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Poetry

Suvenire și impresii, epistole și fabule

Not translated into English

Grigore Alexandrescu · 1847

Synopsis

The title announces three parts: memories and impressions, epistles, fables. In the preface, according to Marius-Valeriu Grecu, the author judges that popular tradition offers only raw inspirations. His poems of memory from those years were born of a journey made in 1842 with Ion Ghica in the Olt valley; the best known has the shade of Prince Mircea and an army of spectres rise by night before the monastery of Cozia. His fables make animals speak: the ox and the calf, the dog and the little dog, the moralist wolf.

Context

The book follows several volumes of poems and fables published from 1832 to 1842. According to Eugen Lovinescu, the author replaced words of non-Latin origin with Latinisms and neologisms, as Heliade had done. The journey of 1842 also yielded a prose narrative, fragments of which appeared in 1848 in the review Propășirea at Alecsandri's request, according to Luciana Chiric. The fables targeted, according to Romanian Literature Wiki, the political situation of the country under the Russian protectorate.

Who it is for

Poems and fables in Romanian, with no known French translation; some fables appeared in German in 1957.

Prizes and reception

According to Grecu's study, Titu Maiorescu and G. Călinescu commented on The Shadow of Mircea, which the latter judged to be balanced.

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