Ion Creangă

I was born in Humulești, where orchards lean over fences and talk tastes of smoke and apples. The lanes, the fairs, the rites of the year taught me more than any catechism. I learned to listen when women kneaded bread and men patched harnesses, and to pocket a proverb the way a boy pockets a slingshot. When I took a pen, I tried to keep that breath of the hearth, so that on paper speech would walk as it does on the road.

They schooled me for the priesthood, and I wore the deacon’s cassock in Iași. My tongue was too frank, my ear too tempted by the stage, and I kicked against discipline until I was cast out. No matter; I stood at the blackboard. I wrote primers and readers meant for ordinary children, to spare them needless thorns and let the letters sit plain. A school is a better pulpit when you can hear the back row breathing.

At Junimea, under Titu Maiorescu’s cool eye and with Eminescu’s warm hand, I began to print in Convorbiri Literare. Out came my Amintiri din copilărie and the tales I had turned and retuned by the stove: Povestea lui Harap‑Alb, Capra cu trei iezi, Ursul păcălit de vulpe, Punguța cu doi bani. I kept the mischief and the bite; life itself mixes honey and gall.

Illness and want visited me often, but friends found me in the little bojdeucă in Țicău, where the bench by the stove never went cold. If you listen closely, you’ll still hear our talk in those pages.