The Destiny of Romanian Culture - Mircea Eliade, 1953
Translation from the Romanian "Destinul culturii românești"
T/N: The following essay contains a discussion of two Romanian folk ballads. It would be proper to provide a translation for both, but as the length of the former one rivals the length of the present essay itself, and not wanting to overwhelm the main translation, I have only included one of them here.
Few nations can be proud to have had as much misfortune in history as the Romanian nation. In order to be able to understand the destiny of Romanian culture, we must first take into account the history of the Romanians. Fate placed us at the eastern border of Europe, on both sides of the last European mountain chain, the Carpathians, at the mouths of and along the largest European river, the Danube. Trajan predestined us to be a frontier peoples. The occupation and colonization of Dacia signified the easternmost expansion attempted by the Roman Empire in Europe. In a certain sense, both geographically and culturally, Europe ceases to exist beyond the Bug: Roman-ness – with all that it represents as the synthesis and heir of the great maritime and continental civilizations that preceded it – failed to extend east of the Bug. From there, another geography and another civilization starts; one which can be of interest, but which no longer belongs to Europe but to that historical-cultural form that René Grousset called the "Empire of the Steppes". The landscapes of Europe are extraordinarily varied: there is almost no region where the landscape does not change at every hundred kilometres distance. Romania is the last country in Europe where this geographical constant still holds. Beyond the Bug, the structure of the landscape changes evermore slowly; geographical variety is replaced by the monotony of the boundless "black lands" of Ukraine, which transform, imperceptibly, into the steppes of Eurasian Russia.
These plains and steppes have from the most ancient of times been the route for Asiatic invasions of Europe. Starting from at least the 1st millennium BC, from the Cimmerians and Scythians, these Eurasian nomadic nations made their way towards Dacia in order to go further, towards Greece or Italy. It is needless to recall all these barbaric raids. Suffice it to say that the Romanians, as a nation, were formed in the shadow of the countless invasions that followed the abandonment of Dacia by Aurelian and organised themselves into independent states shortly after the invasion of the Mongols at the beginning of the 13th century. Culturally, these raids were terribly sterile. Neither the Dacians, nor the Daco-Romans, nor the Romanians had anything to learn from these eastern nomads. There is no comparison to be made here with what the Germanic invasions of late antiquity signified for the future of Europe. Apart from rare exceptions – among which we must mention, primarily, the Slavs – these eastern barbarians did not occupy the conquered territories; they were merely content with devastating them. In this way, the resistance of our ancestors in the face of destruction – often passive in nature – did not bring about any cultural benefit. The only positive contribution came, indirectly, from the great Mongol invasion; but it is of historical, not cultural nature: the devastation and power vacuum caused by the Mongol invasions allowed Romanians the freedom to establish their first major state formations.
Fate made it so that one hundred and fifty years after the Mongol invasions, another new and massive Asian expansion took place in Eastern Europe: it is the appearance of the Ottoman Turks, who occupy the Balkan states in a flash and try to open a way into the heart of Europe by setting their sights on the Danube. Since the appearance of the Ottoman Turks on the horizon of Romanian history, the Romanians, together with their neighbours like the Serbs, Hungarians and Poles (but even more than them, because they were closer to them and resisted them longer) – were confiscated, for almost four centuries, by the ungrateful mission to resist, harass and exhaust the powerful Ottoman armies. This incessant and inglorious struggle – because it is rarely mentioned in the West – amounted to a terrifying haemorrhage for us. There is no doubt that the resistance of the Romanians and their Danube neighbours made possible the salvation of the West. In the three centuries that passed from the battle of Nicopolis to the siege of Vienna, the West had the respite to harden and prepare itself for a counteroffensive. When – after defeating the Romanian resistance – the Ottomans reached Vienna and besieged it in 1683, they were already too late.
They were themselves exhausted by more than three centuries of battle, and since then they were forced to gradually withdraw from Europe. Let it be said in passing that the sacrifice of blood and spirit of the peoples of Eastern Europe has not yet been valued by the historiographical consciousness of the West.
It is enough to recall the history of Romania in its broad outlines to understand why the Romanians could not create culture in the western sense of the word; why, that is, they could not build massive and numerous cathedrals, why they did not build stone castles and burgs, why they did not collect art treasures, did not write too many books and did not collaborate, along with the West, to the progress of sciences and philosophy. First of all, because they had not the time to do all that, because they were not allowed to do it. The invasions succeeded one another without respite and the population not only had to abandon their villages and retreat to the mountains, but also had burn them down in their wake.
The cities were continuously devastated and burned until the beginning of the 19th century. It is surprising, even, that a few churches and monasteries have been preserved to this day. The consummate beauty of these holy places is the best evidence for the taste of Romanian artists and princes. However, very little has remained out of everything that was built in the Romanian principalities. The monasteries were rich in manuscripts and books and thousands of such manuscripts and books, copied and printed in the Romanian monasteries, can today be found in all the great libraries of the world. But all this religious and scholarly production was little heard of in the West; it, however, circulates throughout all Eastern Europe and the Near East. After the fall of Constantinople, the Romanian principalities were, for a long time, the cultural fount for the entire Christian East. It found there an "audience" in the same shoes as itself: terrorized by the Ottoman invasions or occupation, cut off from the rest of free and Christian Europe, seized by a day-to-day struggle for survival. In a certain sense, it can be said that the Middle Ages were extended in Eastern Europe by at least three centuries.
That is why all the written cultural activity that took place in the Romanian countries was done in the way in which books were written in the Middle Ages: for the spiritual strengthening of the people and the teaching of the clergy. For this reason, apart from a few rare exceptions, this cultural production did not interest the West: because the West had long since surpassed the Middle Ages and was only interested in values created in accordance with the new canons imposed by the Renaissance. Or, for easy-to-understand historical reasons, but especially due to the Christian and popular structure of its spirituality, Romania did not experience the equivalent of the Renaissance. And as long as the West lived in the spiritual horizon of the Renaissance, it remained completely indifferent to Romanian cultural values. The West's interest in Romania and the other peoples of Eastern Europe only started at the beginning of the 19th century, when the cycle inaugurated by the Renaissance was definitively closed and the "eon" of nationalities began.
Before going further, I would like to open a parenthesis regarding the historical tension, prolonged for five centuries, that existed between the Romanians, on the one hand, and the Tatars and Turks, on the other. Just as the Daco-Romans, after the abandonment of Dacia by Aurelian, were not fortunate enough to experience a symbiosis with the Germanic barbarian peoples the way the western provinces of the Roman Empire did, and which proved to be so fertile for future historical and cultural creations of Europe – the Romanians did not also have the luck of having spiritually superior or even spiritually equal opponents. To realize the gravity of this, let's remember the case of Spain, which also experienced a similar tension with Islam. But Spain's battle with the Moors was welcomed not only for its hardening the Spanish character, but also for cultural activity in general. Spain gave a lot to Iberian Islam – but also received a lot from it. Even when one cannot speak of an influence, the clash between these two spiritualities and these two cultural traditions was fertile for both of them.
The case of Romania and the other countries that have warred with the Tatars and the Turks for centuries is completely different. Apart from a few lexical items, we gained almost nothing from these opponents. The Ottomans primarily represented a military power and solid administration. The resistance against them had important results, but of a completely different order than those that the Spaniards experienced from their long conflict with the Moors. The military aggression of the Ottomans united all the Christian peoples of Eastern Europe to such an extent that, in the Romanian language, a "Christian" just as well designates a "Romanian", a "man of humanity" and a "believer" – while a "Pagan" represents not only a non-Christian, but also a man without morals, a "stranger" from another world with completely different values. The word "Turk" in Romanian means a man who does not understand what you say, who judges according to strange criteria and from whom you can expect anything. The intervention of the Ottomans in the historical horizon of the Romanians did not, therefore, bear fruit culturally; it only caused the world to be divided into two: on one side the "Christians", that is, the people of "law" and "faith" – and on the other side the "pagans", "the wicked", "the Turks".
Unlike Islam, which during the first centuries of the Hegira spread its rule rapidly in the East, on the shores of the Mediterranean and in Iberia, often forcibly converting the subjugated populations, the Ottomans, themselves rather late converts to Islam, did not interfere but sporadically in the religious life of the peoples they fought with. So that, apart from rare exceptions, the Romanian principalities, like the entire Balkan peninsula, were able to keep their ancestral faith intact. This religious tolerance of the Ottomans was undoubtedly a great good, but on the other hand, it also had a negative aspect. The lack of spiritual tension between the two religions reduced the possibilities of renewal and new cultural syntheses for our nation. Great religious and ideological adversities are usually spiritually fertile for both opponents, and the Catholic West, like Brahmanical India, indirectly owes some of its most important creations to its resistance against Islam. But the Ottomans with whom our ancestors fought were not the Moors who adorned, defended, and mourned Granada. Faced with the danger that the Ottomans represented, the Romanians closed themselves within, they delved deeper into their own spiritual traditions which were not only Latino-Byzantine, but also pre-Latin, i.e. Thracian. The result was that the popular genius, authentically Romanian, emerged stronger from this centuries-long process of internalization. But obviously, the deepening of one's own spiritual traditions in this case could only bear fruit at the level of popular creation, i.e. folklore. Romanians have only recently experienced historical adversities in which either its ancestral faith or the very being of the nation was endangered. Or, such adversities, with all the pain and loss of substance they brought, were, nevertheless, beneficial for it. They hardened the national character and accelerated the process of becoming aware of one's own historical destiny.
The real danger for the entire Romanian nation begins only after the occupation of its territory by the Soviets. For the first time in its history, the Romanian nation is dealing with an adversary that is not only exceptionally strong, but also determined to use any means to abolish us spiritually and culturally, so that it can, in the end, assimilate us. The danger is deadly, because modern methods allow the uprooting and displacement of populations on a scale that humanity has not known since the Assyrians. Even without the massive displacement of populations, there is a danger of spiritual sterilization through the systematic murder of the elites and the rupturing of organic ties with authentically national cultural traditions. The Romanian nation, like so many other nations subjugated by the Soviets, risks becoming, culturally, a people of hybrids. But it could be, however, that this mortal danger results in an extraordinary spiritual reaction, which equates to the establishment of a new "way of being" and signifies on the level of cultural creation what the “dismounting" of seven centuries ago caused by the great invasion of the Mongols meant on the level of the state formation.
As I said above, the founding of the Romanian principalities is largely a result of the exasperation caused by the Mongolian devastation which threatened the disappearance of the small autonomous political formations in the region. It could be that the Soviet occupation and the denationalization attempt undertaken by the Russians by pharaonic methods and means, signifies, through the spiritual counter-offensive it provokes, the true entry of Romania into the cultural history of Europe. I strongly emphasize the term history, because almost everything that the Romanian genius has done so far has been at the level of folkloric creation. Or, as is well known, folklore does not take history into account; on the contrary, it sabotages and devalues it. In the spiritual horizon that is proper to folklore, history equates to the ephemeral, the insignificant and the illusory. "The waters flow, the stones persist!" is the formula that sums up the popular genius's most meaningful point of view towards history. From the perspective of folklore, History is just a series of random, ephemeral and precarious events like "waves" and "waters". Significant are not the constantly becoming "waters" – but what is heavy, immobile, incompatible: "stones", the archetypal image of ontological reality par excellence...
This long parenthesis – opened on the lack of spiritual tension between the Ottomans and Romanians and closed on the danger represented by the Soviet occupation, a danger which could, however, inaugurate a new "way of being" in history for Romanians – we hope has not taken us too far from the subject, because we had just started to say that, due to historical circumstances, Romanians were prevented from creating on the cultural levels perfected by the Renaissance. The masterpieces of Romanian spirituality belong to folklore; and although modern Romania was lucky to have a poet of genius in Mihail Eminescu, the folk poems "Mioriţa" and the legend of "Master Manole" remain the masterpieces of Romanian lyric. Something more: a good part of modern Romanian literature developed in extension of folkloric creation. One of the rare Romanian authors who can truly be called "a classic", Ion Creangă, is located directly in the folkloric universe. This makes Romanian literature perhaps the only exception in European literature; a case where the entire work of one of his clerics is accessible, both through language and aesthetic orientation, to any Romanian peasant; and when we say "accessible", we are not thinking only about the act of reading, because the peasant, even when he knows how to read and write, still remains in solidarity with oral literature; at times, Creangă's work can be listened to and enjoyed by the peasant with the same joy with which he listen to the creations of folk literature. It is enough to remember the gulf that exists between Racine, Montaigne, or Pascal and the spiritual universe of the French peasant, or between the work of Goethe and Dante and the universes of the German and Italian peasants, to realize the significance of the case of Ion Creangă for Romanian culture.
We would not want to be misunderstood. By noting this extension of the folkloric genius into the written literature of the end of the 19th century we do not want to make an apology of folkloric values by opposing them to the values of scholarly high culture. On the contrary, from a certain point of view, this solidarity of a part of modern Romanian literature with the folkloric universe risks maintaining certain Romanian creations in a harmful cultural provincialism. And this, not because folklore is in itself an inferior way of creation, but for the simple reason that, due to its own history, Europe has long surpassed the folkloric mode of creation and imposed the cultured mode of creation – not only on itself, but also on the whole world – that is, the written and not oral expression. In the era immediately preceding ours – and which we could call positivist-materialist – solidarity with the folkloric universe was a real catastrophe even for a modern European culture. If Romanticism everywhere caused a taste for folk literature and "national geniuses", Positivism, on the contrary, succeeded in imposing the belief that all these folk creations belong to a spiritual archaeology, that they are part of the past of European humanity that has been forever abolished and that, therefore, they can no longer serve cultured creation in any way.
As long as this Positivist and Evolutionist point of view reigned in the world, the spiritual possibilities concentrated in folk traditions had, we could say, no chance of being capitalized. The situation has, however, changed in the last 40 years. On the one hand, Europe has experienced and continues to experience an authentic religious renaissance, first of all a vigorous re-actualization of Catholicism and the Positivist dogmas now seem to be obsolete; and on the other hand, Asia has recently re-entered History, and countless other peoples, culturally archaic, are also on their way to intervene in History. This means that a peer-to-peer dialogue will soon begin between European culture and other exotic and archaic cultures. Either way, one thing is known: no matter how much they differ between them, all non-European cultures continue to capitalize on and draw inspiration from "myths" and use the logic of the symbol as the tool of knowledge par excellence. If the dialogue that will begin between European culture and other cultures is meant to be fruitful, the spiritual universes of non-Europeans must be taken into account. It is not without significance that, lately, European thought has made extraordinary efforts to understand symbolism and to revalue myths and archetypes. It is as if the European spirit had foreseen, for about 30 years now, that the course of history will soon oblige it to a free dialogue on an equal footing with the other non-European spiritualities.
So, to return to the case of Romanian culture, its solidarity with the horizon of folkloric spirituality can no longer be considered today as an impediment, as a decrease in the possibilities of collaboration with the true "major" European cultures. On the contrary, this sympathy with archaic modes of sensibility and thought makes it apt, more than Western cultures, to understand the spiritual situations of the non-European world and to maintain dialogue with this world. But all these possibilities belong to the near future. For now, let's see what solidarity with the folkloric universe actually means, and ask ourselves to what extent this solidarity can promote or, on the contrary, limit the creative possibilities of a people.
I was just saying that History forced the Romanian nation to deepen its own Latin and pre-Latin traditions – at the same time preventing it from participating in the cultural movement inaugurated by the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Composed in its immense majority of farmers and shepherds, the Romanian nation concentrated its creative forces almost exclusively in the universe of popular spiritualities. Terrorised by historical events, the genius of the Romanian nation stood in solidarity with those living realities that history could not touch: the Cosmos and cosmic rhythms. But the ancestors of the Romanians were already Christians when the Romanian nation was caught between historical catastrophes. The sympathy towards the Cosmos, so specific to the Romanian genius, is not presented as a pagan sentiment – but as a form of the Christian liturgical spirit. For a long time, it was believed that the feeling of Nature and solidarity with the cosmic rhythms betray a non-Christian spirituality. This prejudice was due to an insufficient knowledge of Christianity and especially of Eastern Christianity, which completely preserved the liturgical spirit of the first centuries. In reality, archaic Christianity did not devalue Nature – as happened with certain aspects of medieval, ascetic and moralizing Christianity, for which nature often represented the "demonic" par excellence. For archaic Christianity, as it was especially understood by the Eastern Holy Fathers, the Cosmos did not cease for a single moment to be God's creation, and the cosmic rhythms were always conceived as a cosmic liturgy. Spiritually in solidarity with Nature, the Romanians did not make an act of regression towards a pagan horizon, but, on the contrary, they prolonged to this day that magnificent attempt to Christianize the Cosmos that was started by the Holy Fathers but interrupted for various reasons in the course of the Middle Ages in the West. These things are today more and more clearly understood, thanks primarily to the revival of the liturgical spirit and the growing interest in patristic spirituality. It is understood today what could hardly have been understood in the middle of the last century: that for archaic Christianity, the Cosmos participates in the divine drama, that is, just as the human soul thirsts for salvation, so the whole of Nature groans and sighs in wait of the Resurrection. Indeed, it is enough to see the iconography of the Eastern Church or to observe the paschal ceremonial to understand how nature is in solidarity with the Christological mystery, with the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of the Savior. The whole of nature is sifted during the week of the Passion, but it is reborn triumphantly through the resurrection of Jesus.
Or we find this cosmic liturgy in Romanian folklore. This means that, withdrawing into themselves, concentrating on their own traditions, defending themselves against the outside world – which was, let's not forget, a hostile world, that of the Eurasian barbarians that have come to prey and destroy – the Romanians preserved, deepened, and capitalized on a Christian vision of Nature as it had been expressed in the first centuries of Christianity. Therefore, the conservatism and archaism of Romanian folklore saved a heritage that belonged to Christianity in general, but which historical processes annihilated elsewhere. This thing is not without importance today when attempts are being made to revalue all the archaic forms of Christianity in order to be able to face the problems raised by the re-entry of Asia into history.
In order to better understand to what extent Romanian popular spirituality, although deeply Christian, is in solidarity with the cosmic liturgy, let's mention only one example: that of the conception of Death. I said before that the two masterpieces of our folk poetry are "Mioriţa" and "The Ballad of Master Manole". Both present ritual death as a supreme value, as the noblest fulfilment that human existence can hope for. The Ballad of Master Manole centres around the mystery of sacrifice: in order to be able to stand up and not collapse, a building – in our case the Argeș Monastery – needs the sacrifice of a human life. Master Manole sacrificed his wife, embedding her in the foundation of the monastery. In other words, the building acquires "life", it is "animated" through a mystery that makes possible the translation of the life of Master Manole's wife into a new "body", namely into the architectural body of the Monastery. As is known, the ritual of the building sacrifice is ancient and is found in many parts of the world, but this ritual only inspired folk poetic creations in the Balkan peninsula: similar ballads are found among the Greeks (Legend of the Bridge over the Anta), the Serbs and the Bulgarians. But what must be emphasized is the fact that the most successful literary form, both from a spiritual and artistic point of view, is represented by the Romanian ballad of Master Manole. It is, therefore, significant that the Romanian folk genius gave its maximum expression precisely in this myth of the creative sacrifice. It is all the more significant, as the other masterpiece "Mioriţa" also reveals a myth of death: the shepherd, although warned by his favourite ewe-lamb that the other shepherds want to kill him, accepts death as a voluntary self-sacrifice, giving it is also the meaning of a cosmic wedding, i.e. the ultimate value of reconciliation with destiny and reintegration into a Nature that is no longer "pagan" Nature, but a liturgically sanctified Cosmos.
We may, therefore, decipher in these Romanian myths of death an archaic and at the same time Christian vision: death is the supreme sacrifice, it is a mystery through which man perfects himself, acquiring a superior way of being in the world. Because for Romanians, as for so many other cultures, death is not an extinction, and not even a diminution of existence – but a new way of being, a new existence on another level closer to God. This conception is still alive among Romanians. After the bloody battles in Mărăşeşti in 1917, in which a division from Oltenia (among others) was decimated, the villages behind the front organised spontaneous processions with priests kneeling on the sides of the roads leading to Oltenia. These people knew that the soldiers who fell in Mărăşeşti without having confessed and taking communion, with not even a candle burning in their name, must return to their Oltenian villages before heading to their eternal abode. They welcomed them on their knees, with candles lit, and with priests saying prayers for the rest of the thousands of unseen dead. I heard that similar processions were held in Moldovia in the winter of 1942-43 after news of the Stalingrad massacre was received. All this means that the myths of death – seen as a mystery of self-sacrifice – are still alive in the soul of the entire Romanian people. The matter is not unimportant. It is known that valorising death is one of the most fruitful victories of Christianity. It is also known that a culture has the more chances to become universal the more courageously it poses the problem of Death.
We thus observe that the values of archaic Christianity – in whose horizon the rhythms of Nature are transfigured into a cosmic liturgy, and death is conceived as a sacramental mystery - not only bore fruit, culturally, in folkloric creations, but are still alive in the daily experience of the Romanian people. Or, if we remember that the preservation and deepening of the values of archaic Christianity was possible thanks to the cruelty of History, which forced the Romanian people to focus inwards on their own religious and spiritual traditions in order to survive – we have the right to wonder if the millennial terror of this History did not, however, also have a positive result: the preparation of the Romanian people for the great test they are going through today, the Soviet occupation and oppression. We can ask ourselves what would have been the chances of resistance of this island of Latinity that the Romanian people represent today if its own history had not constituted a deeply Christian spirituality, having at its centre the mystery of salvific Death and self-sacrifice. It could be that what has so far constituted the misfortune of the Romanians in history will constitute precisely their great chance to survive in the history of tomorrow.
As I said before, historical terror has so far prevented the massive creations of the Romanian genius on a world level. We must always remember that modern and independent Romania is not yet a hundred years old, and the complete unification of the country took place only 35 years ago. Doing the calculations correctly, we see that Romania as a whole enjoyed only 20 years of freedom. And yet, how much was created during this time! If it had another 20-30 years of relative peace, it is likely that Romania would have distinguished itself by an important contribution in the various fields of European culture. But the history of the Romanians does not know long periods of quiet: that is why the creative spirit can only manifest itself intermittently on the level of written, high culture. Only the creation of popular spirituality manifests itself continuously and inexhaustibly, and that is why I insisted so much on it: it alone reveals to us the constants of the Romanian genius.
This does not mean, however, that in those rare and short periods of calm, the Romanian genius did not create at the level of high culture. Something more: these creations had a specific character and a major structure from the very beginning. They did not imitate foreign values, but revealed a spiritual universe unknown, or imperfectly known, to the West. It is enough to mention Spătarul Milescu in the 17th century, Dimitrie Cantemir in the 18th century, Eminescu and Hasdeu in the 19th century, in order to understand on which plane Romanian scholarly creations were located on: they revealed that spiritual horizon today almost forgotten in the West – although it is an integral part of Europe and gave a lot to Europe – that spiritual horizon in which Orpheus and Zalmoxis moved and which later nourished Roman-Byzantine spirituality. From Dimitrie Cantemir, Eminescu and Hasdeu, passing through lorga and Vasile Pârvan, to the present day, to Nae Ionescu and Lucian Blaga, a number of Romanian poets, scholars and philosophers have capitalized on the traditions born from Thraco-Roman spiritual syntheses, syntheses that were formed over centuries of fruitful interaction between Rome, Thrace and archaic Christianity. In this part of Europe, considered almost lost after the establishment of Ottoman rule, treasures of spirituality have been preserved that were once part of the very centre of European culture; because Dionysian Thrace, Orphic Greece, imperial and Christian Rome met and shaped some of their most important values here.
We must not forget for a moment that where Greece, Rome, and archaic Christianity spread is where true Europe took shape, not the geographical Europe but the spiritual one. And all the values created within this privileged area are part of the common heritage of European culture. We cannot imagine a European culture reduced only to its Western forms. Culturally, as well as spiritually, Europe completes itself with everything that was created and preserved in the Carpathian-Balkan space. Something more: we have reason to believe that the space in which Zalmoxis, Orpheus, and the mysteries of Mioriţa and Master Manole were embodied, has not exhausted its sources of creation: where death is still valorised as a beginning of life, spiritual sources have not yet run dry. Europe is the predestined place of multiple, varied, complementary creations: spiritually and culturally, Europe is not – and cannot be – a monolithic block. It, therefore, needs the Orphic and Zalmoxian dimension to be able to complete itself and create new syntheses.
Having reached the end of our presentation, there is only one question left to ask. It overcomes the problems of Romanian culture, taking an interest in the historical destiny of Romanians. The question is this: by a miracle, the seed of Rome was not lost after the abandonment of Dacia by Aurelian – although this abandonment signified a real catastrophe for the inhabitants of the rich province – but can Europe afford this second abandonment of Dacia nowadays? Being a part, physically and spiritually, of Europe, can we still be sacrificed without this sacrifice endangering the very existence and spiritual integrity of Europe? Not only our survival as a nation, but also the survival of the West depends on the answer given by History to this question.
Mioriţa (Little ewe-lamb)
Near a low foothill At Heaven’s doorsill, Where the trail’s descending To the plain and ending, Here three shepherds keep Their three flocks of sheep, One, Moldavian, One, Transylvanian And one, Wallachian. Now, the Wallachian And the Transylvanian In their thoughts, conniving, Have laid plans, contriving At the close of day To ambush and slay The Moldavian; He, the wealthier one, Had more flocks to keep, Handsome, long-horned sheep Horses, trained and sound, And the fiercest hounds. One small ewe-lamb, though, Dappled gray as tow, While three full days passed Bleated loud and fast; Would not touch the grass. ”Ewe-lamb, dapple-gray, Muzzled black and gray, While three full days passed You bleat loud and fast; Don’t you like this grass? Are you too sick to eat, Little lamb so sweet?” ”Oh my master dear, Drive the flock out near That field, dark to view, Where the grass grows new, Where there’s shade for you. ”Master, master dear, Call a large hound near, A fierce one and fearless, Strong, loyal and peerless. The Transylvanian And the Wallachian When the daylight’s through Mean to murder you.” ”Lamb, my little ewe, If this omen’s true, If I’m doomed to death On this tract of heath, Tell the Wallachian And Transylvanian To let my bones lie Somewhere here close by, By the sheepfold here So my flocks are near, Back of my hut’s grounds So I’ll hear my hounds. Tell them what I say: There, beside me lay One small pipe of beech With its soft, sweet speech, One small pipe of bone With its loving tone, One of elderwood, Fiery-tongued and good. Then the winds that blow Would play on them so All my listening sheep Would draw near and weep Tears of blood so deep. How I met my death, Tell them not a breath; Say I could not tarry, I have gone to marry A princess – my pride Is the whole world’s bride. At my wedding, tell How a bright star fell, Sun and moon came down To hold my bridal crown, Firs and maple trees Were my guests; my priests Were the mountains high; Fiddlers, birds that fly, All birds of the sky; Torchlights, stars on high. But if you see there, Should you meet somewhere, My old mother, little, With her white wool girdle, Eyes with their tears flowing, Over the plains going, Asking one and all, Saying to them all, ’Who has ever known, Who has seen my own Shepherd fine to see, Slim as a willow tree, With his dear face, bright As the milk-foam, white, His small moustache, right As the young wheat’s ear, With his hair so dear, Like plumes of the crow Little eyes that glow Like the ripe black sloe?’ Ewe-lamb, small and pretty, For her sake have pity, Let it just be said I have gone to wed A princess most noble There on Heaven’s doorsill. To that mother, old, Let it not be told That a star fell, bright, For my bridal night; Firs and maple trees Were my guests, priests Were the mountains high; Fiddlers, birds that fly, All birds of the sky; Torchlights, stars on high.”
Beautiful. Keep it up, brother.
Wow! Intriguing and fascinating history. about Romania. Unless we seek an education in Eastern European history, we are separated from learning about the importance the impact it had on not just Europe , but the entire world.
Outstanding poem. Thank you for writing and sharing this today.