Panait Cerna

Early life Cerna's early name, rendered in Bulgarian as Панайот Станчов, was commonly transliterated into Romanian as Panait Stanciov, Stancov, Stanciof or Stancioff. The poet's preferred name alluded to Cerna, his birthplace in Tulcea County, Northern Dobruja. Panait Cerna's father was an ethnic Bulgarian schoolteacher, also named Panayot Stachov (Panait Stanciov). or of Bulgarian origin. Shortly before Maria gave birth to their son, Romanian administration began taking over in previously Ottoman-ruled Northern Dobruja. Stanchov, who was a Bulgarian nationalist, refused to accept this change and left for the Principality of Bulgaria, leaving his family behind. Consequently, Cerna never met his father. After completing primary school in his native village, he graduated from a high school in the Danube port of Brăila, then enrolled at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bucharest. His first original poem, Orientale ("Orientals"), saw print two years later in the magazine Carmen. After 1903, Cerna contributed to Sămănătorul, and his poems also appeared sporadically in other publications, including Floare Albastră and Revista Modernă. Cerna spent much of this period traveling through the Old Kingdom, and several times visited regions of the Southern Carpathians, in particular the area of Rucăr, the Bucegi Mountains, and the Jiu Valley. The group of Convorbiri Critice writers also included D. Nanu, Corneliu Moldovanu, Emil Gârleanu, I. Dragoslav and Gheorghe Vâlsan. In 1908, he decided to continue his studies in the German Empire. The decision was influenced and encouraged by Junimea and its leader Titu Maiorescu, who, as Minister of Education granted him a scholarship. This, he argues, was one of the few areas in which Junimea still differed from Sămănătorul, which was more open to less elitist environments. Studies abroad and death From late 1910 to early 1912, Cerna was at the University of Leipzig, where he attended courses held by the philosophers and psychologists Wilhelm Wundt, Eduard Spranger and Hans Volkelt. Panait Cerna's first volume of collected poetry was published at home in 1910, and, two years later, resulted in the author being made a co-recipient of the Romanian Academy's Vasile Adamachi Award. Panait Cerna died in Leipzig, shortly after receiving his diploma. Zarifopol was present when Cerna succumbed, and recorded that Maiorescu's views on poetry where preoccupied his friend even on his deathbed. The poet was buried in the German city, and later exhumed for burial in Bucharest's Bellu Cemetery. ==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. 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 [Cerna] worked" was largely "dominated by Eminescu." 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. 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 [the sentiment] 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: ==Legacy==

Panait Cerna's lifetime success and literary fame made him the target of adulation among his fellow traditionalists, a camp which united various Junimea affiliates and Sămănătorul contributors. According to Călinescu, this group saw him as Romania's answer to Schiller and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Literary historian Z. Ornea argues that this evidenced not just a decline in standards, but also Mehedinţi's "tastelessness". Zarifopol deplores Cerna's submission to traditionalist and classicist goals, arguing that it eventually ruined Cerna as a poet and made him unhappy. later known as an official poet of Communist Romania, and Sămănătoruls Ion Sân-Giorgiu, whose career later took him through an Expressionist stage and eventually to fascist politics. Demostene Botez, another author to have been influenced by Cerna's style, dedicated his mentor a poem which read: In his essay Din registrul ideilor gingaşe ("From the Register of Gentle Ideas"), where he satirizes the Romanian public's reception of literature, Zarifopol looks into the problems faced by Cerna in satisfying his readers. Using one of Cerna's own accounts as the basis for this analysis, he notes that a group of his young "female admirers" where unpleasantly surprised to find out that their idol was "short, pudgy, wide-necked and ruddy-faced." He writes: "the girls ... were thus in full agreement with the philosophical tradition which, since the old days, has set as a supreme ideal a mosaic of perfections that is naive and unlikely." The poet's house in Cerna is presently a museum, dedicated in part to his memory, and also housing a permanent exhibit dedicated to the traditional arts and crafts of Tulcea County. It also features a bust of the poet. as are a high school in Brăila and streets in Bucharest, Brăila, Bistriţa, Hunedoara, Lugoj and Petroşani. The local authorities in Tulcea County organize an annual Panait Cerna National Poetry and Essay Contest. ==Notes==