Mihai Eminescu

I was born Mihail Eminovici in Moldavia, at Ipotești. The speech of villagers, folk songs, and the stern grammar of Cernăuți schooled me better than any diploma. Vienna and Berlin opened cabinets of thought; Schopenhauer’s chill entered my notebooks, yet I kept my ear to Romanian earth.

At Junimea in Iași and later in Bucharest, I tested each line as a coin on stone. From that labor came Luceafărul, the Scrisorile, Glossă, Floare albastră, and other pieces where myth and village breath meet the question of time, death, and the unreachable absolute. Stars, forests, and sea are not scenery to me; they are actors.

In the newsroom of Timpul the ink ran hotter. I wrote on schools, language, finances, and statecraft, wary of corruption and of fashions imported without roots. My polemics could be severe; some pages speak with a harsh, exclusionary edge toward Jews and other străini that reads darkly now. Still, I held that culture must be made solid before it is adorned.

Veronica Micle walked beside my verses like a clear bell. I served as school inspector and as librarian in Iași; in Bucharest I lived among printers’ deadlines and factional quarrels. After 1883 illness seized me; hospitals and silences closed the circle. I died in 1889. Others have since named me the country’s poet; I was only a workman at the Romanian word.