor human soul: longing is light itself—Light, in fact—which drives the mind on until everything, absolutely everything, perishes. In the spirit of the poem Emperor and Proletarian, man is not a light, or rather is no longer a light – because love has withered within him, because there is no longer love on earth; its lamp has not yet been lit.
- 1
Veronica Micle, Love and Poetry. His for Me, Mine for Him, edited by Octav Minar, Bucharest, Socec/Cs.A. Publishers, n.d. 1924.
- 2
Vol. XVI, p. 543.
- 3
Octav Minar, Introductionto the cited edition, pp. 96–97.
- 4
Mihai Eminescu, Sonnets, edited by Petru Creția.
- 5
Ioan Slavici, Memoirs, published by Cultura Națională, Bucharest, 1924, p. 26.
- 6
My Sweet Lady / My Beloved Emin. Unpublished Correspondence between Mihai Eminescu and Veronica Micole. Edited, transcribed, with notes and a preface by Cristina Zarifopol-Illias. Published by Polirom, 2000, p. 188.
- 7
Vol. XVI, p. 452.
- 8
Fr. Damé: New Romanian–French Dictionary, State Printing Office, 1893, s.v.