Rugaciunea unui dac
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Pe când nu era moarte, nimic nemuritor,
Nici sâmburul luminii de viață dătător,
Nu era azi, nici mâine, nici ieri, nici totdeauna,
Căci unul erau toate și totul era una;
Pe când pământul, cerul, văzduhul, lumea toată
Erau din rândul celor ce n-au fost niciodată,
Pe-atunci erai Tu singur, încât mă-ntreb în sine-mi:
Au cine-i zeul cărui plecăm a noastre inemi?

El singur zeu stătut-au nainte de-a fi zeii
Și din noian de ape puteri au dat scânteii,
El zeilor dă suflet și lumii fericire,
El este-al omenirii izvor de mântuire
Sus inimile voastre! Cântare aduceți-i
El este moartea morții și învierea vieții!

Și el îmi dete ochii să văd lumina zilei,
Și inima-mi umplut-au cu farmecele milei,
În vuietul de vânturi auzit-am a lui mers
Și-n glas purtat de cântec simții duiosu-i viers,
Și tot pe lâng-acestea cerșesc înc-un adaos
Să-ngăduie intrarea-mi în vecinicul repaos!

Să blesteme pe-oricine de mine-o avea milă,
Să binecuvânteze pe cel ce mă împilă,
S-asculte orice gură, ce-ar vrea ca să mă râdă,
Puteri să puie-n brațul ce-ar sta să mă ucidă,
Ș-acela dintre oameni devină cel întâi
Ce mi-a răpi chiar piatra ce-oi pune-o căpătâi.

Gonit de toată lumea prin anii mei să trec,
Pân' ce-oi simți că ochiu-mi de lacrime e sec,
Că-n orice om din lume un dușman mi se naște,
C-ajung pe mine însumi a nu mă mai cunoaște,
Că chinul și durerea simțirea-mi a-mpietrit-o,
Că pot să-mi blestem mama, pe care am iubit-o —
Când ura cea mai crudă mi s-a părea amor...
Poate-oi uita durerea-mi și voi putea să mor.

Străin și făr' de lege de voiu muri - atunce
Nevrednicu-mi cadavru în uliță l-arunce,
Ș-aceluia, Părinte, să-i dai coroană scumpă,
Ce-o să amuțe cânii, ca inima-mi s-o rumpă,
Iar celui ce cu pietre mă va izbi în față,
Îndură-te, stăpâne, și dă-i pe veci viață!

Astfel numai, Părinte, eu pot să-ți mulțumesc
Că tu mi-ai dat în lume norocul să trăiesc.
Să cer a tale daruri, genunchi și frunte nu plec,
Spre ură și blestemuri aș vrea să te înduplec,
Să simt că de suflarea-ți suflarea mea se curmă
Și-n stingerea eternă dispar fără de urmă!

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A Dacian Says His Prayer
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When there was neither death, nor anything undying,
Nor any seeds of light, breeders of life, for form vying,
There was no yesterday, today, tomorrow, no days, none,
No now, no always – as one was all and all were one;
When the world, through and through, earth, air, sky – all consisted
Of splinters from creations that never had existed,
Then, You alone were, and my mind asks, torn asunder:
Who is the god to whom we pledge our hearts, in wonder?

He stood alone before the other gods into being were called
And unfettered the spark of life out of the floods of old,
He still grants souls to new gods and to everyone elation
He still remains all mortals’ hope, the source of all salvation:
Rejoice! Sing for him from the heart and put aside your strife,
For he is death’s death and life’s return to life!

Into my eyes the gift of the light of day he distilled,
With the graces of pity he marbled my heart’s build,
In heavy storms, in howls of wind, I kept hearing his tread,
In every song and gentle tune, I heard his voice instead,
But now with yet another present I’m begging to be blessed:
To be allowed to enter a state of endless rest.

Let him curse whoever into my wounds pours the balm
Of pity, let him shower with blessings whoever does me harm,
Let him grant every wish to the one whose will
Is to mock me, and plant strength in the hand that plans to spill
My blood and, to the thief who, as I lie on barren earth,
Steals the stone I rest my head on, let him give laurels and worth.

Chased away by everyone, let me go through all my years
Until I feel that my blistered eyes are depleted of tears,
That there’s an enemy of mine in every man who’s born
That I don’t know myself, in my own side I’m a thorn
That all my aches and sufferings in flinty ice have gloved
My soul, that I can curse my mother, whom I so dearly loved –
And when the cruellest hatred will seem like love to me –
Maybe I can forget my pain and die and cease to be.

If I’m to die, an outcast, a lawless stranger – then
My vile corpse should be flung in a mud path and of all men
If one lets his dogs loose, my heart to tear, devour,
On that man, Father, bestow jewels, a crown and power,
And if one looks about him at the path with stones rife
And stones my face, to that man, master, give eternal life!

This is the only way I can say thank you, Father
For the boon to be alive in this world and no other.
I don’t want any favour, I won’t bend knee nor head
I beg your hatred and your blows, I want to feel no dread
But how your breath chokes my breath in a deadly embrace
And into endless nothingness I vanish with no trace.

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Afara-i toamna, frunza-mprastiata

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Afară-i toamnă, frunză-mprăștiată,
Iar vântul zvârle-n geamuri grele picuri;
Și tu citești scrisori din roase plicuri
Și într-un ceas gândești la viața toată.

Pierzându-ți timpul tău cu dulci nimicuri,
N-ai vrea ca nime-n ușa ta să bată;
Dar și mai bine-i, când afară-i zloată,
Să stai visând la foc, de somn să picuri.

Și eu astfel mă uit din jeț pe gânduri,
Visez la basmul vechi al zânei Dochii,
În juru-mi ceața crește rânduri-rânduri;

Deodat-aud foșnirea unei rochii,
Un moale pas abia atins de scânduri...
Iar mâni subțiri și reci mi-acopăr ochii.

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Outside, the Autumn

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Outside, the autumn throws the dead leaves into strife,
Against the glass panes, the wind heaps rain, in rippling slopes;
And you peruse letters stashed in frayed envelopes
And, in one hour, contemplate your whole life.

You while your time away with sweet nothings, nursing hopes
That no rash guest will, by surprise, at your door arrive;
But such days, rife with sleet and gloom, can be rife
With peace, as well, if you watch the fire, dream, and doze.

And that’s just what I do, plunged in thought, armchair bound,
As I dream of tales of Dokia, the ancient goddess
It’s as if veils of fog unfold and surge all round;

And suddenly I hear the rustling of a dress,
Light steps that seem to barely touch the ground...
And thin cold hands cover my eyes in a soft caress.

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Endless Nothingness, Sweet Nothings

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The rebelliousness of Eminescu’s "Dacian Prayer" appealed greatly to me when I was a student in Cold-War Bucharest. I was in awe of the poem’s existentialist tones and philosophical negativity, in awe of the tragic intensity of the child-parent conflict. Despite the Dacian of the title, a character descended from a sword-and-sandal movie – think of a gladiator of the Thraex i.e. Thracian variety – I couldn’t bring myself to see the Prayer as a historical poem. To my mind, the Prayer was like a panel painting in which the sayer of all those desperate, uncomfortable sayings – a perfect archetypal naysayer, indeed – was a grisaille figure rendered on the reverse side. There he stood, grey, generic, hieratic, cloaked in shade and sadness, while his sayings, exploding in a thousand colours and recounting no less than the birth, anguishes and death cravings of the entire humanity, enjoyed a surreal degree of autonomy and took centre stage on the front side of the painting.

More recently, as I started to translate the Prayer into English, this years-long intuition was confirmed. I found out for a fact that, at the time he began to write this poem, Eminescu wasn’t mining at all the veins of a hoary and remote Roman and Dacian-Thracian antiquity, why, he was captivated by something even hoarier, even remoter: Ur-history. Fallen under the spell of the "Rig Veda", he copied into one of his notebooks the "Hymn of Creation" in German translation and devoted himself to translating it into Romanian and to learning Sanskrit. Then, on the pages of his notebooks, one translation followed another, and another: what an enticing hall of mirrors, what a lark, what a plunge to find myself translating the Prayer’s first stanza into English while imagining the young, nonconformist Eminescu plunged into his Germano-Sanskritic-Romanian lark and working on lines such as: ‘in the beginning was the non-existent, from which the existent arose... then there was neither the n on-existent nor the existent.’ And, just as Eminescu busied himself with these translations, he drafted various versions of the Prayer, tentatively naming one of them "Nirvana". Around this very same time, one of his friends, George Panu, was also puzzled by the poet’s enthusiastic interest in cosmology, which he found ‘totally alien and exotic’. But Eminescu remained keen on exploring all his alien, exotic interests and on distilling them into vivid imagery meant to conjure non-existence and the struggle between nothingness and form: these became recurrent motifs in his poetry.

That’s how the grisaille silhouette imagined during my young years – that hieratic and generic character concealed on the back side of a panel painting – acquired the calm, nirvanic features, the lush tresses coiled in a man-bun and the opulent necklace of a rishi, an ancient saint of the text. Then, as slowly as if in slow motion, the superimposed faces of Kant and Laplace, whose nebular hypothesis fascinated Eminescu, glued themselves over the rishi’s face.

But, and it’s a big but, no matter how Vedic and astrophysical i.e. non-Dacian the text may have been at the beginning, in the end Eminescu decided to have it voiced – poetically – by a Dacian. As he published the final version of the poem in 1879, he settled for a new title: "A Dacian’s Prayer".

So now for another layer of features that should be superimposed over the portrait of our grisaille figure: the Dacian face.

The Dacians were an ancient tribe of Thracian origin, who lived around the Carpathians and the lower Danube. At the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the Romans, led by the emperor Trajan, conquered and colonised the kingdom of Dacia. The Dacians’ culture was oral and their othering by Greek and Roman historians and writers who evoked these barbarians’ admirable wisdom or unhinged love of wine, bravery or savagery, sense of justice or treacherous duplicity is to be taken with a pinch of salt. A few more edifying clues about the Dacians are the result of their very destruction and defeat by the Roman war machine: a spectacular work of imperial propaganda, in the shape of a massive column, was commissioned by Trajan in order to immortalise his triumph in Dacia. The column was adorned by a 200-metre long frieze: a sword-and-sandal epic made out of marble, telling the story of Trajan’s two military campaigns in Dacia, depicting the Dacians as worthy opponents – possibly for propaganda reasons, though there may be enough truth in the accounts of their fierceness in battle – and culminating in the graphic scene of the Dacian king’s suicide. This friezed column is still standing in the middle of Rome. In his essay The Narrative of Trajan’s Column, Italo Calvino marvels at the paradoxical low profile of this lofty monument which is ‘certainly the most extraordinary that Roman antiquity has left us, and also the least well known, despite the fact that it has always been right in front of our eyes’. Calvino then describes in careful, moving detail many of the beautifully carved, sometimes gruesome, sometimes surprisingly tender bas-reliefs. Among the over 2,500 characters of the frieze, the Dacians, again in Calvino’s words, ‘can be made out by their long hair and beards’ and by how ‘they maintain a mournful dignity even in their suffering’.

Trajan’s Column was part of a splendid Forum, which was teeming with statues of Dacians, massive ones, 2.5 or 2.7 or over 3 metres tall, depending on their locations in the architectural complex. We know the triumph column with its frieze has survived, we know the Forum that surrounded it has vanished. What’s less known is that the sculpted Dacians travelled far and wide. Several of them were re-arranged on the attics of the Arch of Constantine, next to the Colosseum, where, to this day, they continue to provide a sombre foil to the brilliance of a great Roman emperor. Other Trajanic Dacian statues or fragments of statues are displayed in major galleries in Rome and in the Vatican, in Naples, Florence, London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Copenhagen, St Petersburg, some of which – Uffizi, for instance – describe their Dacians as masterpieces. Made out of red porphyry or green or white or grey or yellow Numidian or milky Pavonazzetto marble, these Dacian prisoners are dressed in tunics, in bracae – barbarian trousers – and in cloaks buckled over the shoulder and skilfully draped. Some of them are comati – men with long flowing hair who formed the bulk of the defeated army – others wear the pileus, a Dacian hat very similar to the Phrygian cap seen in the representations of the mythical Orpheus. In line with the canon of the Roman iconography of the vanquished, their faces have pained expressions and most of them are represented either with one hand clasping the wrist of their other hand, a symbol of their captivity, or with one arm folded across the chest as if to convey eternal grief.

Dispersed throughout so many world museums, these melancholy colossi find themselves standing in close contiguity only on the pages of illustrated art history books or articles. When reunited on paper or on the computer screen, the drama of their gesturing brings to mind the despair and anguish of Rodin’s "Burghers of Calais". Because the Roman canon doesn’t grant them the right to lift the hand any further than next to or just above the heart, they don’t have the freedom in despair displayed by the most stunning gesturer of Rodin’s group, Pierre de Wissant, that prisoner whose hand – in Rilke’s words – ‘opens in the air and lets something go, somewhat in the way in which we set free a bird’, but they do call to mind Pierre’s brother, Jacques, and Jean d’Ayre, the stoical man who holds the keys of the surrendering city and, beyond doubt, they bear a striking resemblance to the burghers’ leader, the bearded and long-haired Eustache de Saint-Pierre.

How can it be that statues sculpted centuries apart bear such an uncanny resemblance? Be it can: the anguish of those who lose wars and suffer the consequences of wars is universal and eternal. In sculpting his Burghers, Rodin chose to depict a certain episode from a medieval story but also chose to express a modern form of despair. I like to believe that, as he decided to attribute his Prayer to an ancient Dacian, Eminescu, too, chose to express a modern form of anguish.

Note, however, that the Dacian only features in the title of the Prayer, nothing else specifically Dacian is included, or alluded to, in the body of the poem. On the other hand, Eminescu was definitely interested in Dacian themes and explored them in depth in a few other notable works. And it’s because of these that I planted a verbum dicendi in the title of my translation: to acknowledge the Prayer’s possible connection to a number of Wagnerian epic/dramatic projects, in which Eminescu imagined the tribulations of Dacia’s kings and gods in passionate, shimmering brushstrokes. These projects weren’t finessed – the writer died at thirty-nine years of age, after an illness that made it almost impossible for him to write during the last six years of his life – but today’s critics rank "Sarmis", "The Twins", and "Memento Mori" among Eminescu’s most powerful poems. Because of the theatricality of these texts, I thought a verb redolent of a stage direction would make sense in the title – hence "A Dacian Says His Prayer".

He Says – she says – His Prayer but is what he says a prayer? Not at all. This is a dark, circular journey from objective nothingness into subjective nothingness: a text that conjures the great néant from before Creation, in an apparent hymn to Creation which then, step by step, stanza after stanza, turns the praise of Creation on its head, negating the Creator through the words of a Creature whose only wish is to ‘vanish with no trace... into endless nothingness’ at the hands of a supreme god who, towards the end of the poem, is implored to act like a serial killer. This is an anti-prayer. Or, as the twentieth-century philosopher Emil Cioran put it in his essay The Evil Demiurge: a ‘repressed prayer bursting into sarcasm’ from a subject who, like every other human being, once more in Cioran’s words, ‘is a hymn destroyed.’

Cioran’s mugshot is definitely one to be added on top of all the other features we’ve been busy layering over our initially generic grisaille portrait of a prayant man. This Romanian-Parisian troublemaker extraordinaire, a lyrically enraged nihilist who defined himself as ‘the sceptic on assisting duty in a world on the decline’ acknowledged he was indebted to the Prayer: ‘In some way’, he wrote in 1975 in a letter to his brother Aurel, ‘I’m a direct descendant of the "Dacian’s Prayer", whose violence of tone, which turns it into a malediction, not a request for forgiveness, I’ve always enjoyed.’

But there’s a serene coda to the Prayer’s violent desire for death and nothingness that I wanted to add here, too: the letters and ‘sweet nothings’ that sum up a writer’s whole life ‘in one hour’ in "Outside, the Autumn". This intimate and introspective sonnet has a Dacian goddess briefly and light-heartedly dancing her way into the volta. This goddess is called Dokia. Elsewhere in Eminescu’s Dacian-themed poetry she reigns over a mythical realm of sunshine, vast seas, fragrant forests and innocent primeval beasts. Here’s how her world is described in "Sarmis":

The dreamy cypress trees sway softly in the dark
Their lofty black boughs look downwards, to the earth they hark,
And linden trees with wide crowns overwhelmed by blooms
Towards the dusky sea scatter their blossoms and perfumes.
From the solitude of forests a bronze horn faintly pours
Its sounds into the air, as the wild herds gather at the shores.
From the marshes’ reeds, from the waving grasses, with no fear,
From the paths cutting through tree groves, come the does and the deer,
And the sea’s white horses, and goddess Dokia’s wisents, huge, shy
Beasts, crane their necks towards the water, lift their eyes to the sky.
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But in "Outside, the Autumn" the ancient Dokia is just a fulguration. A flitting armchairdream, at home, sweet home, releasing us from mythic, or modernist, despair.

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