Testament
original title: Cuvinte potrivite (testament)
The volume "Suitable Words" , published in 1927, opens with the poem "Testament" , which represents a "poetic burn", defining the artistic belief of the poet in terms of the aesthetics of the ugly, as a fundamental dimension of Tudor Arghezi's creation, circumscribing thus a hypertext with multiple meanings for our lyrics. For Tudor Arghezi, the programmatic affirmation of the “aesthetics of the ugly” is intrinsically realized through an obvious intertextuality with “Les fleurs du mal”, the volume of lyrics by Charles Baudelaire.
The poem "Testament" synthesizes the essence of Arghez's aesthetic thinking. The fundamental idea of poetry is the stable connection between the poet and his ancestors, of "slaves with burdens full of bones shed in me." Therefore, according to his own conception, his creation must be understood as the only dowry left to his descendants. The author, Tudor Arghezi, is the communicative court outside the work that directly expresses its artistic creed through the lyrical self in the first person, from a subjective perspective.
At the level of paratext, the title of the poem can suggest, in a denotative way, the legal act drawn up by a person, through which he expresses his wishes to be fulfilled after his death. In the biblical sense, the term refers to the teaching left by the prophets and apostles (contained in the "Old Testament" and "New Testament"): at the connotative level, the Arghesian work is a covenant between the author (become the Demiurge of his "book") and reader, an image of the world saved by art.
The architect implies a discursive structure organized on five stanzas, of unequal size. Poetic ideas do not succeed each other, but resume in different structures. The beginning shapes the idea of raising the lyrical self through art to the first "stage" of becoming, and the hardest after a long past of toil and suffering of the generations that preceded it.
Thus, the central symbol of poetry is established as a hypotextual element, through several meanings of the "book": the book- "step", the book- "your first deed", the book- "appropriate words", the book- "God of stone ", The book-" the fruit of pain for all eternity ". It is the result of the inheritance of "bones" of sacred value and the "ashes of the hearth" of the ancestors.
The second essential idea of poetry is the source and nature of art, as conceived by Tudor Arghezi. First, the lyrical self confesses how, from the "speech with urges for cattle" of the ancestors, "appropriate words" arose from the master's hand of the one who perpetuates the linguistic treasure with devotion to the descendants designated by the nickname "son". This indicates the main source of his poetic language: the harsh, unadulterated language of the toilers in the fields.
The hermeneutic de-construction of the text reveals that the lyrical self "kneads" for a long time the formless dough of these words ("thousands of weeks"), which will correspond to the principle that intense and long artistic effort shapes the enunciative order of lyrical discourse and can reach a new dimension. - the aesthetics of the ugly. The poet uses, for the first time in Romanian lyric poetry, linguistic resources unimaginable to the poet with an aesthetic function, such as “rags” from which he makes “buds and crowns”, and from “bugs”, “molds and mud”, he outlines new beauties and prices. ”.
Eugen Ionescu wrote: "Tudor Arghezi is a significant magnetic point in contemporary literature", thus recognizing his role as a renewer of Romanian poetry, whose "name gathered on a book" places the poetry of the interwar period under the sign of absolute modernity.
