SEQUENCES FROM THE SPECTRAL LYRICISM OF EMIL BOTTA, A HIDALGO OF EMPTY IDEALNESS
SEQUENCES FROM THE SPECTRAL LYRICISM OF EMIL BOTTA, A HIDALGO OF EMPTY IDEALNESS

Summary/Abstract: Assuming the posture of a poet maudit, Emil Botta stands among the modern Romanian writers who are, in one way or another, drawn to darkness: G. Bacovia, through his decadent atmosphere; T. Arghezi, through his restrained imprecations directed at the world beyond; Ion Barbu, through hermeticism and minimalism; L. Blaga, through his attempt to capture the essentiality of inner states; and N. Stănescu, through his exploration of identity and extreme otherness. Bottian's poetic micro-universe is an attempt to mythologize death, as can be easily observed in the hermeneutic analysis of some representative samples. At this poet, the lyrical self becomes a liminal being, situated in a minor baroque, on the border between life and dream, wakefulness and death, between the corporeal and the immaterial. The spectrality of his poetry is not only thematic, but also manifests itself at a stylistic level through hyperboles, litotes, ruptures, dramatic gestures, a language that seems to be spoken by a voice-over. The predilection for rather closed spaces, such as the forest or the cave, is part, for E. Botta, of an apparently simplified ceremony of the theatrical inner state. Hieratic, quixotic, histrionic gestures and mimicry persist until the last moment in his poems, alternating with the usual interrogations about the futility of suffering and the attempt to refuse and annihilate death through creation. With a kind of tender self-irony, but also with a discreet dignity, the Poet has the feeling that he is part of another, superior world, of noble spirits, like a hidalgo of the impossible ”empty” ideality, as Hugo Friederich would say. Ridiculous in the eyes of the world, but consistent with his own poetic consciousness, Emil Botta opens an important path towards the essentialization of poetic diction in Romanian literature and the etherealization of persistent themes and motifs in this cultural area.

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