EMIL RACOVITA – FRAGMENTS FROM THE EPOS OF THE SOUTH POLE

Abstract

Emil Racovita’s destiny as a pathfinder may seem pretty well-known. The coordinates of his memorialistic literature, however, represent almost a terra incognita. Legitimizing the journey as an important means of translating impressions into memoirs, our paper focuses on the poetics, broadly speaking, found in the Romanian explorer Emil Racovita’s journal. Without being ignored from the great local travelers’ gallery – along with other emigrants such as Nicolae Milescu, Dinicu Golescu, Iuliu Popper, Ioan Xantus, Francis Binder, Dimitrie Ghica and his son Nicholas, etc., but on other coordinates – the researcher from Iași lingers in our memoirs through his exceptional account of the Antarctic expedition (episodes about Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego as well as those on anchoring „Belgica” for 13 months on hostile lands). Although the assiduous traveler’s memories are somewhat surpassed by the scientist’s observations, the minimalism of the artistic memorandum reveals a touching spirit, pervaded alike by the memory of the eternal ice. All these can be found in some sequences from the sailors’ adventure on the antarctic vessel, in some fragments from the wanderings of the explorer Emil Racovita, preceded by a short biography.

Keywords

• explorer
• antarctic continent
• travel notes
• hybrid journal
• memoirs
• literarity