SOURCE: Popescu, Corina. “Eminescu and Leopardi: The Revelation of the Infinite.” Romanian Review 42, no. 11 (1988): 85-94.

[In the following essay, Popescu suggests how and why Eminescu affected Romania's reception of the work of Giacomo Leopardi.]

The reception of Giacomo Leopardi's work in Romania is directly linked to the way the poetry of Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) broadened the readers' horizon.

The kinship between the lyrical formulas employed by the two poets was for the first time pointed out by the high critical authority of professor Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917). In his study devoted to European echoes of translations from Romanian literature published in the monthly Convorbiri literare on 1 January 1882, entitled “Romanian Literature and the Foreign Countries,” Maiorescu reproduced from a German publication a reference made to the “spiritual kinship” of the two poets. In a new study of 1886, “Poets and Critics” he gave a brilliant award in the dispute between the admirers of the poet Vasile Alecsandri (1821-1890) and the enthusiasm of “Eminescianism”: to measure by one criterion alone the first great poets of 19th century Romanian literature is as little possible as to establish whether Leopardi is a greater poet than Victor Hugo. (“… The impossibility to find an answer only attests to the lack of clarity of the question. If it were a matter of lyrical poetry alone and even within lyrical poetry only of the finest expression of deep melancholy, in the midst of the aspiration after the ideal and at the same time of the bitterest satire, Leopardi is unattainable and rises above Victor Hugo. But could this alone be the matter? Victor Hugo is the embodiment of the French genius of his time, in its most poetical aspirations …”)

In 1889—the year of Eminescu's death—Titu Maiorescu published the study “Eminescu and His Poems” in which he asserted that 20th century Romanian literature would start under the sign of this creation. In order to define Eminescu's poetical personality, the critic again resorted to an evocation of Leopardi: “The terms of happy and unhappy love cannot apply to Eminescu in their everyday acceptation (…) Like Leopardi in his ‘Aspasia’ he only saw the woman he loved as the imperfect copy of an unachievable prototype.”

The name of the Italian poet was to revert often enough in the correspondence Titu Maiorescu kept up with the younger prosewriter and poet Duiliu Zamfirescu (1858-1922). Fascinated by Leopardi, with whose writings he had become acquainted during his stay in Italy and from whom he began translating in 1889, Duiliu Zamfirescu “read” the latter's poetry as an “Eminescian,” as a writer trained at the school of Eminescu's language; for instance here is how Zamfirescu commented upon the suggestiveness of a verse by Leopardi: “Torna dinanzi al mio pensier talora / Il tuo sembiante, Aspasia. Suddenly you penetrate the melancholy of the soul addressing you. Torna talora il tuo sembiante: your image sometimes returns … It is as if a star rose from the darkness of times. It is a sonorous value with indescribable evocative power.”

As a matter of fact Duiliu Zamfirescu was the first to remark a number of stylistic affinities between the two poets, mentioning “the incomparable simplicity,” the “subjectiveness,” the “pessimism” and yet—with highly modern intuition—the suggestiveness of the word (he called “comprehensiveness of words.”)

Two decades later, in 1909, in an academic speech entitled “The Metaphysics of Words and Literary Aesthetics” the same Duiliu Zamfirescu analysed the relationships between Leopardi and Eminescu in point of “the influence of metaphysics upon poetic elocution,” on that occasion remarking that the two poets “reach the vast expanses of the human soul” thanks to “the spiritual power of ponderation, of nonmaterial things;” the unique note struck by these poets does not occur out of the sumptuous lexis (“it is not words that sparkle like gems, but the inner power of their relativity. Leopardi's words seem to be detached from the lead of the ore”) but out of the power to capture and to transmit a loftier sense with which each word is invested.

Subsequently, the parallel between Eminescu and Leopardi was examined from various angles by literary critics and historians upholding the most diverse formulas, from George Călinescu to Dimitrie Caracostea, Pompiliu Constantinescu and Tudor Vianu.

As regards the destiny of the two poets, similarities were remarked, among others, by Mircea Eliade. Talking about the isolation of Eminescu among his mediocre contemporaries, M. Eliade wrote in 1939: “He was perhaps as lonely as the invalid Leopardi. Yet Leopardi at least had the chance of not running into clever people every day. Eminescu on the other hand was fated to struggle in intellectual circles. And while ignorance and naivety are appeasing for a genius, aggressive and boastful mediocrity sometimes become a curse. His loneliness was aggravated by the mediocrity of those who claimed to be Romania's cultural élite. Faced with the incomprehension of the multitude, a genius only preserves the forgiving smile of Messiah driven away with stones. Yet in front of the opaqueness of the would-be élites, the smile becomes bitter and scorn is paired with disgust.”

More recently various aspects and contexts of the relationship Eminescu-Leopardi were also investigated by the well-known Italian scholars in Romania, Nina Façon and Alexandru Balaci. In 1983 Eleonora Cărcăleanu wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Leopardi in Romania. We owe a more complex treatment of the theme to Iosif Cheia-Pantea, who dedicated to the many facets of this rapprochement a book around the concept of elective affinities: Eminescu and Leopardi, published in 1980.

But, in the perspective of modern reception, Leopardi and Eminescu appear to us related not only through those features of romantic psychology evidenced by this century's criticism, but also through the anticipatory force of their creation, as pioneers of building the structures of modern European lyricism.

Nobody has ever denied the importance of Eminescu's writings for the whole subsequent evolution of Romanian literature; still, a global approach to the relationship between 20th century Romanian poetry and Eminescu has not yet been undertaken. Leopardi on the other hand was from the very beginning claimed as one of the guardian angels of tutelary spirits of Italian literature after the first world war, while the representatives of hermeticism, headed by Ungaretti, imposed the recognition of some “modern heritage of his poetry, appreciating the contribution of Leopardi's lyrical poetry to the emergence of that kind of modern poetry which replaces the ephemeral reality by a new, nonmimetic reality, and suggesting that Mallarmé would appear to us in an entirely different light if Leopardi's experience could continue.”

It has been remarked with good justification that Leopardi's creative evolution itself is exemplary and, we could say, emblematic of the trends of modern poetry: withdrawing poetry from its public role in lyricism to the space and time of the individual experience, from discursiveness and imagery into the complex musical expression of “song,” therefore the dissolution of the rigid framework of the traditional species and the birth of new structures, based on a new type of coherence, all of them are visible in the very chronological succession of Leopardi's writings.

Moreover, the arrangement of poems in the volume of Canti testifies to a modern acceptation of poetry, for, even before Baudelaire Leopardi detached himself from the tradition of romantic selections of verse and built his representative volume on the idea of a general sense.

A century ago, the similarity between the two poets was based on what seemed to be a thematic novelty en vogue in the epoch of the impressive success with the public of Schopenhauer's writings: the pessimistic profession of faith. When we re-read them today, Eminescu and Leopardi appear to us twinned not only through that tragical feeling of existence, unanimously grasped—whether it be called disappointment, despair, anxiety, but also through their very work born out of that sentiment, a work whose substance included the heroic protest to man's isolation in the world, to the world's ever worse and irremediable degradation and, at the same time, the aspiration to recuperate poetry—considered as the only way to save the human element—in a hostile environment.

Through the assertion of a poetical ego that functions as the centre of the universe, through the attempt to build a kind of poetry that should no longer enounce a problematic truth, but should be the truth itself, the two poets are integrated into a lyrical formula which surpasses romanticism and expresses contemporary seekings.

Out of the manifold aspects of the affinities between Leopardi's verse and 20th century poetry, prolonging typically romantic attitudes, there emerges what one may term the poetics of distance.

The near-far dichotomy deeply marks Leopardi's poetical seekings following the writing of the famous Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (1818), generating the fundamental antithesis between the here, whose imperfection is painfully felt and a somewhere else better suiting the human wish for the absolute, the prefiguration of the Baudelairian anywhere out of this world.

The romantic “thirst for the absolute” acquires a similar configuration with Leopardi and Eminescu, and the consciousness that man is exiled into imperfection is accompanied by the attempt to come out of this exile, opposing the vacuum of existence to the poetical discourse itself.

Leopardi's aspiration after what is remoto in time and space, the tendency to expand the poetical ego find correspondents in Eminescu's placing man within cosmic horizons, which justifies the formula of “titanism of distance.”

Even a cursory glance immediately reveals to us the bipolarity near-far as typical of all of Leopardi's lyrical verse: the poet always depicts himself as attracted by the mirage of some distance—more than once imaginary—: “mirando il ciel ed ascoltando il canto / della rana rimota;” remote landscapes (quel lontano mar, quei monti azzurri) inspire pensieri immensi to the man who contemplates them from here (che di qua scopro).

In Eminescu's poetry, distance is not merely opposed to nearness, and the cosmic landscape does not serve as a mere background for human gestures, but are interpenetrated, integrated into one and the same structure, in which the suggestions of the whole can be found again in details, while the miniature is complementary to the grandiose. Thus, the thrill of erotic approach is tantamount to the maximum distance of cosmic mysteries: “You don't know that the closeness of your eyes / Is balsam for my heart as soothing, mild, / As stars which in evening quiet rise.”

Love itself is thus projected with Leopardi into a distance which purifies it of earthly implications: it has taken flight from immediate, ardent living (lungi volasti); the adored woman inspires love “from a distance” (amore lunge m'inspiri); quiet can be attained through the contemplation of distances by the man who is nailed to the here where he finds himself exiled (Qui neghittoso immobile giacendo / Il mar la terra e il ciel miro e sorrido). Even Silvia, the personification of hope indicates by a desperate gesture the grave—the limit of mortals' life—di lontano. As a matter of fact the poet was conscious of this particular preference for the remoteness of the adored object: in one of his “annotations” to the 1827 edition, he defined himself as the only lover who accepted to have “il telescopio” interposed between him and his beloved.

Let us note that this remoteness is as often as not due to the fact that love episodes are projected into the past, contemplated, though not lived through the senses. The only typically romantic moment of suffering, “pien di travaglio e di lamento”, the one in “Il primo amore” is also distilled in memory.

Being dominated by the nostalgia for nearness, imbued with images of plastic sensuality, Eminescu's love poetry nevertheless began and ended elegiacally, while its essential direction was the return to the past. Very much as with Leopardi, with Eminescu love is not so much lived as re-lived. What prevents its sensorial living is the awareness of time's flight, the dominant fear of losing the moment in the time's flow.

Nor is it difficult to realize that with both Leopardi and Eminescu, we have to do with a genuine obsession of time. The aspect is obvious first of all at the thematic and discursive level and most investigators of the Eminescu-Leopardi parallel have studied comparatively the antithesis between the illustrious tradition and the degenerate present, following the treatment of this theme in Leopardi's Canzoni and in Eminescu's “Epigones” “Third Epistle”, etc. With Leopardi the historical present is characterized exclusively in negative terms, in sharp contrast with an idealized past, the break between the past and the present corresponding to a marked decay of values. (In peggio precipitano i tempi). It is however to be noted that for Leopardi, the illustrious past is no historical time but rather an absolute value, the standard for all civic and moral values. Models are actually sought in a mythical time, in an original state of prehistoric childhood of humanity: let us confine our suggestions to the Inno ai Patriarchi”. “People who would think in legends—all a world who spoke in verse” as evoked by Eminescu do not belong to temporality proper: this past has disappeared and nevertheless it is recurrent in the childhood of each individual. Thus transfigured into mythical dimensions, the historic past becomes the golden age, the lost paradise: both Eminescu and Leopardi oppose to the negative present not the dimension of a remote historical time, but that of the myth—therefore a non-time.

In the system of Leopardi's Canzoni, one distinguishes a permanent tension between tempo storico and tempo privato, and the author's final option—evasion from the historical time institutionalized in the experience of individual grief and passion—results in the birth of a kind of poetry which is to a great extent construction opposed to vacuum, invention of an immobile time.

Eminescu's poetical universe has been described by the Italian professor Rosa Del Conte as being centred around cosmic imagination and around the obsession of the evasion from time; still, the problems of philosophy and gnosis raised by this kind of poetry give rise to a finite, perishable ideological model and it is not in this area that one ought to seek its current values.

Let us follow the obsession of time not in the so-called “philosophical poetry” as in Eminescu's love poems and in Leopardi's idylls.

The drama of perceiving the duration of whatever is human is perfectly representative of the permanent unrest of the romantic soul. The present time is seen by Eminescu as a permanent flow, as “eternal passage,” yet the outlook is not Heraclitian: it is singularized by the fact that this ceaseless movement tends towards an end, towards extinction, towards death. In Eminescu's lyrical poems, stars “perish” in the distance, longing and yearning “are extinguished” in the “night” of oblivion, dreams “fly and fade on the horizon, like the light birds of the ocean” the aim of the uninterrupted flow is the territory of total extinction—Nirvana.

In Leopardi's poetry, the specifically romantic intuition of the evolution of world's realities and the awareness of the fragility of moments acquire pathetical accents, more than once in memorable wordings: “Come fuggiste, o belle ore serene!” or “Umana cosa piccol' tempo dura.” The lapse of time ravishes the joys of dreamy childhood (“Ogni più lieto / Giorno di nostra età prima s'invola / Sottentra il morbo, e la vecchiezza, e l'ombra / Della gelida morte”) darken the most serene moments (“E fieramente mi si stringe il core / A pensar como tutto al mondo passa / E quasi orma non lascia”). The restlessness engendered by the irreparable flight of time proves an overwhelmed fright, which prevents the poet from experiencing the deep feeling of love at the same time as living it through the senses. That is why, the retrospective becomes the major modality of living time, in which two other possible romantic attitudes are dissolved: the aspiration after an indiscernible future and spleen—the feeling of sterile time. “Il piacere può essere solo passato o futuro” Leopardi noted in his “Zibaldone”, indicating as the only way to penetrate the essences of sentiment remoteness, the distance from the immediate manifestation, i.e. “il rimembrar delle passate cose.”

With Eminescu, regressive lapse into the past occurs in two distinct ways: either under the empire of nostalgia which presupposes the return to a certain moment of existence already outlived, or under that of melancholy, not oriented towards a specific object. A fundamental feature of the romantic spiritual structure, melancholy begins as an abrupt perception of the transience of the moment and ends by meaning “a longing for the current moment itself,” taking possession of the present as a remembrance.

Among Eminescu's posthumous poems, there is a variant included in the laboratory of creation for “So Fresh and Frail” which illustrates this desire to wish the miraculous present as a remembrance, in order to save it from sliding into nothingness. The thrill of losing love brings about on the one hand “sweet suffering” which is by far more intense than the exulting living, and on the other hand out of the “gloomy heap” of past times, the “adored face” can be slowly brought back, revived, up to the reiteration of the supremely intense moment of the loss which stamps upon the soul “the sweet sorrow” of death.

In this mechanics of rememoration the Romanian poet discovers the modality infinitely to renew emotional living which, however intense, would otherwise have been limited to one moment of the fluid present. In its essence, rememoration is a movement for slowly bringing close an image from another space: “If branches tap my window-pane / And aspens quiver sear, / ' tis to remember you again / And slowly bring you near.”

Very much as in Leopardi's case, an amarissima ricordanza may become the source for lunga doglia, thus prolonging the intense sensorial experience; thanks to it one may recover the sometime fervour (vive quel foco ancor, vive l'affetto), while the adored image is restored to its life (spira nel pensier mio la bella imago).

The signs of the outer world favour this movement of drawing near a spatialized time which is rememoration, yet does not univocally determine it: the re-spatialization generating painful delight is a voluntary operation. Nor does Leopardi act differently in “Aspasia” (“… E mai non sento / Mover profumo di fiorita piaggia / né di fiori olezzar vie cittadine / ch'io non ti vegga ancor qual eri”) as well as in “Le Ricordanze” (“… e fia compagnia / Dogni mio vago immaginar, di tutti / I miei teneri sensi, i tristi e cari / Moti del cor, la rimembranza acerba.”) Perhaps we ought to see here not a mere manifestation of what we usually call affective memory, but rather an aesthetic attitude to the erotic feelings, projected into a distance from which it can be contemplated and relished.

The transfer into the past is tantamount to the full possession of the object of adoration: the past is an area over which “the worm of times” (il tarlo della morte) no longer has power. The beloved “lost for ever” becomes “for ever adored,” while the human feeling acquires an infinite perspective.

The recuperation of the past through memory, in fact through a reverie in which memory and dream are united—and whose prototype we find in Petrarch's lyricism—, illustrates what the Romanian professor Edgar Papu (b. 1908) called the “dynamics of a vegetal type” of the romantic mind, a gesticulating kind of dynamics though not ambulatory of élans alternating with ebbing movements. In “A Silvia”, for instance, the enthusiastic evocation is followed by the resigned meditation upon universal vanity; an upswing is followed by a retractile movement: the imaginative élan which mobilizes the soul of the lyrical hero does not wrest the latter from his form anchoring into the terrestrial element, not just fortuitously vegetal—“sull'erba” (Leopardi), “near the host of yellow lilies / on the brink of that blue lake” (Eminescu).

Memory holds a central place in the universe of Leopardi's poetry: sorrowful at all times, it is nevertheless a source of delight (“e pur mi gioia La ricordanza, e il noverar l'etate del mio dolore”). Love re-lived in remembrance is a source of infinite torment (“cagion diletta d'infiniti affanni / meco sarmi per morte a un tempo spento”) as well as of celestial joy (“gioia celeste”). The fascination of remembrance is similar to that exerted upon the poet by indefinite space, by indistinct sounds. With Leopardi, the function of remembrance is twofold: of an analgesic—which enables one to put up with the inferno of reality (“Quasi incredibil parmi / Che la vita in felice e il mondo sciocco / Cià per gran tempo assai / Senza te sopporta”) or of a stimulant which gives birth to an artificial paradise, where the depth of feeling may reach its limits. The paradise to which it raises the remembrance of the beloved being is synonymous with the abolition of earthly time: “Che mondo mai, che nova / “Immensità che paradiso è que lo / Là dove spesso il tuo stupendo incanto / Parmi innalzari dov'io / Sott'altra luce che l'usata arrando / Il mio terreno stato / E tutto quanto il ver pongo in obblio.” Regression in time carries the poet towards an Edenic state, towards immersion into a restoring mythical time: “Come da' nudi sassi / Dello scabro Apennino / A un campo verde che lontan sorrida / Volge gli occhi bramoso il pellegrino; / Tal io dal secco ed aspro / Mondano conversar vogliosamente. / Quasi in lieto giardino a te ritorno / E ristora i miei senzi il tuo soggiorno”. The visions elicited by the retrospective re-living of love are similar to the dreams of gods (“i sogni de l'immortali”) truer than the primary truth of everyday life: they are a delusion (“inganno”) of divine origin, “che incontro al ver tenacemente dura / e spesso al ver'sadegua”.

Submitting of his own accord to the penalty of remembrance (“To reach your gentle shadow I stretch my arms in vain / out of the waves of time, now, I can't raise you again”) erotic Eminescu too in hours of ecstasy invoked the face of his beloved “out of the waves of time”: acquiring the consistency of a dream apparition, this will again turn into the aim of despondent adoration and the poet almost simultaneously experienced both the sadness and the joy of meeting again in remembrance: “Is there a chance to wrest you out of your misty ocean? / To lift you to my bosom, dear angel of devotion (…) Alas, you are not real, if you can pass like this / And lose your very shadow in some dark cold abyss / To leave myself down hearted, once more, bereft and lonely, / To love the dream of rapture in sad remembrance only …”

Throughout Eminescu's verse, recollections acquire almost material coherence: “Above them all / Memories like grigs are chirping / In some cracked and darkened wall; / or fall heavily through soothing / Crushing sadly on my hood / Like the tapers slowly dripping / At the effect of Jesus' Road.”

The memory of the infatuated man is prolonged infinitely through the ancestral memory of the species: “I love you much, with heathen eyes / In which but suff'ring gathers / Bequeathed by people old and wise / By fathers and grand-fathers.” With Eminescu, very much as with Leopardi, behind all things, as well as in the depth of the soul, we permanently encounter the mysterious presence of Eternity which, as in Baudelaire's poetry later on, brings about the need to outgrow ones own life through the immense prolongation of ancestral memory and of previous lives.

The voice of the forest in “Oh, Stay with Me”, evokes the complementarity specific to Eminescu of distance along various axes in the image of the moon which sets fire to the lakes (not the lake, the plural evoking infinite distances, broadening the horizon). No less essential is the dilatation of time in memory, a privileged space of erotic ecstasy in which time is immobilized: “As you gaze at moonlit water / Shimmering like fiery tears / All your life seems but a moment / And sweet moments seem long years.”

Rememoration, rebuilding the flow of life out of discrete elements, is a kind of exorcism directed against the nightmare of Time. For the modern poet, life itself becomes coherent, to the extent to which its duration is no longer unfolded but composed. The detachment from the space of passionate-romantic living, remoteness from immediate sensations, is the condition necessary for purifying the erotic feelings and for raising them to a higher stage of reality. The counterpoise of time is space, and the total function of poetry—in Rilke's wording—is the adaptation of things subject to time to the quieter world of the pure space, which is just another face of nature.

The preference for night and the moon, for the respective atmosphere, is justified by this aspiration after wresting love from the empire of time. The attraction exerted by night upon a poet of Eminescu's kind is that of a space for recollection and meditation upon life, of dreams and of memories, extracted from the solar space of action. The effect of immersion in this area, an area in which living is suspended in favour of dreams or of meditative watchfulness, is obviously the distancing from immediate sensations and the possibility to re-live the impulses of diurnal existence with enhanced intensity.

Exiling love into memory, its contemplation from afar, as in the verse of Leopardi and Eminescu, gradually detaches feelings from any topicality, lending them an infinite perspective and freeing them from the dominion of time.

The feminine figures that populate Leopardi's poetry—Silvia, Nerina, Aspasia—appear in the space of memory, liberated from time, being reincarnated into apparitions with a human face out of the distilled essences of memory and dream. The highest point of this transposition outside human time is embodied in the canzone “Alla sua donna”, a hymn devoted to the woman who does not exist (“Alla donna che non si trova”) present in the atemporal dimension of sleep, in stellar spaces, in the proto-historical age of gold, as a cosmic emblem of the feminine principle.

A poem that begins and ends in the shadow of death such as one of Leopardi's most amazing productions “A Silvia” manages to revive though “singing” the very experience of destruction, restoring the delight of being in the very description of universal ruin and vanity. It is also Eminescu's modality of rendering the negative positive—a process which 20th-century poetry was going to carry to the most dramatic summits. Leopardi had theorized that miraculous effect which he had ascribed to art generally: even when he offers a representation of life's zero value, le opere di genio bring a certain solace to the sensitive leader, “e non trattando nè rappresentando altro che la morte, le rendono almeno momentaneamente quella vita che aveva perduta.”

For a poet like Eminescu, human creation begins through a refusal of his own temporal limits, with a voluntary detachment from immediate living and with recuperation of life through remembrance. Imagination manages to overcome the boundaries of limited human perception; by begetting visions and by imposing human truth on the world through words, man recovers / regains his own dignity: “As Nature only has its bounds / There is boundlessness in man.”