January 16, 2026
Eminescu: a Sombre Prophecy
And because yesterday there was no time for him, for Emin, I leave here a few lines of a sombre prophecy:
“And the gods, stroking their long beards, / raising their gaze into the ancient vaults / to recall sweet memories, / would listen to me telling them of the world / of pygmies that swarms today / upon the dust that they once inhabited.
‘Leave them to the wilderness; who would have believed / that the seed born of gods / would become so wretched.’
But an old man who sat at a corner of the table / raised his cup of mead: ‘Listen, / canst thou not tell me how fares the land / that was called Dacia — my kingdom? / Does it still stand rooted in mountains of stone, / with walls of granite, with Gothic towers, / my ancient citadel of Sarmizegetusa?’
‘By no means, O Decebalus. I see it / for the first time now, raised up / through thy hair like a proud crown, / wrought in precious stones as in granite.’
‘And the descendants of those Romans?’
‘What shall I say of them? All men / are pygmies today upon the old globe… but they, / among all the pygmies, are the smallest — / the weaker, the more soulless, the baser. / Romans or Dacians, Dacians or Romans, nothing / recalls your greatness. / Any people, however wretched, / will find a stone, or a piece / of iron or of brass, to scratch away with it / the deep traces you have left — / you great men, who now sit with the gods / and feast with them — in the black dust, / forgotten and light, of the ancient earth. / But they… Should they go south or north — nothing. / They are like a rabble of nomads and vagrants / who stand for the moment only upon the ground / they have taken, to be driven off / by another, stronger people, a people that loves / the things that have passed, which are the root / and the glory of those that are.’
‘Ah, what we should wish, in the hour of my death, / is that Rome should drink to the dregs the cup / of misery and of decay, so far / that it should despise itself — / this has come to pass… The old and proud Romans, / the conquerors of the world, have become / Romunculi… But with what do they occupy themselves? / Do they raise lapdogs, or learn / to crow like cockerels? A people / that despises itself must / come to such things.’
‘No, they speak French and do politics.’
‘It is all one.’”
A (forgotten?) fragment, too rarely quoted — one wonders why — from “Odin and the Poet”.
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