SOURCE: Popescu, Corina. “Eminescu and Leopardi: The Revelation of the Infinite.” Romanian Review 42, no. 11 (1988): 85-94.

In the following essay, Popescu suggests how and why Eminescu affected Romania's reception of the work of Giacomo Leopardi.

The reception of Giacomo Leopardi's work in Romania is directly linked to the way the poetry of Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) broadened the readers' horizon.

The kinship between the lyrical formulas employed by the two poets was for the first time pointed out by the high critical authority of professor Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917). In his study devoted to European echoes of translations from Romanian literature published in the monthly Convorbiri literare on 1 January 1882, entitled “Romanian Literature and the Foreign Countries,” Maiorescu reproduced from a German publication a reference made to the “spiritual kinship” of the two poets. In a new study of 1886, “Poets and Critics” he gave a brilliant award in the dispute between the...