La poésie de Mihai Eminescu et la langue roumaine ancienne
Mihai Eminescu’s Poetry and Old Romanian Language

Summary/Abstract: Mihai Eminescu paid special attention to old Romanian. As a cultivated intellectual, who was well acquainted with old Romanian writings, he was interested in the model offered by religious texts for the emergence of modern literary Romanian. As a poet, he was convinced that the “archaisms” of the old writings would be gradually incorporated, accepted into poetry, in order to “revive the colours of the language.” Old Romanian forms, identifiable throughout all the poet’s creative phases, belong to phonetics, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Almost naturally present in the Romantic period, in poems on historical subjects or in “versified stories,” the archaisms initially had a predominantly prosodic role, but they were also constantly used to (re)create “the colour of a historical period” or to “retrieve an earlier, more heroic world,” evoking attitudes and suggesting generally human states of mind. In Eminescu’s poetry and philosophical poems, the archaic elements emphasize, in the same Romantic spirit, the dichotomy between man’s ever-changing feelings and emotions and nature, which is eternal and unchanging. And in the works of Eminescu’s maturity, characterized by an obvious and often noticed stylistic “stripping of ornaments,” compensated by a remarkable internal development, the archaic elements structure the poetic text. And, in this process, we find in many representative poems the creative reassessment of specific tropes from old Romanian writings. Far from being a simple element of poetic inventory or just a stylistic ornament, as in the writing of the minor Romantic writers of the 19th century, the use of archaisms proves to be a defining, individualizing component of Eminescu’s poetic language. Thus, in Mihai Eminescu’s poetres, the archaic element functions not only as a “synonym outside the vocabulary” for words, forms or structures common in the language of the time, but also as an important means of artistic suggestion and metaphorization of the poetic text.

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