George Coșbuc

George Coșbuc (Hordou, 1866 – Bucharest, 1918) was a Romanian poet, translator, teacher and journalist from Transylvania, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He wrote in Romanian and is remembered above all for his verses about rural life, with its hardships and its moments of joy. He matters because, at the turn of the twentieth century, he gave Romanian high poetry a voice for the countryside that had rarely appeared in cultivated literature before.

The son of a Greek Catholic priest, Coșbuc attended school in Telciu and Năsăud, where he read the Romanian and world classics eagerly and soon began teaching himself. His father hoped he would follow him into the priesthood and was not pleased by his literary ambitions. In 1884 he published his first poems in the almanac of a local literary club, and that same year he began university courses in Cluj, where he later edited the newspaper Tribuna. There he made his name with Nunta Zamfirei, which was warmly praised in Romanian literary circles.

In Bucharest he published Balade și idile in 1893, a volume that secured his reputation. Around this time he also wrote poems with a political edge and contributed to the capital's literary journals. His translation work was extensive: he rendered Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey into Romanian, as well as works by Schiller and passages from Kalidasa, working from German versions of the Sanskrit original, and he undertook a complete translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. In 1901 he co-founded, with Alexandru Vlahuță, the magazine Sămănătorul, which promoted a traditionalist outlook rooted in peasant culture.

After his only son died in a car accident in 1915, he largely stopped writing. His reputation endures in Romanian schools, where many of his poems are still read, and in place names: his native village was renamed Coșbuc in 1925.