Literary Excerpt: Creangă, Folk Narrative | Romanian Grammar

Ion Creangă (1837–1889) is the great voice of Moldovan oral Romanian. A village schoolteacher and storyteller from Humulești near the Carpathian foothills, he wrote his fairy tales (Povești) and his Amintiri din copilărie ("Memories of Childhood") exactly as they would be spoken aloud by the fire — full of regional words, proverbs, asides to the listener, and the breathless tense-switching of a man telling a good story. For the advanced learner Creangă is a goldmine and a trap at once: a goldmine because no other canonical author preserves so much living Moldovan grammar; a trap because that grammar is regional, and a beginner who imitates it will sound like a 19th-century peasant. Read him to understand the dialect, not to copy it.

Creangă is public domain (he died in 1889). The passages below are quoted from his published tales in standard modern orthography, with regional spellings noted as such.

The fairy-tale opening

Every Creangă tale opens with a variant of the same incantation. The fullest version, from the start of his tales, runs:

A fost odată ca niciodată, că de n-ar fi, nu s-ar mai povesti.

A literal gloss:

A fost odată ca niciodată,

There was once like never,

că de n-ar fi, nu s-ar mai povesti.

for if it weren't (so), it wouldn't be told anymore.

The whole line is a rhymed proverb-formula. The first half is the frozen "once upon a time" block (A fost odată ca niciodată). The second half is a tiny conditional argument: de n-ar fi ("if it weren't") and nu s-ar mai povesti ("it would not be told"), both in the condițional prezent (auxiliary ar + short infinitive). The storyteller jokingly defends the truth of his tale — "if it hadn't happened, people wouldn't keep telling it" (see conditional overview).

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De here means "if," a folk and regional alternative to dacă. De n-ar fi = dacă n-ar fi. You will meet this conditional de all over older and rural Romanian; in the modern standard it survives mainly in proverbs and set phrases.

Perfect simplu and pluperfect chaining

Once the formula ends, Creangă narrates. Oral Moldovan storytelling chains events in the perfect simplu (the synthetic, single-word past) and reaches back to earlier events with the mai-mult-ca-perfect (pluperfect). Consider a typical narrative sequence reconstructed in his style:

Se duse băiatul la pădure și tăie un copac.

The boy went to the forest and felled a tree. (two perfect-simplu verbs chaining the action)

Când ajunse acasă, mama lui adormise deja.

When he got home, his mother had already fallen asleep. (perfect simplu ajunse, then pluperfect adormise for the earlier event)

The perfect simplu is what makes Creangă's prose move. In everyday spoken Romanian almost everyone says s-a dus, a tăiat, a ajuns (perfect compus); the synthetic se duse, tăie, ajunse is now literary and, in living speech, survives mainly in Oltenia in the south-west — not in Moldova. Creangă uses it as a narrative tense, the way a written tale demands, even though his spoken dialect would have used the compound past. This is a crucial distinction: the perfect simplu in Creangă is a style of writing, not a recording of Moldovan speech (see perfect simplu, regular formation).

Event order	Tense	Example
Foreground, sequential	Perfect simplu	se duse, tăie, ajunse
Earlier than the foreground	Mai-mult-ca-perfect	adormise, plecase, mâncase
Background, ongoing	Imperfect	era, ședea, ningea

The narrator's intrusive present

Creangă's signature trick is to break the past-tense narration and lean toward the listener in the present with an aside or a proverb. The narrative present (praesens historicum) speeds up a scene; the gnomic present states a folk truth:

Și, vorba ceea: la plăcinte înainte, și la război înapoi.

And, as the saying goes: first in line for pies, last for war. (a gnomic present-tense proverb dropped into the story)

Ce-mi pasă mie? — zice flăcăul și se duce.

What do I care? — says the lad, and off he goes. (narrative present zice/se duce for vividness)

This switching between past narration and present aside is the texture of oral storytelling. English does it too ("So this guy walks into a shop...") but Romanian folk narrative does it more, and Creangă is its master.

Moldovan regionalisms

Creangă's lexicon and phonology are Moldovan. A few features the learner should recognize (and label mentally as regional: Moldova, not standard):

diminutives everywhere: băietan (a strapping lad), purcel, iezișor, mămucă (dear mama). The diminutive carries warmth and folk intimacy, not just smallness.
native, earthy lexicon: a se duce (to go off), a se sfădi (to quarrel), hojma (constantly), năprasnic (sudden, violent).
the regional address word măi / mă ("hey, you"), an all-purpose vocative interjection.

Măi, băiete, ce-ai făcut tu acolo?

Hey, boy, what have you done there? (măi = regional/familiar vocative interjection)

Capra cu trei iezi avea trei iezișori pe care îi iubea.

The goat with three kids had three little kids whom she loved. (iezișori = diminutive of iezi, kids/baby goats)

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Creangă's diminutives (iezișor, mămucă, purcel) are affective, not literal. Mămucă doesn't mean "small mama" — it means "dear, darling mama." Romanian uses diminutives to color feeling, especially in folk and family registers.

A note on his pre-1993 spelling

Creangă wrote before the modern orthographic reforms. In original editions you will see sînt (modern sunt, "I am / they are") and the older distribution of î where the modern rule writes â word-internally (e.g. cîine for modern câine, "dog"; pîine for pâine, "bread"). When you read a facsimile or an old edition, treat these as the historical spelling of the same words.

Original (pre-reform)	Modern orthography	Meaning
sînt	sunt	(I) am / (they) are
cîine	câine	dog
pîine	pâine	bread
romîn	român	Romanian

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The 1993 reform restored â word-internally and sunt. Texts printed before then use î throughout and sînt. The words are identical — only the spelling convention changed. Modern reprints of Creangă usually normalize to today's rules.

Common Mistakes

The errors below are the ones advanced learners make when they first read Moldovan folk narrative.

Don't assume Creangă's perfect simplu reflects how Moldovans speak:

❌ Moldovans say 'se duse, tăie' in everyday speech because Creangă wrote it.

Incorrect — that's a literary narrative tense; spoken Moldovan uses the perfect compus.

✅ Creangă uses perfect simplu as a written narrative style; spoken Moldovan = s-a dus, a tăiat.

Correct understanding of the register split.

Don't read conditional de as the preposition "from / of":

❌ de n-ar fi = of/from it wouldn't be

Incorrect — this de is the folk conditional 'if', = dacă.

✅ de n-ar fi = if it weren't

Conditional de, equivalent to dacă n-ar fi.

Don't take the diminutives literally:

❌ mămucă = a small mother

Incorrect — it's an affectionate form, 'dear mama', not a statement of size.

✅ mămucă = dear/darling mama

Affective diminutive, Moldovan folk register.

Don't read the narrative present as a tense error:

❌ zice flăcăul, se duce — Creangă mixed up his tenses.

Incorrect — the historic present is deliberate, for vividness.

✅ zice flăcăul, se duce — narrative present for dramatic immediacy.

A standard device of oral storytelling.

Don't normalize sînt to a different word:

❌ sînt is an archaic verb unrelated to sunt.

Incorrect — it's the same verb, just the pre-1993 spelling of sunt.

✅ sînt = sunt (am / are), historical spelling.

Only the orthography differs.

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