SOURCE: Todoran, Eugen. “The Sacred Mountain and the Abysmal Phenomenon.” Cahiers Roumains d'Etudes Litteraires, no. 2 (1989): 12-25.

In the following essay, Todoran compares Eminescu to two later Romanian poets, Tudor Arghezi and Lucien Blaga.

“To speak about the poet is as if you shouted in a large cave. … Your words cannot reach him without disturbing his silence. The language of strings only could retell his delicate, lonely glory, by lulling it on a harp … You must only whisper respectfully, in an undertone … In a way, Eminescu is the all-immaculate saint of Romanian verse … His dimensions are by far greater than even our surrendering piety imagines … The mountain begins all around us and has no paths whatever … As you can't climb it, you just look at it and are contented with a few elf-like images … How could one possibly ever render the portrait of a shadow and of the endless...