Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/22



The task of translation from the French was certainly difficult, often to the point of impossibility, though on the whole it was not necessary as, from this period on, South-Eastern Europe was able to read from the originals. These were to be found in the libraries of all Roumanian noblemen and of the higher clergy, the latter of whom were less impeded by religious scruples than is commonly admitted. The highly cultured Bishop of Râmnic in Wallachia, Cesarius, is known to have asked his book-seller in Transylvania for the dangerous Encyclopaedia of the Philosophers and would not accept a similar book bearing the same title. In such libraries, besides, were found the futile literature of the second-half of the century, including the « Amours du Chevalier de Faublas », and the «Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle» by Bossuet, with Roumanian glossaries.

Towards the end of the 18th century translators appeared. Their choice was often queer and unexpected. Some of them, in the Roumanian Principalities, where certain of the bishops even adopted free-masonry, soared to the heights of contemporary western poetry. Besides the interpreter of the works of the Frenchman Florian, Alexander Beldiman, one Constantin Conachi, a Moldavian, rendered Pope’s «Essay on Man» into his dry Roumanian. A gifted Greek, Athanasius Christopoulos, imitated the lyrics of France of the time of Jean Baptiste Rousseau, not forgetting his initiation into the joyous verse of Anakreon. But the Italian tradition survived. The most important of all Wallachian poets, a contemporary of Conachi, John Văcărescu, spoke and wrote good Italian, years after the dispersal of a group of twenty young Roumanians living in Venice, by order of the Sultan, who feared the danger of political contacts with the west. More, the best-known of all Italian poets,