Dintre sute de catarge

Category
LITERATURE - MAJOR WORKS

Language
RUMANIAN

"Out of All the Masts" is an 1880 philosophical poem by Mihai Eminescu, Romania's national poet. Written in a condensed, four-stanza format, with a very tight rhyming sequence which makes it notoriously hard to translate, it is widely seen as a small masterpiece in Romanian literature. Its central metaphor, of sailing ships and migratory birds heading out into a naturally perilous journey, constitutes a reflection on entropy, which, over the last lines, builds up into a summary of ontological idealism; Eminescu urges his readers to identify entropy as a guiding law of existence, and to recognize their own thoughts as imperfect echoes from a superior level of reality. The kenning of "winds" and "waves" as stand-ins for generic fate is presumed to originate with similar usage in Romanian folklore, using "time" instead of "waves". Eminescu's reliance on maritime imagery, which was largely absent from Romanian poetry up to that point, may be an indirect record of his trips to Northern Dobruja in the late 1870s. <

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