In 1977, a massive earthquake erupted from sinister pith of the Vrancea Mountains, with a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter Scale. The city of Bucharest partially crumbled on top of itself. In weight of damage, that meant destruction to approximately 33,000 buildings, wounds to 11,300 people, and death to 1,578 people—including actors, singers, film directors, writers . . . and a nineteen-year-old translator named Corneliu M. Popescu.
Born at the end of the 1950s, a decade that represented the height of communist censorship, Corneliu Popescu was ultimately swept away by the violent waves of the era he lived in. The sporty and sociable son of a lawyer, “Cornel” was offered a good education: while most people studied Russian in school, Cornel studied English with Ion Kleanthe Gheorghiu, who had been Romania’s ambassador in London, shortly before being imprisoned for anti-communist activities. Much of the boy’s short life seemed governed by the power of the moment, polymorphous in its guise as coincidence or destiny: perhaps subconsciously aware of the importance of now, he was effectively a savant, translating Treasure Island into Romanian at age ten. At around sixteen, enamored with the foamy intensity of Mihai Eminescu’s poetry, he began translating the poet, something only his parents and teachers knew about. Agreeing to postpone publication so that he could fully dedicate himself to preparing for medical school (a scholarship at Humboldt University had been lined up for him), Cornel edited his manuscript up to the day of his death: March 4, 1977. As he had arrived home from a tutoring session earlier than expected, the earthquake caught up to him at home. He was found in the arms of his mother the next day, amidst the rubble.
At this point, things were looking extremely grim for the despairing father. Not only had he lost his wife and only child simultaneously, but in the post-apocalyptic anarchy of the disaster, their bodies had been stolen from the morgue. Two empty coffins were interred at Bellu Cemetery, where Eminescu also slept, having met an untimely demise himself, nearly one hundred years before. The corpses were found a year later, after fervent investigations, without their clothing and jewelry.
Before this calamity occurred, Corneliu’s father, evidently unaware of what was to come, had had the insight to type up the manuscript and send it off to a literary journal or publishing house for an expert evaluation. Today, the specifics of how it survived is unclear—really the stuff of urban legends. This was to be his solace: the young translator’s memory still lives on today, in Romania and beyond. After his death, he was decorated by the Romanian Academy, and there is The Poetry Society’s prestigious Popescu Prize, named in his honor, still very significant for poets and translators today.
So, what does this fateful book look like? Of course, the tragic story in itself caused a sensation in the literary world at the time, but that isn’t where its value lies. First off, it’s notoriously a feat to translate Eminescu: transposing a nineteenth-century voice into a phraseology that would be intelligible for twentieth-century readers (and now twenty-first century readers) requires a sort of double translation: the translator really must understand all the potential interpretations of the original in order to convey it intelligibly, while preserving the essence of the work. Martin Woodside explains it well:
Of course, these same features make Eminescu difficult to translate and, as a result, lead to him being translated so infrequently, and as a result, to being little known or understood by western readers. And this is not an isolated example as many “difficult” poets suffer a similar fate. I’m not suggesting that translators shy away from these poets/poems out of laziness but rather that they do so out of respect and care for the work they’re translating, adopting a kind of a ‘do no harm’ philosophy that may inadvertently do some harm, failing to accomplish what I see as the main goal of translation—bringing greater exposure to the poets who most deserve it.
Corneliu Popescu’s ambition, then, is a touching example of adolescent eagerness to prove oneself, but also an objectively good attempt at taking on a major project. Andrei Brezianu writes, in his Preface:
One could speak – discussing this astonishing and unexpected manuscript – of a daring endeavor in the art of translation: the position of the young author is, in the first place, that of an extremely alert reader, fathoming the depths of the poet’s speech, breaking them up into their constituent parts while attempting to understand them, recombining them, under the stimulus of an unavoidable instinct of irradiation and communication, into the pattern of a particular idiom.
In his own foreword, Popescu worries that certain English equivalents might “rob the work of all significance and color,” or that his choices that could “deprive it [the work] of all personality”; he is concerned to preserve both the “unhampered freedom” and the “peculiar fragrance and natural beauty” of the Romanian original. The tension between the two priorities at hand—preserving what one loves about a work and getting meter and rhyme right—point to the dilemma inherent in the translator’s task. Are you, as a translator, a linguist or a creator? Line by line, Popescu is something of a classicist (often using inverted word and apostrophes), but in the bigger picture, he seems interested in curatorial work: he combined the “classic edition” of the poems with selections from Eminescu’s work, indicating his own clear vision in relation to the work. He also rearranged the original order (published after the original author’s death), arguing that certain poems are continuations of others. At any rate, we can presume a degree of erudition and a great deal of talent must be at play, and agree with Brezianu’s suggestion to understand the translation’s struggles as “limits as proof of indisputable effort he made.” But, as always, the text best speaks for itself. Here are some memorable examples:
“And if the clouds their tresses part
And does the moon outblaze,
It is but to remind my heart
I long for you always.”
(“And If”)
Given the strictness of this rhyme scheme, it becomes clear that a translator of Eminescu’s must have excellent knowledge of formally traditional English-language poetry in order to draw equivalent formulations from a mental database. Rhyming “outblaze” with “always” suggests an intuitive understanding of the English language, but also preserves a certain incantatory quality that is perhaps the hallmark of the original (one might argue that there is no excuse for foreignization when it comes to rhyme). The translator justified his decision to retain a few words in their original form, counterbalancing this: doină, cobză, candelă, toacă. Moreover, he showed remarkable critical perspicacity by naming Eminescu’s most important poem (“Luceafărul”) not “The Evening Star,” as most other translators had done, but “Lucifer”—a reference not to the demonic religious connotation but rather to Eminescu’s cosmic interest.
Extract from “A Dacian’s Prayer”:
When death did not exist, nor yet eternity,
Before the seed of life had first set living free,
When yesterday was nothing, and time had not begun,
And one included all things, and all was less than one,
When sun and moon and sky, the stars, the spinning earth
Were still part of the things that not come to birth,
And You quite lonely stood…I ask myself with awe,
Who is this mighty God we bow ourselves before.
Extract from “Mortua Est!”:
Through my head beats a whirlwind, a clamorous wrangle
Of thoughts and of dreams that despair does entangle;
For when suns are extinguished and meteors fall
The whole universe seems to mean nothing at all.
Extract from “Fair Love, Our Mutual Friend”
Maybe indeed there is no room
In a world filled with distress,
Midst so much grief, and so much gloom,
For so much happiness.
This preserves the rhythmic (in the pentametric sense) of the original.
Extract from “Of All the Ships”
Still, it is past our comprehending
What design your song enslaves,
Rolling on until time’s ending,
O winds and waves, o waves and winds.
While it was indeed a singular act to be translating into “Shakespeare’s tongue” during communism,[1] Eminescu’s worldview—redolent with the aesthetics of English and German Romanticism, reminiscent of Schopenhauer, sagacious and slow burning—makes The Iron Curtain look quite porous. It is not so difficult, then, to understand why a teenager in the 1970s was attracted to the idea of translating the poet, and he wasn’t the only one who felt this way. It must, of course, be said that Eminescu has been translated extensively into English, and it is difficult to argue that one translation is better than another—rather, reading as many versions as possible is certainly conducive to understanding an author’s opus (we also recommend the exuberant translations of Leon Levițchi and the sleek versions of Adrian G.Sahlean). Eminescu was also translated into Spanish by the popular poet Rafael Alberti. Amita Bohse discovered that his meter translated neatly into Sanskrit and Bengali. Otherwise: Italian, Polish, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Yugoslav, Hungarian, Slovakian, Arabic, Russian, Swedish, Czech, Japanese, Latin . . . ![2] Just last year, a Chinese teenager, Yin Yuguo, became very well-known after a video of him went viral on the Internet: at sixteen years old, he had come to Romania with the intention of learning Romanian after falling in love with Eminescu’s poetry. He died tragically in a train accident. We are reminded of Eminescu’s keen sense of mortality: “kings that moan in their mighty vaults, and fill the world’s dome with their sighs”. . .
[1] Granted, communist officials commissioned translations for propaganda purposes. These were, more often than not, poor.
[2] Here’s a problem we’ve met again and again: the tiny number of editions that publishers can afford to produce when it comes to poetry in translation, making poets like Eminescu the pet of aficionados and not for the general public. But that’s another story . . .
Andreea Scridon is an Oxford-based poet, fiction writer, and translator of Romanian to English. She has been Assistant Editor at Asymptote since July 2018. You can read her work here.
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