1 A Place of Absence and Silence in the Metaphysics of Begegnungen: the Poetry of R. S. Thomas and Tudor Arghezi 1 EMILIA IVANCU ROMANIA Lecture given in August 2012 at the Summer School ‘Wales and the World, Past and Present - Cymru a'i Chyfeillion Tramor Heddiw a Ddoe’ organized by the European Academy of Modern Celtic Languages in Aberystwyth According to Martin Buber, the philosopher of dialogue, man’s existence in the world and the world proper are twofold as a result of his twofold attitude. This twofold attitude springs from the twofold nature of the primary words he speaks: one primary word is the construct I-Thou, while the second is I-It, where It can mean He or She. Reformulat ing the Biblical sentence ‘At the beginning there was Word’, Buber writes ‘In the beginning is relation. ’(Buber 1959: 18) and presents the three types of encounter, named here ‘begegnung – pl. begegnungen’ which define man’s life. Here are the three types of relation that build man’s existence:  First, our life with nature. There the relation sways in gloom, beneath the level of speech. Creatures live and move over against us, but cannot come to us, and when we address them as Thou, our words cling to the threshold of speech.  Then our life with other people. There the relation is open and verbally explicit. We can give and accept the Thou  Third our life with intelligible forms i. e. with the absolute. There the relation is clouded, yet it discloses itself without words, but creates language. We perceive no Thou but nonetheless we feel we are addressed and we answer – imagining, thinking, acting. We speak the primary word with our being yet we cannot utter Thou with our lips. (Buber 1959: 6) Today we shall approach the poetical work of two poets, one Welsh – R. S. Thomas and the other Romanian, Tudor Arghezi, through the third type of relation that Buber analyses in his book I and Thou, that is the relation that seems to cover much of both their works, the relation with the absolute. Let us have a short look at their biographies, which have at least one thing in 1 This paper was written in Plas Hendre, Aberystwyth, Wales in the summer of 2012, a place where I heard the cuckoo sing in August. I would like to express my gratitude to Bethan Miles for her support and inspirational personality in writing this paper.