Panait Cerna - Literary Contribution

Literary Contribution

Cerna was a traditionalist poet, listed by Călinescu among the contributors to Romanian literature whose work "steers toward Classicism", as do those of Dragomirescu, Mehedinţi, Henri Sanielevici, D. Nanu, Ion Trivale, Cincinat Pavelescu, Corneliu Moldovanu, Mihail Codreanu, Alexandru Davila and George Murnu. In this account, Cerna is one in a group of "conceptual" poets, all of whom were connected with Dragomirescu. For part of his life, Cerna was also formally committed to Symbolism and the local Symbolist movement, whose aesthetic ideals he merged with his lyrical style, and sought to recover part of the Romantic legacy. He was thus known as the translator of works by Romantic poets, as well as for adopting a Messianic and Humanist perspective on life (notably present in his poems Floare şi genune, "Flower and Chasm"; Zile de durere, "Days of Sorrow"; and Plânsetul lui Adam, "Adam's Sobbing").

Literary historian Tudor Vianu notes the influence exercised on Cerna and other traditionalists by Mihai Eminescu, Romania's major mid-19th century Classicist and Junimist poet. modernist theorist Eugen Lovinescu also believes that the "matter in which worked" was largely "dominated by Eminescu." He also cautions that there is a major difference between the two: Cerna is an optimist, while Eminescu most often projected a pessimistic attitude. According to Zarifopol, the poet considered himself an "improved follower" of Eminescu. Cerna was also a late admirer of Lord Byron, a main figure of English Romanticism, and translated from his Childe Harold. One of Cerna's poems was an epic piece inspired by the Book of Genesis, where Adam confronts God. Titled Plânsetul lui Adam, it builds on themes which recalled Byron's 1821 play Cain, and constituted an interrogation of divine laws.

In Plânsetul lui Adam and various other pieces, Panait Cerna (called a "reflexive poet" by contemporary critic Ilarie Chendi) sought to reconcile poetry and philosophy, thus creating a hybrid form of conceptual poetry. Eugen Lovinescu proposed that, although praised by Cerna's contemporaries, this goal was "mediocre", and that the literature it produced "does not express and does not suggest profound spiritual states, but, on the contrary, it expresses by means of rhetorical dialectic not only that which can be expressed, but also that which can be proven." Paul Zarifopol, who notes that Cerna particularly treasured the Classicist poets Friedrich Schiller, Louise-Victorine Ackermann and Jean-Marie Guyau, as well as the Parnassian Sully Prudhomme, recounted their disagreement when it came to Caragiale, whom Cerna enjoyed only for his power of "observation", but whom he argued lacked "concepts". For Zarifopol, this statement, made with "a fanatical and dogmatic pathos", evidenced a moment of "academic foolishness" in Cerna's career.

Călinescu, who criticizes the poet for his difficulties with the language, describes him as "not accomplished". Elaborating on this, he states: " declamatory, banal and dry in his use of metaphors, although he displays a touch of the sublime here and there." Lovinescu thought many of the expressions Cerna used in his poetry to be "unacceptable", and argued that they were characterized by banality. This assessment was itself contested by Călinescu, who argued that the lyrics in questions are "actually the acceptable ones", and that the awkward wordings "are entirely lost in lyrical fluency." Among the writings forming the subject of this disagreement was Cerna's Din depărtare ("From Far Away"), which Lovinescu believed was marked by the use of repetitive and banal poetic images:

The subject of unrequited love was one of the major ones in Cerna's lyric poems and, Călinescu argues, it evoked his actual experience with women, as "the regret of not having lived through the great mystery of love." These pieces, the critic notes, point to the influence of Classicist authors such as Eminescu, Dante Aligheri, and Giacomo Leopardi (the latter poet had also been quoted in Cerna's Die Gedankenlyrik). One of the pieces, written from the perspective of a man who has once failed to gain the object of his affection, features the lyrics:

While rejecting Cerna's conceptual approach, Lovinescu admired his style, for "the amplitude through which is laid out in vast chimes and compact constructions of rhetorical stanzas." Such features, he concluded, surpassed "everything ever written in our country". For George Călinescu, Cerna's "euphoric thirst for life" recalled the work of Parnassian and Symbolist author Alexandru Macedonski, but was tempered by "the mellow anemia of the phthisic." One of his better-known pieces from the series of love poems read:

Cerna's protest over the violent repression of the 1907 revolt was lyricized in several contexts. In one such indignant piece, Cerna called on Peace not to arrive until the social issue would be solved. In Zile de durere, he appeals to the Sun to wash out the blood of peasant victims: