January 15, the Day of Romanian National Culture and Mihai Eminescu’s Day

By RBJ
Is Eminescu’s work still read, do people still like his poems, which have reached almost all corners of the world, and how current are his political writings? The universality of his poetic work was also recognized by UNESCO, the poem Luceafărul entered the Guinness Book of Records, and the poet’s name was attributed to a crater on Mars and even a small planet.
He would have deserved a Nobel for literature, but this prize is not awarded posthumously”, stated the academician Eugen Simion, the former president of the Romanian Academy, who campaigned and succeeded, with the support of the Academy, for January 15 to be legislated as the Day of National Culture.
The Parliament approved this law in 2010, and in the statement of reasons of the initiators of the law it is stated that “National Culture Day will be, in our view, a day in which we celebrate a great creator, but also a day of reflection on Romanian culture, in general, of cultural projects of national interest”.
There are precedents for this celebration in other European countries, in Spain, the Day of Culture was fixed on the day of Miguel de Cervantes’ death, and in Portugal, on the day of Luis de Camoes’ birth. Moreover, the authorities of the Republic of Moldova decided that Mihai Eminescu’s birthday should become the Day of National Culture.
“The complete man of the Romanian culture… a consciousness of culture open to everything.” This is how Constantin Noica wrote about Mihai Eminescu.
Hundreds of pages of poetry, prose, dramatic projects, translations, adaptations and adaptations, even a sketch of a Sanskrit grammar or a dictionary of rhymes, compose a vast and original work, lyrical, nihilistic, heroic, fantastic, cosmogonic, didactic and polemic that shows an inquisitive mind, a good philosophical education and a huge will to master many fields.
Eminescu’s publicism, several thousand articles that spoke about the state, social progress, civilization and culture, was the subject of controversy, and political people, ideologues or sociologists cultivated it or repudiated it depending on their interests.
His entire work was influenced by the great philosophical systems of his era, but also by ancient philosophy, from Heraclitus to Plato, by the thinking systems of romanticism, by the theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant or Hegel and even by Buddhist philosophy.
Eminescu was an overwhelming personality, who impressed his contemporaries with his intelligence, memory, intellectual curiosity, his European-level culture, the richness and charm of the language. For this reason, we can say that without Eminescu we would be poorer.
“The greatest poet that the Romanian land has seen” This is how George Călinescu appreciated him.
Mihai Eminescu was born on January 15, 1850, in Botoşani, he was the seventh of eleven children of the commoner Gheorghe Eminovici and Raluca Eminovici, the daughter of the nobleman Juraşcu from Joldeşti. He spent his childhood in Botoşani and in his parents’ house in Ipoteşti, and attended German school and high school in Cernăuţi.
He debuted as a poet at the age of 16, with a poem written in memory of his former teacher, Aron Pumnul, and in the same year he changed his name to Eminescu, later adopted by other members of his family.
Between 1869 and 1874, he was a student in Vienna and Berlin, as an “extraordinary auditor” at the Faculty of Philosophy and Law in Vienna and as a scholarship holder of the Junimea cultural association in Berlin.
“He knew German and French, he wanted to absorb the history of religions, astronomy, philosophy, physics, ethnopsychology, geopolitics, to do metaphysics and engaged journalism at the same time. A romantic soul dedicated to universal harmony, but which the mixer of Wallachian politics shattered into the nothingness of its nature. What more sublime and sad lesson, at the same time, of Romanianness can be imagined?”, said the literary critic Dan C. Mihăilescu, in a portrait of Eminescu.
He returned to the country in 1875, was director of the Central Library and substitute teacher, editor of the newspaper Curierul de Iaşi, continued to publish in Convorbiri literare, and Titu Maiorescu, the Minister of Education, appreciated him and helped him get a position as a school inspector.
The universality of Eminescu
His verses were read in almost all corners of the world because Eminescu was translated into 60 languages on all continents.
As a result of his German cultural background, the first translations of his poetic work were in German, made even by Queen Carmen Sylva, who called Eminescu to the Peleş Palace to get him to collaborate on her cultural projects. The first queen of Romania wrote a lot, poems and prose, under the pseudonym Carmen Sylva, and only two people dared to present their observations to her, Mihail Kogălniceanu and the poet Eminescu, who, after translating a short story for the sovereign, told her sincerely that it would not be good to publish it.
Translations in German have been added to French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Gagauz or Romani, but also in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Sanskrit and even Esperanto.
And, in recognition of his universality, 100 years after the death of the national poet, the year 1989 was declared by UNESCO, “The International Year of Eminescu”, and UNESCO also decided that Mihai Eminescu should be declared the poet of the year 2000.
With the poem Luceafărul, on which the great poet worked for nine and a half years, made dozens of variants and over 3 thousand changes, Eminescu entered the Guinness Book of Records in 2009. With its 98 stanzas, Luceafărul was recognized as the longest love poem.
Also, NASA named after Eminescu a crater with a diameter of 125 kilometers on the planet Mercury.
And, in the catalog of small planets (“Minor Planet Names – alphabetical list) among the 233,943 planets in the Universe that bear a name, the Eminescu Planet is at position 9,495.