Proverb and style in Eminescu’s journalistic writings
Affiliations
Faculty of Letters, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Bd. Carol I 11, 700506 Iași, Romania
History
Received October 27, 2019
Accepted November 3, 2019
Published November 7, 2019
Motto
“quid, quaeso, probabilius quam quod nemo non dicit? Quid verisimilius, quam id, qoud tot aetatum, tot nationum consensus et velut idem suffragium comprobauit?”
[“what could be more convincing, I ask you, than what is said by everyone? What is more likely to be true than what has been approved by the consensus, the unanimous vote as it were, of so many epochs and so many people?”]
(Erasmi Roterodami, Adagiorum chiliades tres, 1508)
Abstract
The paper inquires into the idea that Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889)—the most important Romanian writer of the 19th century—used in his journalistic writings proverbs collected from the speech of common people. Concerning the hundreds of proverbs featured in the press articles penned by Eminescu, I assume that the aforementioned writer naturalised in the mosaic-like journalistic texts certain book excerpts upon which he conferred the stylistic image of folk elements. Without denying that some of the proverbs used by the poet in his articles pertain to common language, in this study, I am mainly interested in the “stage setting” orchestrated by the writer to confer a folkloric aura upon erudite excerpts. Last but not least, the study unveils Eminescu’s willingness to experiment with various journalistic compositional formulas, tailored to his knowledge, sensibility, and imagination.
Copyright
© 2019 The Authors. Publishing rights belong to the Journal. The article is freely accessible under the terms and conditions of the CC-BY Open Access licence.