Young Adult: influențe asupra apariției genului în România / Young Adult: Influences on the Emergence of the Genre in Romania

Abstract: Over the past 20 years or more, the reading audience among teenagers and young adults in Romania has known different trends, and the apparition of the young adult genre in our country has been brought into the attention of publishing houses and critics. Young adult literature, as its name suggests, is targeted for a young audience with the age between 15 and 24 (as UNESCO defines youth), and it is a separate category from children’s literature. Young adult novels first came into existence in the US in the middle of the 20th century and the genre has been a top selling category. Thus, the genre is analyzed by the American critics ever since. Moreover, some of the contributing factors to the success of young adult novels are the creation of literary awards aimed at young adult authors (for example the Michael L. Pritz award meant for the best young adult novel judged on literary merit since 2000) or the successful film adaptations. There are many subgenres of young adult in English literature, the most popular being fantasy, romance, realistic fiction, or dystopias. Along with the translation of young adult novels, such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games or Twilight phenomenon, the young adult genre is treated as a different genre by some of the publishing houses in Romania. We consider that translating young adult literature as seen in the American literature critic has shaped the apparition of the genre in our literature. The precursors of the autochthon young adult genre could be considered Cireșarii by Constantin Chiriță, or Toate pânzele sus by Radu Tudoran, but since the apparition of these adventure books, the young adult genre has come a long way: punklit, chicklit or fantasy are popular subgenres for our national young adult audience. For instance, Romanian writers such as Cristina Nemerovschi or Irina Binder became very popular among its targeted audience.

Keywords: Young adult literature, influences, translations, young adult genre in Romania, popular subgenres.

“Possedere il dominio di due lingue è come se vivessi due vite in una.” La testimonianza di Matei Vişniec alla Giornata Europea delle Lingue / “Mastering Two Languages Is Like Living Two Lives in One.” Matei Vişniec’s Testimony at the European Day of Languages

Abstract: The following pages include a testimony of Matei Vişniec on the occasion of the writer’s participation in the European Day of Languages, on 26 September 2020, as a guest of the Romanian Language and Literature discipline of the University of Pisa. His discourse contributed to the more general reflection, shared by various linguistic and literary disciplines of the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics (FiLeLi), on which the event focused, in a transversal and interdisciplinary perspective: the literary bilingualism and multilingualism of writers who have suffered the rigors of political power – censorship and the most diverse forms of uprooting and estrangement, triggered by the tragedies of the twentieth century, such as the holocaust, the totalitarianisms of Central and Eastern Europe, Nazism, fascism, etc.

The 2019 edition was very successful, since the European Commission was the protagonist in Pisa. In 2020, among the seven protagonists of the initiative there were present leading contemporary writers, bilingual and plurilingual, together with many scholars. The Romanian French writer expressed his capacity as a witness and a privileged interlocutor in contemporary Romanian culture with the purpose of illustrating the theme of the event, as well as of testifying, in the first part, to his experience as a young writer at the time of censorship and his fascination when confronted with two languages that seduce him and by which he feels seduced. In the second part, the poet reserved an extraordinary performance for the participants, reciting his renowned poem Corabia (The ship), a poetic text with an evident political substratum. The above-mentioned literary pièce contributed, as the author himself recounts, to the interdiction of the famous “Cenaclul del Luni” (“The Monday Literary Circle”), in which the so-called ‘80s Generation, including our writer, had launched themselves. Vișniec reflected on the relationship that a bilingual writer establishes with his mother tongue and with both languages – that of his writing and that of his existence. He characterized the idioms in which he expresses himself in a contrastive approach, revealing the care for poetry, the semantic and stylistic richness above all the results present in his self-translations into Romanian, and, in a more general meaning, the act of translation, in which poetry must remain an essential element also of his theatre.

Keywords: Matei Vișniec, literary bilingualism, multilingualism, censorship, uprooting, estrangement, act of translation.

Influența studiilor de tip World Literature în dinamica traducerilor romanului Nostalgia / The Influence of World Literature Studies on the Translation Dynamics of the Novel Nostalgia

Abstract: Starting from the idea of David Damrosch, according to which once translated, literary works go beyond the universe of origin, they cease to be products exclusively of a single culture, in this paper I propose the analysis of how the novel “Nostalgia” by Mircea Cărtărescu it is received. Thus, this work enjoys a positive reception not only in Romania, but also abroad, being translated into French, Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Brazilian, Turkish, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, and in 2005, the novel “Nostalgia” is translated into English by Julian Semilian and it is published by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Through the translation of the novel “Nostalgia” by Julian Semilian, in 2005, Mircea Cărtărescu becomes one of the Romanian writers who attracted the attention of American readers, who after a long period in which they got used only to works that trace the directions of the magically realism , with the appearance of this writing, with a different pattern, they prove to be fascinated, which is why foreign critics often talk about this text depending on the reader’s ability to closer of the source literature. From this point of view, in the American space this work was perceived as a source to discover Bucharest and the inner features of the inhabitants of this city, who lived under the influence of the communist regime or sometimes this book is spoken of as one that allows the reader to discover the theme of dream and the childhood from Romanian literature. On the other hand, in the translation of the novel, certain changes could be identified depending on the new cultural field. Thus, some words have been changed or adapted, and some sentences have been segmented in order to facilitate the understanding of the book by American readers or to attract the public’s attention. From the perspective of World Literature, all these influences on the novel “Nostalgia” by Mircea Cărtărescu are justified by placing literature in a global context, more precisely in other geocultural spaces than the original ones, which can offer readers other perspectives than those in the local space.

Keywords: World Literature, translations, global context, Mircea Cărtărescu, intercultural relations.

Textul Biblic Ebraic ca sursă traductologică: Noi abordări istorice și filologice / The Hebrew Biblical Text as a Translatological Source: New Historical and Philological Approaches

Abstract: Since the Hebrew Bible has frequently been translated into multiple languages and distributed throughout the world, how can we be sure that error has not crept in, even if it was unintentional? As Christianity spread, it is certainly true that people desired to have the Bible in their own language, which required translations from the original Hebrew and Aramaic languages of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament. Not only did the work of translators provide an opportunity for error, but publication, which was done by hand copying until the printing press arrived ca. A.D. 1450, also afforded continual possibilities of error.

Through the centuries, the practitioners of textual criticism, a precise science, have discovered, preserved, catalogued, evaluated, and published an amazing array of biblical manuscripts from both the Old and New Testament. In fact, the number of existing biblical manuscripts dramatically outdistances the existing fragments of any other ancient literature. By comparing text with text, the textual critic can confidently determine what the original prophetic / apostolic inspired writing contain.

Although existing copies of the main, ancient Hebrew text (Masoretic) date back only to the tenth century A.D., two other important lines of textual evidence bolster the confidence of textual critics that they have reclaimed the originals. First, the tenth century A.D. Hebrew Old Testament can be compared to the Greek translation called the Septuagint or LXX (written ca. 200-150 B.C.; the oldest existing manuscripts date to ca. A.D. 325). There is amazing consistency between the two, which speaks of the accuracy in copying the Hebrew text for centuries. Second, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947-1956 (manuscripts that are dated ca. 200-100 B.C.) proved to be monumentally important. After comparing the earlier Hebrew texts with the later ones, only a few slight variants were discovered, none of which changed the meaning of any passage. Although the Old Testament has been translated and copied for centuries, the latest version was essentially the same as the earlier ones. Every translation is at many points a trade-off between literal precision and readability, between formal equivalence in expression and functional equivalence in communication. Within this framework we have to examine the LXX translation if it is literal as possible, while maintaining clarity of expression and literary excellence, as far as grammar and syntax allow. If it’s not, that means that the scribes intervene subjectively into the sacred text.

Keywords: Masoretic Hebrew text; Dead Sea scrolls; textual criticism; scribes; manuscript variations.