Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space

It's through that hole, I thought, that I am returning to my birthplace. --Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag In the Romanian folk poem Miorita, a shepherd boy is warned by his beloved ewe, Miorita, that his fellow shepherds plan to murder him and take his flock. Instead of resisting, he accepts his fate, asking only that Miorita go in search of his mother and tell her the story not of how he was betrayed, but of how he was married to the daughter of a powerful King. Thereafter, wherever the ewe wanders, she tells the story--not the true, unadorned facts of death and betrayal, but a beautiful fiction of a transcendent wedding. This simple story, told and retold in countless versions, is Romania's most enduring cultural text.(1) The popularity of the Miorita can be attributed to the power and simplicity of its poetry, but even more to its mythic structure. The myth has been used to define the Romanian character by several authors, including Mircea Eliade, who has called the "cosmic marriage" of the Miorita an example of "cosmic Christianity"--part pagan, part Christian, but in any case wholly Romanian--"dominated by a nostalgia for nature sanctified by the presence of Jesus."(2) But the most controversial concept of Romanian identity to be derived from the poem is the concept of "mioritic space" defined by the Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga. For Blaga, the path of Miorita's wandering delineates what he calls "mioritic space," a geography of the Romanian poetic imagination, or, as one recent historian of the Romanians describes it, "a philosophical attempt to explain the Romanian spirit through the Romanian landscape, which [Blaga] saw as the stylistic matrix of Romanian culture" (Georgescu 205). Blaga's critics have charged that this concept has become a liability, nationalistic, escapist and fatalistic. For political analysts, Blaga has been criticized as a romantic aesthete, self-absorbed and disengaged from political realities, while pursuing a mystical communion with nature.(3) In this view, mioritic space is an escapist dream of a romantic nationalist that encourages political apathy. For ethnographers, it is a romantic distortion of the Romanian peasantry's connection to the land that ignores political and historical reality. These critics suggest that it may even account for the tendency of the Romanian people to suffer oppression passively: "one 'cause' of the seeming passivity of the Romanian population may be the fatalistic Weltanschaaung implicit in the Miorita" (Kligman 356). But to Blaga, mioritic space was simply a way of locating the Romanian poetic spirit. All these theories and criticisms may seem like much ado about a boy and his sheep, but the story has great resonance to a country long troubled by internal conflicts and external conquerors. It has often been noted that Romania is, geographically, "inside-out," its mountains in the interior, its plains on the borders, leaving it vulnerable to invasion. More than once has the Romanian spirit had to take refuge from the threats presented to its exposed borders by escaping to the mountains and forests of its interior. When the threat was institutionalized within its own borders during the Turkish and Communist regimes, the Romanian spirit could survive only by going into physical (usually political) or metaphysical exile. One such exile, both physical and metaphysical, is the Romanianborn American poet and translator of Blaga, Andrei Codrescu. Having fled the Stalinist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu in the mid-1960s, Codrescu traveled to a number of European countries before embracing America, then in the throes of a mostly benevolent revolution, as the country most likely to listen to what he had to say, in the language that he was most likely to say it in. Since then, he has published twenty volumes of poetry (including translations of Max Jacob and Lucian Blaga), four volumes of fiction (including the recent bestseller, The Blood Countess), several collections of his commentaries for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program, and four volumes of memoirs. …