20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

The Reader (Lepturariul) of Aron Pumnul – a pioneering book 153years of junior secondary school, contains 154 texts (96 of them transcribedin Cyrillic characters and 58 in Latin alphabet), ordered without any criteriaand with no additional specifications or data about the authors. Some textsare reproduced from the famous calendar Icon of the World (Icoana lumii);others are translations from books that were popular at the time. Among thewriters present in the first volume some are well-known (V. Alecsandri, Gr.Alexandresu, I.H. Rǎdulescu, C. Bolliac, Al. Donici, G. Sion, Gh. Asachi),but others – like Anastasie Panu, Mihai Porfiriu, George Bǎrǎşiu, MihaiCuciureanu – are not. The second part, which has fewer translations andextracts from Icon of the World, contains texts by the same authors and, inaddition, by Damaschin Bojâncǎ, G. Bariţiu, and N. Istrate.This first volume has mainly an educational objective. We come acrosstexts that speak, through fables and short stories, about the most beautifulhuman traits: diligence, honesty, courage, justice, modesty, wisdom, virtueand fairness (Judges Worthy of Mention, The Dog and its Shadow, The Cricketand the Ant, The Frog and the Ox, Two Ears, The Justice of Persians etc.).Other texts provide information on zoology (The Bour, The Lion, The Deer,The Tapir, The Bison, The Elephant, The Ferret); on botany (The Flowers,The Cotton Plant, The Corn, The Musk); on history (The Mummies, TheEmblems of Moldavia); practical advice (The Corn Cob Paper); teachingson geography (The Cave of Vifleim, Jerusalem, The Overflow of the Nile,The Nests, The Spring of Fire in Mount Cracovia), with special emphasis onthe beauty and richness of the Romanian landscape (From the Descriptionof Borsec Baths, Looking Over Hateg, The Red Tower Pass). Note that, onp. 102-103, our famous folk ballad is reproduced, under the title The Sheep(Mioara), by V. Alecsandri. This is its first inclusion in an anthology, afterits discovery by Russo and its publication by V. Alecsandri in his wellknown1852 collection of folk poetry.The mere listing of these areas shows that, through his Reader(Lepturariul), Pumnul also endeavoured to provide the history, geography,botany and zoology textbooks which did not exist in Romanian at the time.The aesthetic value of the reproduced texts was less important although, asmentioned, some of the titles were to become part of Romania’s heritageof classic literature (Mioriţa, Constantin Brancoveanul; or The Ox and theCalf, by Gr. Alexandrescu, The Raven and the Fox, by I.H. Rǎdulescu).Also worth mentioning is the fact that this first volume already comprisesauthors from all the Romanian provinces: Moldavia (Alecsandri),Transylvania (G. Bariţiu), Wallachia (Grigore Alexandrescu, Ion HeliadeArune Pumnul, Professor of Rumanian Language and Literature at the Plinariu SecondaryCollege in Chernovtsy. 1862, Tome I, Subsidised by the G.O. Religious Fund in Bukovina.Vienna: C.R. Publisher of Educational Books.