Vasile Alecsandri (1821–1890)

Some of the poems were merely okay, but some of them were amazing. None of those assessments is probably objective. The first has to do with the fact that I dislike romantic poetry, so the ones that had too much of the nasty R in them did not appeal to me. The second assessment is based on sheer nostalgia: there were poems in this collection that I had studied during elementary school in Romania when I was about, oh, 7-8, so they created the warm, sweet, melancholy feeling of something long-forgotten that I knew I'd heard before. Those poems talked of linden trees and cuckoos, golden fields and snowed forests, deer and foxes, willows and dandelions, the changing of seasons, rivers I knew by name and rivers I'd swam in, places I'd seen and places that sounded like places I'd seen - in short, all the things that I remember from my childhood. How could I not love them?… (mehr)