The Last Bastion of European 
Romanticism: A Quantitative 
Analysis of Poetry in the Romanian 
Literary Magazine Convorbiri 
literare (1867–1916)
Vlad Pojoga
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Romance Studies, 
Bulevardul Victoriei nr. 5-7, 550024 Sibiu, Romania
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5531-2488
vlad.pojoga@ulbsibiu.ro
The article presents a quantitative analysis of poetry published in the most 
popular literary periodical of modern Romania, Convorbiri literare (CL), from 
its founding in 1867 to 1916, when Romania entered World War I. Often seen 
as the last major magazine of European Romanticism, CL appeared at a time 
when poetry was a privileged genre in Romanian literature, and it hosted in 
its pages both the national poet Mihai Eminescu and nineteenth-century’s most 
prominent Romanian literary critic Titu Maiorescu. Arguing that the publication 
and theorization of poetry was an integral part of one of the last nation-building 
processes in Europe, the article indexes and quantitatively analyzes all forms of 
poetry and of what can be viewed as poetic networks in CL. By using ARCANUM’s 
digital archive of more than 66,000 pages of CL, three strata of poetry-related 
metadata are extracted and examined: the local production of poetry (who 
published in CL and when, and how much did they publish); poetry imports 
(whose poetry was translated into Romanian in CL and when, and what were the 
authors’ origins); and networks of influence (which foreigners were most often 
mentioned in relation to the two most talked-about Romanian Romantic poets 
of the century, Eminescu and Vasile Alecsandri). Thus, the article aims to chart 
the national regime of relevance that applies to Romanian modern poetry by 
uncovering the international network of authors who were at the center of literary 
debates in CL.
Keywords: Romanian poetry / European Romanticism / poetry translation / Eminescu, 
Mihai / Alecsandri, Vasile / Maiorescu, Titu / quantitative analysis
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 47.2 (2024)
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10
Romanian literary studies go digital
If ten years ago anyone told Romanian scholars and even more so 
Romanian literary critics that they would be able to access, read (or 
go through), and analyze tens of thousands of pages, millions of words 
of curated corpora of literary or non­literary texts in a heartbeat, they 
would have shrugged it off at best, and laughed it off at worst.1 What 
are the tenets that would guarantee such a reaction a decade or so 
ago? To begin with, the quasi­unanimous view of literary criticism in 
Romania was (and to some extent still remains) that every critical en­
deavor ought to be based in an aesthetic judgment formulated by a cul­
tured individual’s personal reading experience and history. Therefore, a 
clearly hierarchical view of the literary system was still taught, learned, 
and perpetuated. Such a view was in a direct relationship with the idea 
of the canon and the notion of literary relevance viewed as correlated 
with the position that these individual aesthetic judgements conferred 
(or not) on actual texts, and in direct opposition to the demand of the 
post­1990 local book market. It is no wonder then that a symptom of 
this exaggerated focus on high­brow literature, along with the fresh 
liberalization of the book industry, led to a steep increase in translated 
literature (see Terian, “Big Numbers” 67, for a statistic of the local ver­
sus translated novels published in Romania between 1990 and 2000). 
At the time, most Romanian writers sought canonization for them­
selves and therefore tended to write for the critics who they thought 
could help them achieve that, whereas casual readers turned more and 
more to imported commercial fiction. Consequently, as literature was 
approached as a way of imposing personal verdicts and as a vehicle of 
entering the canon, even scholars who were remotely interested in ex­
ploring “the great unread” (Cohen 23) of Romanian literature would 
not know where to start. Granted, this was in part because digital ver­
sions (either as scanned or as textual material) were both scarce and 
scattered, and corpora were either incomplete or reduced in size. And 
although “distant reading” (Moretti) was becoming a quite popular 
way of looking at literature, its actual implementation was much more 
difficult than in more technologically advanced countries where coher­
ent digital resources where more readily available.
In 2015, few analytical attempts existed that used the resources of 
digital humanities, and even those were focused on English literature 
1 The work on this article was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry 
of Education and Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI, project number PNIII­P4­ID­
PCE­2020­2690, within PNCDI III.
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
11
(Nicolaescu and Mihai; Mihai), whereas the emerging debates were 
centered around questions of applying digital humanities in Romania 
(Ursa) and using quantitative tools in literary studies (Anon.). In fact, 
the major breakthroughs were not analytic at first, but rather concerned 
corpus and archive building, because there were no comprehensive digi­
tal primary sources to work on. The release of the Romanian ELTeC 
corpus by Roxana Patraș and her team (https://github.com/COST­
ELTeC/ELTeC­rom), consisting of around 100 novels, and the paral­
lel three­stage release of The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 
(https://revistatransilvania.ro/mdrr), consisting of around 1,300 novels, 
ushered in a new stage of digital humanities in Romania. For the first 
time, in 2019, there was a corpus comprehensive enough for large scale 
analysis. The same year, but prior to the project, Ovio Olaru (Olaru) 
and Patras and her team (Patraș et al.) published valuable overviews 
of the use of digital tools in Romanian humanities research. Just a few 
months later, the first results of the Digital Museum of the Romanian 
Novel project were published. In that first dossier, my colleagues and I 
(Pojoga et al.) provided a brief discussion of possible ways of analyzing 
the newly­build archive, and the two studies on the genres (Terian et al.) 
and the internal geography (Baghiu et al., “Geografia internă”) of nine­
teenth­century Romanian novel set the stage for more detailed analyses 
by the same extended team (these were published in various Romanian 
and international journals, by various combinations of authors). Most 
of these contributions were focused on prose, since the main available 
corpora were novel corpora. We explored space (fictional and histori­
cal), time, subgenres, and character identities, among other topics. We 
extracted metadata, compiled maps, and built graphs. And at the end, 
when we reached the year 1947 and entered dangerous copyright terri­
tory, we started to wonder: what about other literary genres?
The digital museum of Romanian poetry
The choice was natural, given our previous preoccupation with the 
genre (see Vancu; Pojoga, “A Survey”): poetry. Thus, we tried to fig­
ure out how to build a Digital Museum of Romanian Poetry to mir­
ror its twin, The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel, but with 
the experience of archive building and cleaning (where we manually 
rewrote text that was not entirely recognized by OCR software) that 
enabled us to look at the process in a completely new way. At first, we 
surveyed the existing digital poetry archives, and, after moving past the 
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12
usual websites that can sometimes be great poetry archives but are often 
limited to English and American works, we found a few possibly note­
worthy models for our venture. In terms of corpora, the ELTE Poetry 
Corpus (https://github.com/ELTE­DH/poetry­corpus), for instance, 
indexes poems authored by 50 Hungarian canonical poets, for a total 
of around 13,000 poems; A Gutenberg Poetry Corpusextracted by 
Allison Parrish from the literary archive of Project Gutenberg (https://
github.com/aparrish/gutenberg­poetry­corpus)includes about 3 
million lines of poetry; and the Finnish Folk Poetry Corpus brings 
together Finnish folk poetry from the sixteenth century to the 1930s 
(https://www.kielipankki.fi/corpora/skvr/). But all of these are restric­
tive one way or another, and we wanted more. We did not want to 
index and analyze canonical poets alone (like ELTE), or work with an 
eclectic corpus (like Gutenberg), or work on folk poetry, but rather we 
wanted to include all poetry written in Romanian until World War I.
A quite ambitious feat, as we are still finding out. Because all poetry 
written in Romanian until World War I meant volumes, brochures, pam­
phlets, composite volumes (prose and poems), but also poetry published 
in literary magazines and newspapers. Moreover, we were also interested 
in the post­archive building phase, namely the digital analysis of the 
extracted metadata and poems. In this regard, likely the most comprehen­
sive project that goes beyond archive building is Poetry Standardization 
and Linked Open Data (POSTDATA) (https://cordis.europa.eu/proj­
ect/id/679528), a European Research Council project coordinated by 
Elena González­Blanco. POSTDATA is “focused on poetry analysis, 
classification and publication, applying Digital Humanities methods of 
academic analysissuch as XML­TEI encoding […] in order to look for 
standardization, as well as innovation by using semantic web technolo­
gies […] to link and publish literary datasets in a structured way in the 
linked data cloud” (Gonzalez­Blanco et al.). Our modus operandi for the 
novel project involved, during the scanning phase, the manual extraction 
of certain metadata that were meant to provide either a basis for later 
digital analyses (country or city names providing a starting point for a 
series of studies that culminated with Baghiu et al., “Geografia romanu­
lui”) or insights that at that point seemed difficult to extract automati­
cally (main characters’ occupation or social origin, time and space, etc.). 
Therefore, we needed to make important decisions about, say, what and 
how to extract, and we came up with a preliminary model. This model 
includes identification metadata (place of publication, author, translator, 
title), sizing metadata (number of stanzas, lines, words, characters with­
out spaces), subgenre classification, main and secondary themes, space 
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
13
and time metadata, and subject metadata. But since we wanted to test 
the process before applying it to the full archive we intended to build, 
we agreed that we would do a pilot run on a full archive of a magazine, 
before moving to full volumes.
In this article, I will thus work with the pilot identification and 
sizing metadata2 for about 3,000 poems in The Digital Museum of 
Romanian Poetry, published between 1867 and 1916 in Convorbiri 
literare (Literary Conversations, henceforth CL), which is one of the 
most relevant Romanian literary magazines, and chart local produc­
tion of poetry, poetry translations, and the two respective networks 
of influence for probably the most referenced Romanian poets of the 
nineteenth century, Mihai Eminescu and Vasile Alecsandri.
The last bastion of European Romanticism
The question that seems to arise now is why CL and not some other 
Romanian magazine? The short answer would stress the sheer impact 
CL had on the development of Romanian literary culture, but that is 
not necessarily a quantifiable and coherent marker. I will try to formu­
late a more elaborate answer in this section.
When attempting to delineate the precise epoch(s) of Romanticism 
across Europe, one invariably grapples with a nebula of years, volumes, 
and theoretical frameworks encompassing production, definitions of 
the movement, and its main features. For instance, the volume titled 
A Companion to European Romanticism is presented on the publisher’s 
website as covering the national literatures of France, Germany, Italy, 
Poland, Russia and Spain. Even more confusing are assumptions such 
as “An era when millions of people flock to see The Lord of the Rings 
might forgivably be called Romantic still” (Ferber 8), which seems to 
merge cultural trends with artistic movements in a rather gratuitous 
manner. Duncan Wu, in another companion volume, situates the 
(English) Romantic movement broadly between 1790 and 1830, as 
the section “Contexts and Perspectives” shows (Wu 1–108). On the 
other hand, Virgil Nemoianu, an Eastern European critic, talks in his 
book The Taming of Romanticism about commenting on “some specific 
items of European literature between 1815 and 1848” (vii) and “these 
2 The project metadata (and subsequently the metadata for this article) were 
extracted by a project team based at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, consisting of 
Geanina Giuhat, Ana­Maria Stoica, Hanna Han, Bogdan Contea, Andreea Popescu, 
Teodora Susarenco, Daniel Coman, and Crina Neacșu.
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14
later stages” of Romanticism that go until 1848 (1). It has already been 
shown that the case of Central and Eastern European Romantic move­
ments is quite different than their Western counterparts:
The literatures of the region have often been concerned with their belatedness 
in relation to the Western literary cultures, and they occasionally measured their 
lag also in relation to neighboring cultures. Romanian literature, for example, 
experienced its “will to modernity” in the nineteenth century not only with an 
acute sense of belatedness but also with an “unhappy consciousness” about its 
need to choose “imitation” […] to recover the lost ground. (Neubauer 321)
Moreover, for most of Central and Eastern European literatures, 
Romanticism and its partial overlap with nineteenth­century nation­
building processes were an opportunity to elevate one of their emerg­
ing poets to the status of the national poet; hence “the typical pattern 
in east­central Europe […]: picking a (Romantic) poet from the first 
half of the nineteenth century or mid­nineteenth century and canon­
izing him in the following decades” (Dović and Helgason, 63–64). 
In Romania, there were Romantic writers who published in the first 
half of the nineteenth century as well, and they founded several mag­
azines, most notably Dacia literară (The Literary Dacia) by Mihail 
Kogălniceanu in 1840 and România literară (The Literary Romania) 
by Alecsandri in 1855, with both ending within a year, after only 
a few issues. The real Romantic boom does not happen until after 
1864, when the Junimea literary society was founded in the city of 
Iași by Titu Maiorescu, P. P. Carp, Vasile Pogor, Iacob Negruzzi, and 
Theodor Rosetti. Sometime later, Maiorescu, the leading ideological 
and literary figure of the society, suggested “it would be wonderful 
to start a small literary magazine to print the writings read and ap­
proved by the Society,” to which “everyone agreed without much 
debate” (Negruzzi 89–90; my translation). As a result, the inaugural 
issue of CL came out in 1867, and it was going to be published con­
tinuously (with the exception of the war years of 1916–1918) until its 
hiatus in 1944. Its importance to Romanian canonical literature and 
Romanian Romanticism is so great that, instead of seeing a continuity 
in his influential literary history, Nicolae Manolescu chooses a dual, 
parallel periodization, outlining Romanticism as a movement between 
1840 and 1899, and Junimism as a period between 1867, when CL 
starts, and 1889, when Eminescu dies (see Manolescu 141–434). But 
rather than demonstrate further the national relevance of CL and the 
Junimea society, we should assume its local relevance and try to place 
it in an international landscape.
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
15
In lieu of a more refined metric, I propose a visual approach to 
situate CL within the broader timeline of European Romanticism. In 
Figure 1, I chart the birth and death years of 22 prominent Romantic 
poets hailing from 21 European countries spanning the geographical 
expanse from Western to Eastern Europe, encompassing spaces from 
England and France to Russia and Ukraine as well as from Denmark 
to Bulgaria. This visual representation serves as a comprehensive pan­
orama of the Romantic literary timeline, encapsulating a diverse group 
of poets whose activity almost invariably starts in the first third of the 
nineteenth century.
Figure 1: Lifespans of various European Romantic poets and the publication year of 
the first Convorbiri literare issue.
Within this chart, I added two Romanian representatives: Alecsandri, 
regarded as the original Romanian Romantic poet, and Eminescu, the 
so­called younger Romantic destined to usurp Alecsandri’s potential 
position as Romania’s national poet (Terian, “Mihai Eminescu”). As 
it can easily be seen, by the time of Eminescu’s debut in 1866, most 
European Romantics were already dead. The same can be said about 
CL, the Romanian literary magazine that will be the main focus of this 
study, and whose first issue appears in 1867. But, as we have seen (and 
will see in more detail below), CL, as an appendix to and a populariza­
tion tool of the Junimea society, was the most important proponent 
of Romanian Romanticism, and the (chronologically) last bastion of 
European Romanticism.
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An overview of poetry publishing in Convorbiri literare
Figures 2, 3, and 4 chart all poetry published in CL between 1867 and 
1916; Figures 2 and 3 use the number of words as a metric, and Figure 4 
uses lines. At first, I intended to simply count the number of words pub­
lished as poetry every year in CL, but then I thought that trends would 
emerge more clearly if I looked at a five­year average (average number of 
words per five years, changing constantly) and a rolling average (average 
number of words per year from the beginning up to that year). This is 
shown in Figure 2. Besides the general trend, which is clearly down­
ward, Figure 2 indicates that, after an initial rise (and peak), poetry 
publication drops in 1877most likely because of the Romanian War 
of Independence in 1877–1878; the drop continues until the late 1880s 
when there seems to be a brief resurgence, and then returns until the 
twentieth century brings another rise. This calls for some explanation, 
which is what Figure 3 tries to achieve. Here, rather than focusing on 
the sheer number of words, I chose to split the number of words into 
three categories: local production (poetry written by Romanian poets, 
in Romanian), folk poetry (defined simply as authorless poetry), and 
translations (poetry written by non­Romanian poets, translated into 
Romanian). In the landscape of poetry published in CL, local produc­
tion covers 53%, translations account for 36%, and folk poetry repre­
sents 11%. The data in Figure 2 led to possible explanations for all three 
peaks: the first and highest peak is mainly driven by local production 
(seconded by translations) and the need for the magazine to establish its 
direction and promote the authors associated with the Junimea society; 
the second peak, quite strangely given the generally low percentage of 
words attributed to the category (only 11%), seems to be driven by folk 
poetry (seconded by local production), due to a large number of folk 
poems collected by Alesiu V. (Alexiu Viciu) that are published between 
1888 and 1890, mostly a type of traditional Romanian poetry called 
doină; and the third peak is clearly driven by translations, with the main 
culprit being the translation of Homer’s The Iliad, translated by George 
Murnu over a six­year period (1900–1905). In spite of these peaks, the 
rolling average shows a clear image: CL gradually loses interest in po­
etry. But how does this change if, instead of looking just at numbers 
of words, we concentrate on the space occupied by poetry? By that I 
mean the percentage of lines (as the best metric to measure occupation, 
because words might be misleading in this casefor instance, one can 
have poems with very short verses, which means that less words occupy 
much more magazine pages than the much wordier prose) occupied by 
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
17
poetry in each year of CL. The trend in Figure 4which uses a formula 
that takes into account the number of lines per page, the number of 
columns per page, the number of pages per issue, and the number of 
issues per yearlooks even harsher for poetry publication, going from 
an average of over 10% of total space prior to 1877, to a little over 5% 
prior to 1905, and less than 5% after 1905. But how and why does this 
happen? I will try to answer this question by analyzing local poetry pro­
duction and poetry translations in the next two sections.
Figure 2: All poetry published in Convorbiri literare by yearly number of words (a).
Figure: 3: All poetry published in Convorbiri literare by yearly number of words (b)local 
production, folk poetry, translations.
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Figure 4: Space occupied by poetry in Convorbiri literare as percentage of all lines in 
the magazine per year.
Local production of poetry in Convorbiri literare
The slow start of the novel in Romania (see Terian, “Big Numbers”) 
meant that there was an open creative space that was filled with other 
literary forms. Or at least that is what it meant in theory. For there 
was another gap between Romania and Western countries, a litera­
cy gap. For instance, at the 1899 census, only 22% of the Romanian 
adult population (over the age of 15) was literate (Colescu 122). This 
low number suggests that the lack of original literary production in 
Romania may not have been a matter of literary genres, but rather 
a matter of the number of people who knew how to read and write. 
Indeed, based on the data that we have for both novels (Terian, “Big 
Numbers”) and poetry, at least until World War I, novels and poetry 
seem to grow together on average, rather than any of them falling out. 
Nonetheless, as shown in the previous section, poetry publication in 
CL seems to get periodically lower, just as the poetry market grows.
In Figure 5, which only includes poems by Romanian authors, 
excluding translation and folk poetry, there are no other peaks above 
the rolling average after the starting surge, only two falls-one in 1877, 
and one after 1894, when Iacob Negruzzi leaves the magazine-slowly 
picking up again after 1907, when Simion Medehinți takes editorial 
control of the magazine. The totals in Figure 5 are corresponding to 
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
19
80% of all poems and 89% of all words in poems published in CL 
with a Romanian origin. The rest is folk poetry, and from the extracted 
data, two stylistic characteristic specific to folk poetry (compared to 
poetry attributable to individuals) come to surface: folk poems have 
very few stanzas per poem (an average of two vs an average of seven 
for male­authored poems, and four for female­authored poems), and 
they have many more lines per stanza (an average of 16 vs an average of 
seven for male­authored poems, and four for female­authored poems). 
Of course, this is a rather expected result, given the nature of folk 
poetry and its predominant structure, but it nonetheless offers us a 
quantified confirmation. In the same vein, also expected is the gender 
imbalance, with 83% of all Romanian poets being male, and only 6% 
being female (almost half as many as the unidentified poetssigning 
with a pseudonym or initialswho make up 11% of the total number 
of Romanian poets). The disparity is even greater in terms of word 
totals, with 97% of all Romanian poetry words published by male 
poets, and only 2% by female poets (1% remaining for the unknown 
poetsbecause most of them only published a maximum of one or 
two poems). Hence, women publish less, but even when they do, their 
poems are much shorter than those of their male counterparts (the 
paradigmatic form seems to be stanzas of four lines each, for an average 
of four stanzas per poem).
In fact, the quatrain seems to be the paradigmatic stanza form 
for the whole corpus, with more than 40% of all poems authored by 
Romanian writers having four lines per stanza. This is the case even 
though, as mentioned above, the averages for male poets are seven stan­
zas per seven lines each, which is mostly due to the exceptionally long 
poems that they authored (all of the ca. 120 poems over 100 lines are 
authored by male poets, and only 3% of all poems over 50 lines are 
authored by female poets).
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Figure 5: Local production of poetry (words/year) in Convorbiri literare.
In terms of best represented poets, our corpus includes 22 poets with 
over 20 poems, three of which are women. Yet these three female poets, 
namely Matilda Cugler, Veronica Micle, and Ana Conta­Kernbach, have 
authored 80% of all poems published by women in CL prior to World 
War I, with Matilda Cugler even being the fourth author overall, with 
79 published poems. She is also the only woman to be included in the 
list of six put forward by Maiorescu in the aforementioned programmatic 
study, alongside Alecsandri, Eminescu, Samson Bodnărescu, Theodor 
Șerbănescu, and Dimitrie Petrino. Again, the data supports the notion 
that Maiorescu’s direction is in fact CL’s direction (or the other way 
around), since, with the exception of Dimitrie Petrino, the other five 
authors also represent the top five in terms of the most poems published 
in the magazine. If we use a different metric, and look at the number of 
words instead of poems, only Alecsandri and Eminescu remain in the top 
five, alongside Iacob Negruzzi, Anton Naum, and Dimitrie C. Ascanio­
Ollanescu. Needless to say, Alecsandri easily tops both categories.
One and a half centuries later, CL and Junimea seem to have 
achieved most of their goals, with the most important one probably 
being the elevation of Eminescu to the status of the national poet. In 
the process, however, they seem to have lost interest in other kinds 
of poetry and to have been unable to overcome Junimism, which in 
poetry meant a sort of combination of Classicism and Romanticism. 
Of their nineteenth­century poetry bets, only Eminescu has survived in 
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
21
the high­school canon, although admittedly he also is the lone nine­
teenth­century poet on the list. After him, CL seems to begin to mar­
ginalize poetry, much as France (Sapiro 25) and Germany do in the late 
nineteenth century, but against the Romanian tide of poetry production.
Translations of poetry in Convorbiri literare
  
        
Figure 6: Composite landscape of five maps with the countries of origin for the poets 
translated in Convorbiri literare in 1867, 1878, 1895, 1901, 1906, and 1916 (the last 
two are the same because no changes occur).
36% of all poetry words in CL are translated. They belong to over 70 
poets from 11 countries, plus Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. 
The maps in Figure 6 chart the periods when CL puts a pin on a coun­
try, that is, when a poet from that country is translated into Romanian 
in its pages. I have not included the two state forms I mentioned-
Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire-for historical reasons, and also 
because they would have overlapped with nineteenth­century Italy and 
Greece. Due to technical limitations, I had to use current borders of the 
countries, which I can defend by noting that the purpose of these maps 
is not to accurately represent historical borders, but rather to represent 
the translation reach of CL. In the first year, only the two continental 
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
22
powerhouses, France and Germany, are represented, alongside a wan­
dering Austria (through a single poem by Heinrich von Levitschnigg). 
Ten years later, England, Italy, and Greece appear on the map, and by 
1895 Spain also joins the group. In 1901, the first (and only) non­Eu­
ropean country, India (through several translations by George Coșbuc) 
appears, alongside Switzerland, and by 1906 they are joined by Norway 
and Ireland. The maps are relevant more because of what cannot be seen 
than of what can be seen. For while we could expect France, Germany, 
England, Italy, and Spain to emerge on the map, we should have ex­
pected to find more than just one non­European country. The absence 
of Romania’s neighbors is unexpected as well, as is the status of Austria 
as the sole European country to the east of Germany.
At this point, some depth should be added to the maps; besides the 
geographical space targeted by translations, quantities are also relevant. 
Figure 7 shows the total number of poems translated from each coun­
try. I chose the number of poems for this graph rather than the num­
ber of words because the number of poems also plays a part in terms 
of how many times a certain poet appears in the magazine. Two clear 
frontrunners emerge here, and, without much surprise, they are France 
and Germany. Nonetheless, given that the general view of the era was 
that CL is decisively oriented toward German poetry and literature, it is 
quite remarkable to see both go head­to­head until the early 1900s, when 
France moves on top. This translation duo should be explored further; for 
instance, its fruit is one of the most peculiar events of literary translation 
in the so­called long nineteenth century. In 1871, CL published a poem 
signed by Gablitz, a supposedly German poet translated into Romanian 
by an unknown translator. In fact, “Gablitz is a poet who never existed, 
and by inventing this German name, I had in mind CL’s predilection 
for everything that comes from Berlin” (Hasdeu; my translation): this is 
the confession of Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, one of the main opponents 
of Titu Maiorescu and Junimea. The impression that German literature 
was the go­to literature for CL was so strong, that a prank like this was 
thought of and, for that matter, pulled off. Even though the reality of 
poetry translation in CL contradicts Hasdeu, there is another reality that 
most likely molds his thinking and public discourse. That reality is the 
fact that Romanian culture was francophone during those years, and 
novel translations, for instance, reflect that, as shown by Baghiu (Baghiu 
94), since less than 30% of all novels translated in Romanian prior to 
1918 are non­French. Indeed, poetry translations are much more bal­
anced, and directly contradict the francophone status quo of Romanian 
culture. And if we look even deeper, we discover that the general French 
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
23
propensity has another consequence: granted, translations from French 
and German are similar in number and size, but the eras they cover are 
vastly different, with 21% of French translations rendering pre­Roman­
tic poets, 58% Romantic poets, and 21% post­Romantic poets, whereas 
94% of German translations render Romantic poets, distinctively show­
ing the main movements of interest for CL. Moreover, the next two 
cultures of origin are the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece, insofar 
as Ireland, although fourth, is an anomaly, due to 51 translations from 
Thomas Moore published in one year, 1905, in a sort of retrieval effort, 
which is another possibly fruitful avenue of interpretation.
Since I have already suggested some possible categories to chrono­
logically integrate all translations, Figure 8 shows (this time by number 
of words) the evolution of the publication of poetry translations in 
CL, with all poems separated in five groups: (Ancient) Greek, Latin, 
pre­Romantic, Romantic, and post­Romantic. Besides the fact that 
Romantic poetry seems to be all­present, and clearly dominates the first 
third of the graph, something strange happens afterward. Following the 
publishing of many Romantic poems up to the early 1880s, one would 
expect CL to turn to, or at least attempt to turn to, the post­Romantic 
era; instead, contributors begin to intensively translate Latin poetry 
(until the late 1890s), followed by the Ancient Greek poetry that domi­
nates all translations published after 1900. Therefore, just as CL does 
not seem to be able to leave Junimism behind when it comes to local 
production, its conservative stance turns even more conservative, and 
the journal turns (radically) backward instead of going forward.
Figure 7: Total number of poems translated per country (rolling sum).
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
24
Figure 8: Translated poetry per designated period (words).
Vasile Alecsandri and Mihai Eminescu in world literature 
networks
As shown above, if we consider the number of poems and the number 
of words at the same time, two poets emerge as central to CL: Alecsandri 
and Eminescu. But even so, Alecsandri leads (by far) in both catego­
ries. Even though he was already an established poet by the time the 
first issue of CL appeared, he was appreciated by the Junimea society. 
At every step, however, his name seemed to be deployed as a tool to 
push forward Eminescu’s name, starting with a nationally read article 
that Maiorescu published in CL in 1872; in that article, Maiorescu 
mentions Eminescu directly after naming Alecsandri and thus starts 
a twofold process: the canonization of Eminescu and the replacement 
of Alecsandri as the prominent Romanian poetic figure. This leads to 
Eminescu’s “quick recognition as a top literary figure and even ‘national 
poet’,” which “must have appeared odd because the position seemed 
to have been filled already by an older and more distinguished writer, 
namely Alecsandri,” who “surely fit the job description” and, in fact, 
“was overqualified” (Terian, “Mihai Eminescu” 38). The relationship 
between Maiorescu and Eminescu seemed to mirror another relation 
that led to the eventual canonization of a national poet, namely that be­
tween Slovenian critic Matija Čop and Slovenian poet France Prešeren, 
in which “Čop offered his friend Prešeren philosophical, historical and 
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
25
comparative aesthetic knowledge as well as the fund of his private li­
brary and that of the lyceum” (Juvan 43). Junimea and Maiorescu fund­
ed Eminescu’s studies abroad, arranged jobs for him, and published his 
works. But how did Maiorescu and CL canonize Eminescu? This last 
part of my study tries to quantitatively prove a hypothesis proposed by 
Andrei Terian in his contribution to the collective volume Romanian 
Literature as World Literature, namely that
it is not by accident that Karel Hynek Mácha has been called “the Czech Byron,” 
and that Hristo Botev has been dubbed “the Bulgarian Victor Hugo,” whereas 
Adam Mickiewicz was exported to the United States during the First World War 
sometimes as “the Polish Goethe” and sometimes as “the Polish Shakespeare.” 
All these authors gained legitimacy as national poets also through “at­distance” 
associations of various kinds with authors belonging to other cultures—if you 
think about it, the very granting of the title of national poet implies or, to my 
mind, should imply that the author in question does double duty as a trans­
national poet, that his or her work and his or her overall figure are a kind of 
business card one literature offers to the others. (Terian, “Mihai Eminescu” 36)
In brief, the hypothesis is that the Romanian national poet is can­
onized by means of linking him to foreign cultures that legitimize 
him on the local literary scene. Therefore, my colleague Ana­Maria 
Stoica and I extracted the names of non­Romanian poets and phi­
losophers (to cover both literary production and thought production) 
who appear on the page before, on the same page, and on the page 
after the appearance of the names of Alecsandri and Eminescu. From 
a methodological point of view, I used ARCANUM’s database and 
OCR (so clearly there will be errors, as not all instances of names were 
found) to search for the names-using “Eminescu” for Eminescu and 
“Alecsandri” plus “Alexandri” for Alecsandri. During the manual ex­
traction, names were eliminated in various instances: they appeared in 
the contents section; they appeared after the end or before the begin­
ning of the contribution containing the name; they appeared in con­
tributions about other literary figures, and they did not specifically 
refer to Alecsandri or Eminescu. The results are in the table below and 
in Figures 9 and 10.
mentions links unique links
Alecsandri 1679 336 85
Eminescu 1203 1121 207
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
26
Figure 9: Number of international relationships per origin for Mihai Eminescu and 
Vasile Alecsandri.
Figure 10: Network visualization of international relationships per origin for Mihai 
Eminescu and Vasile Alecsandri (generated with GPT­4, based on a links .csv).
The discrepancy in links and unique links is immediately striking. 
Eminescu has almost three times more international connections with 
over two times more unique links. And yet, the difference only intensi­
fies if we calculate the average ratio between the number of mentions 
and the number of links, as Alecsandri is at 0.2, while Eminescu is at 
0.93. That means that every five times Alecsandri’s name appears, one 
Vlad Pojoga:     The Last Bastion of European Romanticism
27
foreign name accompanies it, whereas almost every time Eminescu’s 
name appears, it does so alongside a foreign name. Terian’s intuition 
seems to be duly confirmed.
But if we look at the data more closely, and operate with categories 
rather than just numbers (Figure 9), we will see that Alecsandri’s net­
work of relationships is mainly in the French world (48%), whereas 
Eminescu’s is mainly in the German world (36%), but with the French 
world being a close second (31%). This echoes the place of their for­
mal education, with Alecsandri being educated partially in Paris, and 
Eminescu partly in Vienna and Berlin. But it also reveals a pattern of 
preference that associates Alecsandri only with the French canon (the 
next spaces of origin are the German one at 15% and the Latin one 
at 13%), while associating Eminescu with both the French and the 
German canons. And as we have already seen, the poetry scene is not 
nearly as francophone as the prose scene, which suggests that this sys­
tem of canonization greatly favored Eminescu at Alecsandri’s expense. 
Moreover, the network in Figure 10 (color­coded by singular and 
shared relationships: on the left are Alecsandri’s singular relationships, 
in the middle the shared relationships, and on the right Eminescu’s 
singular relationships) shows the sheer difference in breadth and scope 
between the two names. Around 20 names would disappear from the 
network if Alecsandri’s name also disappeared, whereas more than 130 
would disappear if Eminescu’s name also disappeared.
Conclusions
Drawing everything from the analytical parts of this study together, a 
few insights were gained that support the idea that CL is the last bas­
tion of European Romanticism. Firstly, the local poetry published in 
the magazine centered around the poetic output of Junimism, a late 
blend of Classicism and Romanticism, and was unable to overcome 
it, thus almost abandoning poetry publication by World War I de­
spite the general growth in poetry production. Secondly, the transla­
tions published in CL were mainly from French and German, but after 
the exhaustion of the European Romantic poets the magazine did not 
turn to post­Romantic poetry, but rather circled back to Latin and 
Ancient Greek translations. And thirdly, Eminescu was canonized as 
the Romanian national poet through the critical internationalization 
of his poetry and his integration into world literature networks rather 
than through a better national grounding.
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
28
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Zadnji branik evropske romantike: kvantitativna 
analiza poezije v romunski literarni reviji 
Convorbiri literare (1867–1916)
Ključne besede: romunska poezija / evropska romantika / pesniški prevodi / Eminescu, 
Mihai / Alecsandri, Vasile / Maiorescu, Titu / kvantitativna analiza
Članek predstavi kvantitativno analizo poezije, objavljene v najbolj 
priljubljeni romunski literarni reviji druge polovice 19. stoletja Convorbiri 
literare (CL) od njene ustanovitve leta 1867 do leta 1916, ko je Romunija 
vstopila v prvo svetovno vojno. CL, ki velja za zadnjo večjo literarno revijo 
evropske romantike, je začela izhajati v času, ko je bila poezija privilegirana 
zvrst v romunski književnosti. Na svojih straneh je predstavljala tako naro­
dnega pesnika Mihaia Eminescuja kot najvidnejšega romunskega literarnega 
kritika 19. stoletja Tituja Maiorescuja. Članek indeksira in kvantitativno 
analizira objavljeno poezijo in podatke, ki jih lahko razumemo kot pesniška 
omrežja. Rezultati analize podpirajo tezo, da je bilo objavljanje poezije in teo­
retiziranje o njej sestavni del enega zadnjih državotvornih procesov v Evropi. 
Iz ARCANUM­ovega digitalnega arhiva z več kot 66.000 stranmi CL so izlu­
ščeni in preučeni trije sloji metapodatkov, ki so povezani s poezijo: lokalna 
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
30
produkcija poezije (kdo je objavljal v CL in kdaj ter koliko); tuja produkcija 
poezije (čigava poezija je bila v CL prevedena v romunščino in kdaj ter od 
kod so bili avtorji prevodne literature) in mreže vpliva (kateri tujci so bili naj­
pogosteje omenjeni v zvezi z dvema najpopularnejšima romunskima roman­
tičnima pesnikoma, Eminescujem in Vasilom Alecsandrijem). Z odkrivanjem 
mednarodne mreže avtorjev, ki so bili v središču literarnih razprav v CL, si 
članek prizadeva očrtati nacionalno shemo relevantnosti, ki velja za romun­
sko poezijo v drugi polovici 19. stoletja. 
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.135.1.09-1“1867/1916“:004
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v47.i2.01