Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century (1794-1914): A Quantitative Perspective

Ștefan Baghiu

doi:10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.05

Abstract

This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five other groups of novels translated during the period (the atomizing agents: the East European, the Spanish, the Austrian, the Nordic, and the Asian novel).

Highlights

METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY 6.2 expanded period of novel translation on the Romanian territory and as “a yet unexplored century of literary imports” (Chiorean 153)1
Far from trying to discuss novel translation from a technical or linguistic point of view, I will attempt to trace the critical clichés regarding translation during the nineteenth century and to confront them with the “realities” of the field, with a view to determining whether “translations make a literature” and how we can verify with quantitative tools Terian’s thesis, according to which in the 1866-1918 interval the Romanian literary field transitioned “from the Western canon to the Literature of the World”
The Competitors: the German Novel, the Russian Novel, and the Political Case of the American Novel In order to observe the translation dynamics for other important literatures which enter the Romanian field in the nineteenth century and up until 1918, we must trace the roots of these developments

Summary

Introduction

METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY 6.2 expanded period of novel translation on the Romanian territory and as “a yet unexplored century of literary imports” (Chiorean 153)1. Followed by a series of subgenre novels (or canonical variants of adventure literature, like Gulliver’s Travels, rendered in 1848), they began to shape a diverse Romanian literary consciousness visible in local commentaries only in the third part of the nineteenth century, in the same period when Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917) used his position as one of the most important critical voices of the time to stress the importance of the genre (Maiorescu, “Literatura” [Literature] [1882]).

Results

Conclusion