Persistent and futile are the theories of translation. But so are as those of the fantastic or the acts of public piety. From the posturing of a judgmental above or an insidious aside, little of substance has been said about the swarming, sharp work of translation. As if there were a general of translation, not having to whom to delegate the work of difference across the clouds, the sun gets bored upon seeing than everything underneath is the same. To be sure, there is no interesting theory of translation as...   ⇨ Read more

Based on critical theory such as Giorgio Agamben‟s homo sacer and Heidegger‟s thoughts on dwelling and lethe, this article follows the biopolitical movement of destruction in Franz Kafka‟s Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) to reveal some of the challenges this contextualization poses to its English translation. Stanley Corngold‟s translation serves as an example for the intricacies that pertain specifically to Kafka‟s language of abjection, words such as the famous Ungeziefer of the first sentence. These...   ⇨ Read more

Translation Studies has crossed a tumultuous interval of theorization. But has it passed the linguistic limits instituted by a semiotician like Umberto Eco? Wouldn’t be the time to access more courageously the intersemiotic interregnum with its heterogeneous transfer of signs? As it happens in advertising, concrete poetry, tattoos, and stage or filmed version of famous texts? If we have gradually accepted that in the postcolonial and cross-cultural epoch what matters is not consensus, but negotiation and...   ⇨ Read more

The present essay addresses the ideas of radical translation and radical interpretation advanced by celebrated analytic philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine and D. Davidson, attempting to show their relevance for translation theory and, more broadly, for the corpus of literary theory. I aim to reassess the debate over the translatability or untranslatability of a literary or cultural text, taking it beyond the politics of translation and multicultural studies and placing it within the framework of hermeneutic...   ⇨ Read more

Our study investigates the possible ways of discussing the functions of the identity in fictional work. As point of departure we have chosen the novel Jacob se hotărăște să iubească (Jacob beschließt zu lieben, C.H. Beck, 2011) by Cătălin Dorian Florescu. Identity is multilayered, having being formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems, as Stuart Hall (1992, 1997) stressed out. The approach is heavily influenced by postcolonial and...   ⇨ Read more

Over the past 50 years, the understanding of the nymphet has mutated from a special type of becoming, as seen in Nabokov′s master text, to being a Lilith- like essence. There are other rules to be observed by the American artists Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie when portraying a nymphet as contrasted to those Soumei Hoshino has to follow in Japan. They navigate different (sub)cultural contexts and address varying conventions, so that visually “translating” Lewis Carroll′s Alice becoming a nymphet implies...   ⇨ Read more

The paper aims at discussing translation as a political and ethical paradigm, as proposed by Bogdan Ghiu and Lawrence Venuti, in the broader context of comparative literature‘s contrarian turn with the Bernheimer and the Saussy reports, as well as in conjunction with anarchism‘s minor literary tradition (in the deleuzian sense). I argue that the translation paradigm and the non-vanguardist anarchist aesthetic are stemming from the same legacy of freedom, both formulating their basic ethical, political and...   ⇨ Read more

As a literary genre, the travel literature was considered a literary hybrid made of several other sub-genres, or a literary sub-species made of the autobiographic writings (Paul Fussell) or of the ethnographic writings (Patrick Holland). Being defined on several axes, such as fiction/non-fiction literature, internal/external travels, poetical/historical form, time/space perspective, the travel writings differ not only in terms of narrative strategies but also in terms of method or purpose of writing. The travel...   ⇨ Read more

After 9/11, we have witnessed several backlashes to Francis Fukuyama‟s theory regarding the end of the world. With the credibility of this theory questioned, new maps have emerged and the theories regarding cultural dialogue have been updated, providing support for Samuel Huntington‟s concept of clash of civilizations. In this context, Western Europe produced new forms of collective anxieties. In the present paper, I am interested in explaining two particular forms of fears that appear in the European Union...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims at explaining the translation process through a psychological perspective, the Cultural Frame Switching paradigm. Psychological studies concerned with the Cultural Frame Switching have proven that bilingualism and multilingualism favour the manifestation of different personalities of the same person, i.e. speaking different languages will lead to displaying different personalities, as a result of the cultural influences acting upon us. Along this line of research, one can expect that a...   ⇨ Read more

This article will analyse the various ways in which opera translations of William Shakespeare‟s works are part of the cultural adaptation process. Using examples from various libretti, from the classical to the Romanian versions, the author claims that these adaptations are actually making Shakespeare more accessible across linguistic and cultural borders.

My paper will discuss the critical grounds that preceded the translation of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy‟s diaries into Romanian, published by Univers Publishing House in 1974 and 1975-1976 respectively, focusing on the Prefaces written by Ion Ianoși. Relying on both historical studies and relevant documents of the 1947-1989 period, I will start by generally describing, on the one hand, the process of the Russian and Soviet translations into post-War Romania and, on the other hand, the Communist regime‟s views and...   ⇨ Read more

Thierry WOLTON, Une Histoire Mondiale du Communisme. Les Bourreaux, Essai d’investigation historique. Tome 1. D’une main de fer. Les bourreaux, Editions Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1128 pages, 2015.

István KIRÁLY V., Death and History, Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, ISBN: 978-3-659-80237-9, 172 pages, 2015.

Andrada FĂTU-TUTOVEANU, Personal Narratives of Romanian Women during the Cold War (1945 – 1989): Varieties of the autobiographical genre, The Edwin Mellen Press, ISBN-13: 978-1495503733, 2015, 160 p.