The Culture of Translation in Romania / Übersetzungskultur und Literaturübersetzen in Rumänien

List of Contributors/Verzeichnis der Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter

Georg Aescht

Übersetzer und Redakteur bei der Stiftung Deutsche Kultur im östlichen Europa

PhD Candidate Ștefan Baghiu

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Romance Studies

PhD Cosmin Borza

Romanian Academy, Sextil Pușcariu Institute of Linguistics and Literary History of Cluj-Napoca.

PhD Nora Căpăṭână

Lucian-Blaga-Universität Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Fakultät für Philologie und Bühnenkünste, Departement für anglo-amerikanische und germanistische Studien

PhD Candidate Alex Ciorogar

Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Letters, Department of Comparative Literature

PhD Ioana Constantin

Lucian-Blaga-Universität Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Fakultät für Philologie und Bühnenkünste, Departement für anglo-amerikanische und germanistische Studien

PhD Candidate Andreea Coroian-Goldiș

Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Letters, Department of Comparative Literature

PhD Sunhild Galter

Lucian-Blaga-Universität Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Fakultät für Philologie und Bühnenkünste, Departement für anglo-amerikanische und germanistische Studien

PhD Candidate Iulia Gîță

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Anglo/American and German Studies

PhD Alex Goldiș

Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Literature and Literary Theory

PhD Candidate Anca-Simina Martin

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Anglo/American and German Studies

PhD Candidate Emanuel Modoc

Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Letters, Department of Comparative Literature

PhD Candidate Ovio Olaru

Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Letters, Department of Scandinavian Studies

PhD Candidate Vlad Pojoga

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Romance Studies

PhD Maria Sass

Lucian-Blaga-Universität Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Fakultät für Philologie und Bühnenkünste, Departement für anglo-amerikanische und germanistische Studien

PhD Doris Sava

Lucian-Blaga-Universität Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Fakultät für Philologie und Bühnenkünste, Departement für anglo-amerikanische und germanistische Studien

MA Student Cătălina Stanislav

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Romance Studies

PhD George State

Transylvanian Review in Cluj-Napoca

PhD Andrei Terian

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Romance Studies

PhD Radu Vancu

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Romance Studies

Translating the World, Building the Nation:

Microtheories of Translation in Romanian Cultural Criticism (1829–1948)

In Romania, translation studies is of a fairly recent date, gaining momentum at the outset of the new millennium, when undergraduate programs in applied modern languages were introduced in local universities. This, however, does not mean that translation did not elicit any scholarly attention prior to 2000; before this year, it often fell within the scope of linguistics, comparative literature, and cultural history. It is only in the last two decades that translation theory has established itself as a standalone discipline, known as “translation studies,” with several works devoted entirely to the study of translation¹.

Interest in the theoretical aspects of translation has developed in conjunction with that in the history of translation and translation studies. Particularly interesting is that most essays on the theory and practice of translation in Romania focus on either the early days, on the interval between the sixteenth century and mid-nineteenth century, or the post-World War II period. What is even more surprising is that most international studies of the dynamics of translation ←19 | 20→ in Romania are also devoted to the same periods.² As a result, in both cases, research has of late failed to cover almost a century, spanning the period between 1850 and 1950, a period that has proved instrumental to the formation of both Romania as we know it and its modern national literature.

What could account for this omission? The most plausible answer this period tends to be conflated with the previous one, since it too is a “pre-translation studies”³ or a “proto-translation studies”⁴ period when the study of translation had not yet established itself as a standalone discipline or, at the very least, a research area in its own right. Despite this, most Romanian critics and ideologues of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century advanced their views on translation. No prominent Romanian intellectual, from the emergence of the first Romanian magazines to the instauration of the communist regime (1829–1948), hesitated to forward their views on the benefits, scope, content, and modes of translation. Consequently, the complexity and diversity of the statements made during this period should not be judged in terms of “pre-” or “proto-” but rather as “microtheoretical,” since every critic sought to propose possible solutions to one or more translation-specific issues. In turn, this practice raises a series of questions to which I aim to provide an answer in this essay: which are the most significant Romanian stances on translation taken in the period between the mid-nineteenth century and World War II? Are they in line with the ideologies that pervaded Romanian culture at the time when they were adopted? And last but not least, where does the dominant discourse stand on translation in the period marked by an accelerated modernization of Romanian culture?

Do Translations Make a Literature?

To answer these questions, I will first attempt to chart the translational history of the period, dividing it into three major sub-periods. The first spans the years between 1829 and 1866, namely from the emergence of the first Romanian magazines—Curierul românesc (The Romanian Herald) in Wallachia and Albina românească (The Romanian Bee) in Moldova—to the coming into force of the first Constitution of modern Romania, which protected the freedom of the press and print. Coinciding as it did with the gradual separation of the Romanian Principalities from the Ottoman Empire, and, in turn, with an increasingly evident Westernization of Romanian society, this phase in the history of translation in Romania also witnessed an unprecedented rise in the number of literary translations into Romanian.

Yet, it would erroneous to claim that Kogălniceanu’s statement reflects the dominant discourse of that time on translation. In fact, his comments are an exception in his age. Unlike Kogălniceanu, Ion Heliade-Rădulescu (1802–1872), a prominent man of letters of the same period, perceived the practice of translation not as a threat to originality, but as its catalyst, the more so when a translator is challenged to render the works of a prestigious writer. This is one of the main reasons why, in 1846, Heliade-Rădulescu envisioned a comprehensive Universal Library, where he sought to reunite the most emblematic ancient and modern writers, from Homer, Aeschylus, Seneca, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes to Voltaire, Goethe, Byron, Balzac, Scott, and Eugène Sue (!). Heliade-Rădulescu was convinced that through these translations,

Although it failed to yield the ambitious results he envisioned, Heliade-Rădulescu’s initiative was welcomed wholeheartedly in the other Romanian Principalities. For example, in Transylvania, George Barițiu (1812–1893) saluted the prospect of “translating all classics, old and new,” which would “give strong wing to Romanian literature, allowing it to rise to new heights.”⁷ Even Kogălniceanu ultimately came round, publishing partial translations in the Propășirea (The Progress) and Steaua Dunării (The Danube Star)⁸ magazines, which he would found in 1844 and 1855 respectively, following the failure of Dacia literară. All these historical data point to the fact that this first stage in ←21 | 22→ the history of Romanian microtheories of translation is marked by an intensive campaign to domesticate the “classics” of Western literatures in an attempt to enhance the expressive potential of Romanian literature.

Romanian critics’ stance on translation changed fundamentally during the following stage in its history (1866–1918), when Romania witnessed not only significant developments of its national literature, but also a diversification of its critical and ideological discourses. Under these circumstances, Romanian intellectuals not only pleaded for more and better translations, but also attempted to define its main development guidelines. This would be the burgeoning period of the so-called “directional criticism,”⁹ in which perhaps the strongest relation is forged between literary programs and the various ideological agendas disputing authority in Romania.

The new state of affairs is evident in studies such as “Literatura română și străinătatea” (Romanian Literature and the Foreign Countries), authored in 1882 by Titu Maiorescu (1840–1917), probably the most influential Romanian critic and ideologue of the second half of the nineteenth century. This essay points to at least three major differences between Maiorescu and his precursors. He is the first to analyze translations from and not into Romanian by surveying the German reception of six Romanian literary works. Then, there is the importance he places on translation. Without addressing in any way the complicated issue of language, the Romanian critic notes that literature is “the most direct manifestation of a nation’s spirit,”¹⁰ and therefore a privileged instrument for the forging of relations between cultures and the exchanges between them. Maiorescu, for instance, emphasizes how it is not by chance that Romanian translations were received well in Germany, given that “the Germans have taken the greatest interest in the literary spirit of other nations” through translations of their works.¹¹

The critic argues that Romanian literature too should follow, in terms of translation policy, in the footsteps of the nations that dominated Europe at that time. Yet, even more interesting is the manner in which Maiorescu aligns Romanian writers with various foreign narrative forms. To emphasize their international relevance, the Romanian critic also advances a new type of prose fiction—“the popular novel,” among the representatives of which he includes, apart from Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, Charles Dickens, and Paul Heyse, Spanish writer Pedro Alarcón, Russian novelist Turgenev, “Californian” author Bret Harte, and the Low Saxon novelist Fritz Reuter.

Socialist critic Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (1855–1920) takes a similar, albeit more radical stance on the origin of texts that should be translated into Romanian. Despite the many tense debates between Gherea and the conservative Maiorescu, the two critics find a common ground in their advocating the same translational cause. In a series of articles published between 1894 and 1895 on various translation-related topics, Gherea begins by discussing its positive influence on the expressive potential of the Romanian language only to refer, toward the end of the installment, to source texts that should make their way into Romanian. “We must translate works of the highest caliber from all literatures [emphasis mine],”¹² insists Gherea, who therefore protests against the Graeco-Latin monopoly on ancient texts and the French-Anglo-German one on modern works. In fact, he goes as far as to make clear recommendations, urging the Romanian translation of “several authors that stand out from all others.” In his suggestions, he does not hesitate to leave out the most influential literature of the nineteenth century, pleading instead in the clearest of terms for (semi)peripheral literary cultures:

Gherea’s stance on translation does not differ to such a large extent from the statements made a decade later by the main ideologues behind the two Romanian ←23 | 24→ populist movements, Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) and Garabet Ibrăileanu (1871–1940). Again, despite the doctrinal dissimilarities between the two ruralist ideologies—Iorga’s ‘sămănătorism’ and Ibrăileanu’s ‘poporanism’¹⁴—, and last but not least, in spite of their opposing Gherea’s socialism, the stances of the three authors are, by and large, the same. For instance, Iorga, in the opening lines of his short, yet passionate 1903 “Traduceri” (Translations), notes how Romania, for many a century, has been a “French cultural colony”; beyond this intrinsically regrettable state of servitude, too high an influx of French literature should also be avoided on the grounds that “not even French literature of the most recent date is a reflection of a golden age in the history of the French nation.”¹⁵ Yet, Iorga does not question the benefits of translations in general; they are “a road that must be travelled to its farthest edges, for our new culture to be founded on a better understanding of mankind’s greatest cultures.”¹⁶ Consequently, Iorga urges translators to familiarize themselves with the English, German, Italian, and Spanish literatures, and with works originating in North-European countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and those written by Slavic writers from Russia and Poland.

Similarly, Ibrăileanu, in a 1906 article, insists that “the literature of a country could never call itself ‘rich’ if the greatest works in world literature are not translated into the tongue of its people.”¹⁷ Although, in support of his statement, he gives as examples the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, he does not hesitate to include, among them or even higher in his hierarchy of authors, writers from (semi)peripheral cultures. Notable in this respect is the praise he gives to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which he perceives as being a “masterpiece of the genre,” which “no other novel in world literature surpasses in terms of variety and multitude of narrative forms.”¹⁸

In conclusion, it can be said that the statements made during the second stage of the history of Romanian microtheories of translation share a mutual ground in their plea for increased openness beyond the narrow circle of core European literatures. Yet, it is also evident that the scope of such a shift changed significantly over the course of a few decades: if Maiorescu and Gherea pleaded for this turn as a means of garnering a better understanding of the “spirit” of other peoples, Iorga and Ibrăileanu deployed it as a form of “cultural dumping,” whereby Romanian literature can avoid its colonial annexation to French literature.¹⁹

Beyond World Literature: The Untranslatables

Romanian critics’ stance on translation witnessed the beginning of a new stage in its history in 1918, which would last until 1948. In this period or, at the very least, ←24 | 25→until the outset of World War II, the existence and integrity of the Romanian state seemed inviolable, protected as they were by the international treaties that marked the end of World War I. By this time, the Romanian language too became stabilized, which, in turn, put an end to colonial anxiety. During this period, translations became a topic of great interest, debated not only by critics and ideologues, but also by prominent writers such as Camil Petrescu, Alexandru Philippide, Cezar Petrescu, Adrian Maniu, Victor Eftimiu, Ion Marin Sadoveanu, Felix Aderca, Mihail Sebastian, and Mircea Eliade, to name only a few. Moreover, this period also witnessed significant improvement in the status of translations, which, although far from being officially recognized as a canonical literary category, were nonetheless included in yearly critical reports. For instance, Șerban Cioculescu (1902–1988), a literary critic with Adevărul (The Truth), one of the most important Romanian newspapers at that time, devoted between 1933 and 1936 a segment of his yearly surveys of the previous literary year to translations.

Regardless of these circumstances, political debates concerning translations focused primarily on two topics. On the one hand, the rise in the quantity and quality of Romanian literary works implicitly brought about a rise in the expectations for translators to produce increasingly more effective renditions. In the opening lines of a 1935 review of several novels, critic George Călinescu (1899–1965) notes how “the length and quality of translations testify to a culture’s level of development.”²⁰ Yet according to him, “with the exception of a few poor translations of sensationalist novels, no other echo of the great literature has of late made its way to us [in translation].”²¹ For this, he blames the fact that, at the time, translations, regardless of how successful, were the outcome of isolated initiatives, whereas a systematic assimilation of the great works in world literature would not be possible without established editorial series. “Without such an alignment with the civilized world,” Călinescu insists, “Romanian culture cannot gain momentum.”²²

On the other hand, during this period, there is talk of the translatability of literature. Although, at that time, it was a recurrent theme among scholars who touched upon translation, perhaps the best-known stance on the matter is that of Eugen Lovinescu (1881–1943), the most important critic in interwar Romania. In the last volume of his seminal work titled Istoria literaturii române contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature, 6 vols., 1926–1929), Lovinescu distinguished, along the lines of French philosopher Frédéric Paulhan, between the ‘notional’—‘psychological,’ intellectual, denotative, prosaic—and the ‘suggestive’—‘esthetic,’ affective, connotative, poetic—functions of language.²³ The former is that of everyday language, whereas the latter imbues ←25 | 26→ the poetic text with artistic value; in other words, to Lovinescu, the great poetry is an “enhancement” of the suggestive function of language.²⁴ Yet, it is this elusive character that renders the “suggestive values” of a text “untranslatable”: what can survive translation are but its “notional” values.²⁵ While Lovinescu acknowledges that “on the intellectual framework of a foreign poem new suggestive values can be built, if not identical, at least similar or even superior,” he nonetheless argues that, in such cases, what emerges is a “new creation,” and that, in most cases, “it is rare for a poet capable of creating original values to lend themselves and their talent to translation in a foreign language.”²⁶

Judged against the larger framework of the theory of “mutation of esthetic values,” which also analyzes losses in the “suggestive values” of literary works over the course of time rather than in translation, Lovinescu’s binary microtheory is, beyond any doubt, one of the most original contributions to Romanian translation studies. Yet, it also possesses an ideological agenda, as its origins are not by any means arbitrary: Lovinescu postulated the inherent “untranslatability” of poetry at a time when Romanian literature experienced full-on the failure—or absence of success—of the translations of works written by the great Romanian poets, including Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889), the “national poet” and the main source of “suggestive” examples for Lovinescu’s microtheory. Under these circumstances, it hardly comes as a surprise that the Romanian critic discusses translation in such depth in the last volume of his Istoria, where one would expect to find a synthesis of Romanian contributions to world literature: in practice, Lovinescu’s microtheory of the Untranslatable comes to mask, in fact, the shameful reality of the Unspeakable—namely the fear of provincialism and mediocrity that threatens to clip the wings of young Romanian literature.

Conclusions

Based on the previous analysis, several conclusions can be drawn. First, it is evident that the Romanian critics’ and ideologues’ attitudes toward translation do not coincide with the doctrinal debates pervading the three evolutionary phases surveyed in this essay. Irrespective of whether they identify themselves as progressionists or aristocrats, urbanists or ruralists, Europeanists or nationalists, traditionalists or modernists, Romanian intellectuals find, by and large, a common ground in their “horizontal” acknowledgment of the need for the translation of valuable foreign works into Romanian. The absence of harshly diverging opinions on the benefits, content, and modes of rendition between 1829 and 1948 testifies to this likeness of mind. Secondly, the consensus between Romanian ideologues at a “horizontal” level highlights not only a prominent ←26 | 27→ sequentiality that could be rearranged “vertically,” but also an evolutionary pattern—which can be divided into three phases: 1. translation of “great” literatures, 2. diversification of the process through the inclusion of peripheral literatures, 3. rendition of locally-produced works into other languages. The recurrence, if not the normative character, of this pattern could be tested and confirmed by the mapping of other literatures. Thirdly, the circle appears to come full at one point: the nature of this evolutionary pattern—which implies, in the first two phases, the acknowledgement of a subordinate cultural status, and in the latter, the assumption of a risk, which could lead, as in the case of Romanian literature, to a bitter failure—accounts for the implicitly marginal, evasive, and “microtheoretic” character of the discourse on translation in emergent cultures.