Both in Speak, Memory and in Strong Opinions, Nabokov insists on his early proficiency in English, French. This authorial stance makes it easy to believe that the writer's transition to English was easy. And yet, Nabokov's correspondence with publishers and his literary agent, Altagracia de Jannelli, reveals that this conversion was torturous and required extensive support from native speaker editors and translators. The essay documents Nabokov's inner turmoil at the time when he began to explore the British...   ⇨ 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

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

Mircea MARTIN, Christian MORARU, Andrei TERIAN, Romanian Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, ISBN 978-1- 5013-2791-9, 357 p.

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.

For the better part of the last three decades, Romanian poetry has undergone a series of mutations that led to the recovery of the interwar avant-garde, both in terms of poetic discursive strategies and in the militant rhetoric of its manifestoes. Although the first avant- garde influences date back to the 60ies, with a major iteration in the 70ies and the 80ies, because of the socio-cultural context of these periods we can only speak of a formal influence of the avant-garde. This paper intends to analyse how...   ⇨ Read more