Metacritic Journal For Comparative Studies and Theory 2.1

Metacritic Journal for Comparative
Studies and Theory
Volume 2, Issue 1
July 2016
Contact:
metacriticjournal@gmail.com
Support contact:
Main contact: Mihaela Ursa, mihaela.ursa@ubbcluj.ro
Managing editor MJCST

Faculty of Letters, UBB
Horea str. 31, room 211
200202 - Cluj
Romania
Editorial Team:
Editors-in-chief Mihaela URSA, Alex GOLDIȘ
Associate editors Laura PAVEL, Adrian TUDURACHI
Assistant editors Ana-Maria DELIU, Cristina DIAMANT, Emanuel MODOC
Editorial board Gianina DRUȚĂ, Anamaria MIHĂILĂ, Emma PUSTAN, Adrian

TĂTĂRAN
Advisory board Ioana BICAN (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania)

Corin BRAGA (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania)
Philip FEDCHIN (St. Petersburg State University, Saint Petersburg,
Russia)
Till KUHNLE (University of Limoges, Limoges, France)
Liviu LUȚAȘ (Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden)
Norman MANEA (Bard College, New York, USA)
Călin-Andrei MIHĂILESCU (University of Western Ontario, London,
Canada)
Mihaela MIROIU (National School of Political Studies and Public
Administration, Bucharest, Romania)
Doru POP (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania)
Mihai SPĂRIOSU (University of Georgia, Athens, USA)
Levente SZABO (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania)
Bogdan ŞTEFĂNESCU (University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania)
Andrei TERIAN (Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, Romania)
Olga VORONINA (Bard College, New York, USA)
Copy editors Amalia COTOI, Călina PĂRĂU, Mihaela VANCEA, Alex VĂSIEȘ
Translation editors Oana VĂSIEȘ, Cristina POPESCU
Proofreaders Andreea STOICA, Alexandra TURCU, Daria CONDOR
Layout editors Adelina HAȘ, Daniel MATIȘ

Table of Contents
Călin-Andrei MIHĂILESCU
Translation and Mutual Transcendence ........................................................................... 5
Peter ARNDS
Lost in Translation: on Kafka’s Language of Abjection in Die Verwandlung ............. 19
Felix NICOLAU
Imagetext and Ekphrasis as Chances of Revival in Translation Studies ...................... 35
Laura PAVEL
Reclaiming Radical Translation and Interpretation: The Translator’s Charity ........... 59
Cătălin CONSTANTINESCU
Postmodern Readings of the Relationship Between Space and Identity ..................... 73
Cristina DIAMANT
Reverse Ekphrasis and Bakhtinian Re-accentuation: Coding Alice as a Nymphet in
Graphic Novels .................................................................................................................. 91
Adrian TĂTĂRAN
Anarchism, Antirepresentationalism and the Translation Paradigm.......................... 115
Carmen DOMINTE
Travel Writings as Means of Intercultural Translation ............................................... 139
Adrian-George MATUS
Translating Collective National Fears Through Best- Sellers: Michel Houellebecq’s
Soumission and Timur Vernes’ Er Ist Wieder Da .........................................................155
Ioana UNK
Translation and Personality. MultifaceS of Personality in Translation.......................174
Alina BOTTEZ
Shakespeare’s Untranslatable Englishness Translated into Opera ............................ 193
Oana PURICE
Translating the Diaries of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Communist Romania ............ 213
3
METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY
Thierry WOLTON, Une Histoire Mondiale du Communisme. Les Bourreaux, Essai

d’investigation historique. Tome 1. D’une main de fer. Les bourreaux
Review by Adrian-George MATUS .......................................................................... 232
István KIRÁLY V., Death and History

Review by Constantin TONU ..................................................................................... 237
Andrada FĂTU-TUTOVEANU, Personal Narratives of Romanian Women during the

Cold War (1945 – 1989): Varieties of the autobiographical genre
Review by Eliza POP..................................................................................................... 243
4
TRANSLATION AND MUTUAL TRANSCENDENCE
Călin-Andrei MIHĂILESCU
University of Western Ontario

Canada
E-mail: cmihails@uwo.ca
Abstract: 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 long as ‘theory’ and ‘translation’ keep within the dominating sphere of
sameness (the orders of being, telos, and deduction).
Keywords: translation, transcendence, resistance to literature, Kant, Aristotle
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 long as ‘theory’ and ‘translation’ keep within the dominating sphere of
sameness (the orders of being, telos, and deduction). Had Immanuel Kant
descendent upon translation as a topic of reflection, he would have probably
concluded that the impossibility of forming specific concepts for this or that
translation relegates translation to the realm of art: universal, yet lacking a concept.
5
Yet Kant was relentless in his sculptural attempt to polish language until only
concepts were left of it.
Translation occurs as eventful practice; this means that the semantic losses it
incurs on the road from “source” to target” may be recuperated or mimicked
pragmatically:
“Mother is mère est Mutter ist cara madre es mamma. Mater,

если
you are aceeaşi partout, Ich auch werde ceea ce seré sein, que
quasi lo dit dieu en hébreu.”
Even if a chasm separates mère from Mutter and Brot from pain, even if the
Rhine River is wider than both North- and South Atlantic, simple translation will
attempt to bridge the gaps regardless of their breadth. Simple translation works on a
pattern that is not foreign to that of common definition, by seeking to point to mère
and Mutter’s mutual representability across sense, chasms and their echoes. This is
the stuff of analogy, and contemporary imaging techniques showing where things
happen in the brain stem from the same anxiety of difference, which they call “the not
yet known.” Under the conditions of representational military appeal of simple
translation, the subject will retain the means of orientation towards its own
sameness, as both source and target, while commuting between the two. This
proleptic subject is an appropriated mechanism meant and oiled for capturing
unmanageable difference, holding its prey tight and trading it off for other proleptic
subject’s use, joy and abuse.
Such a repetition in advance, superimposed on unreflected Platonising
reminiscences, has the structure of superstition: the subjection to the stuff of religion,
magic and everything else that requires, for its own self-preserving functioning, an
operative transcendental, which comes in handy for magi, priests, bankers, lobbyists
and lesser middlemen to juggle with. Call this trite translation. Benjamin named it
bad translation, as it focused on pimping information and creating both rapacious
and apathetic infomaniacs. Trite translation empowers the middleman to take home
a percentage, accumulate power and capital, and thus gnaw at the world from the
6
middle of traffic. As the middleman rules the day, it makes it mediocre enough for it
to need to be spiced up with superlative stars: Super-, Bat- and Spidermen. A punch
at the middleman may wake us up a bit to see what extreme translation could do to
our unpoetic world.
Richard Feynman used to explain everything physical with the aid of three
objects only: a pair of glasses, a pencil and a rubber band. But we need only two
objects to explain the whole of theory – I call it so as to include both philosophy and
erosophy. These objects are a hand and a pile of mud.
The hand grabs some mud and squeezes it. What stays inside the squeezing fist
is the impressed; what slips through the fingers is the expressed. The movement of
impression is, at first, mythical: it gives form to the formless. The remainder is
detritus, dirt, chaos, hyle (“stuff”) – though the hand might insist to recycle it – with
gestures that qualify an obsessive compulsive order or another). Adam is impressed.
Like everything else, he was shaped by the forming hand, whose itch was variously
attributed to the primum movens, to the sculptor meant to free the being cast in
matter, or to the legislator. The logic of exclusionary power eliminates the expressed
– Plato’s poets exhaled out of the Republic, Ovid – of Rome, the unrecyclable sinners’
souls flushed into this or that Hell, scapegoats pushed beyond the horizon, genocide
as good housekeeping – on and on. On its way to purity, the logic of impression
squeezes out tautologies and contradictions, inductions and abductions, madmen and
geniuses, women and kids, demons, beasts and mud. The conclusion of this act of
separation is the spectacle of the impressed: the fist opens to show the sphere of mud,
a demonstrative gesture, which doesn’t allow for any distinction between the thing
and its representation. The sphere of mud is the thing and the thing is its own
representation. For what is exhibited is what is left after the remainder has already
been expressed, let go, excised, thrown away with the other goats, ignored, sent to
enjoy freedom or be killed otherwise. The open hand offers the result of its
impression in the various shapes and follies: perfect societies or bodies, proofs and
conclusions, triumphs and all the instances of “I told you so,” porn and porn and
Medusa’s head.
7
The coalescence of the representing and the represented has arrived at a point
of ecstatic confusion in contemporary technics: here nothing is to escape through the
digital fingers, but what’s left inside is the spectre that emerges as the correlative of
everything. By excluding exclusion, the digital came to figure the contemporary
accomplishment of Faust’s clownish fate.
The relentless effort that eventually saved Goethe’s Faust is that of the fist
grabbing all the mud around: the work of the concept that grabs the mud’s sameness
at the expense of the difference between the mud inside, now shaped, and the
formless mud that slipped through the fingers. Under contract, Faust needs not to
stop to cherish the beauty of the moment, thus keep production reproducing ad
infinitum. What he gets instead is the self-referential specter of everything, from
wisdom to Helen of Troy. Self-reference is the making of the self: expression finds its
‘self’ in impression, thus alienates itself from its non-self. So Faust, the first digital
hero, whose mastery of the concept obtained at the price of its material expression.
The concept, whose ruse has been crafted from Socrates on, is, at the end of days, the
mythical capture of the subject by a drive to power and possession that matches the
fear of being expressed, that is, non-recognized. To become a conceptual god, the
subject had to relinquish language, thus disentangle itself from the marshes and
maelstroms, from the instability and the abysses of the languages that we call
“natural.” That conceptual god would be called “philosopher,” for lack of a worse
word.
Philosophy’s resistance to literature can be variously explained, but Plato’s fear
of poets and Aristotle’s logical evisceration of the literary language set the rules of the
games in the West: language must be purified of its subversive potential. While
language has, for its post-preSocratic course, been ‘framed’ by secondary systems –
such as numbers, music, prayer and others – so as to become a stable tool, it was
philosophy which, until recently offered the iron fist to squeeze language out of itself.
Only Stoic thought avoided the squeeze, opting instead for the continuity of becoming
between grammar and logic and ontology and ethics. But the Stoic sternly fluid peace
has little to do with common, organized peace, which is predicated on the rejection of
poetry: whatever is not translatable by a securing interface cannot claim the right to
8
existence. The value of anything is seen in its reproducibility – and whatever is

represented, must exist.
Our peace is being refashioned as the wavelength that marshals the territory
between the war we won and the one we’ll lose: between explosions and implosions;
it manages the risk that will come upon mankind like oftentimes the danger of the
Furies. Now they are feared as explosions of terror and implosions of the system.
Peace is laying between them, peace – the manageable; peace – the globalized oasis
whose sphincter is open 24/7 to spill, over garbage, laurels and future, its message –
mediocre, colorfully tacky. The peace behind the rich’s global blast doors closed shut
for the swarming poor not to intrude? We call it globalization, but shouldn’t we say
that it is here to nationalize debt, to privatize pleasure, and to outsource pain? That
this does translate flawlessly into a language even monkeys know?
As Descartes’ cogito, the doubt manager, the unbreakable ground of
knowledge – or subiectum inconcussum –, broken English comes to cover the world
in the sheets of its mapping. At the time when English comes to imperially figure the
telos of all languages, it turns into unbreakable English, or the shrinking limits of
linguistic difference and imagination. Today’s lingua franca is angla inconcussa, an
English unbreakable because it originates in the broken contract with its own
“naturalness.” It is in this language that the funny difference between Continental
and analytic philosophy was crafted, so that the annihilation of language’s powers by
the “continentals” may appear as child’s play when contrasted to the analytics’
massacre. Here the subiectum (the subject as a lawmaker and power dealer, the
corporate self) is called upon to govern over the the daily tribulations of the subiectus
(subject to the impositions of the outside) in each of its agents and everywhere else.
All this must be said in English, the least muddy of them all, for the most de-
muddified. The problem one faces under the digital siege is that translation has
become as transparent as the language it is supposed to reflect: mother is Mutter is
mère is mamma… Poetry’s currency is at an all-time low today; or, if we were
sentimental and wanted to adopt Heidegger’s slipshod ending of his “Question
Concerning Technology” – that the essence of technics is poiesis – we should say that
9
the naturalness of poetry has been squeezed out the world by technics, that only a god
can save us, etc. But why get weepy?
Avoid the work of tears! Say, with Nietzsche,1 that natural language is
essentially metaphorical and that the digital impositions of transparent, business-as-
usual translation are castrated metaphors. That language should be understood
otherwise to withstand its slaughter and turn the guillotine on its head.
To recommence: language is many things at once – it is Aristotle’s pharmacy
and Stalin’s wooden tongue, Shakespeare’s waterfalls and Akhmatova’s moans,
Pascal’s diamonds of fire and Mallarmé’s Book, Dan Brown’s redneck occult and
Danielle Steel deflating adverbs, the Vienna Circle curfew imposed on the logos,
Madame Murasaki’s petals, García Márquez’s Patriarch lazying around on two-page
sentences, the Somali cabbie’s “thank you good night,” Bakhtin’s vowel movement –
anthem, rather than anathema to the regions below the waistline, the deadlines of the
accountant and the footnotes of the academic text, the absolute (lack of footnotes) of
the Adamic tongue, and Benjamin’s languages of much and the echoes of language as
such, the yes’s of Molly Bloom, the twenty-word lexicon of the drill sergeant… and so
and so-so on. All of them, in bazaars as in boudoirs, fathom language as a battlefield.
In a proper sense, translation happens in the crossfire.
To enter the crossfire, the distinction should be drawn between interstices and
superstices, corresponding, but not entirely, to the distinction between the immanent
and the transcendental. The interstice is that in-between that Deleuze called l’entre,
wherefrom everything emerges (on entre par l’entre), where the virtual is never
tricked into the real. Paul de Man once instructed Wolfgang Iser that reading is not a
fill-in-the-blanks commotion: that reading doesn’t happen between the lines but
between the ever expanding limits of each word, of each word of Proust, for one. This
is the interstice, formed inside the elastic word as long as reading goes on. Picking on
this, Stanley Corngold argued that comparative literature lies in that interstice, that
every reading is trans-lingual, but that translation was the natural enemy of
comparative literature. He was hinting to the (then not yet existing) Google
translator, or if you will, to the KGB agent who was translating what the Soviet
victims were saying into what they were supposed to say. But he was, maybe,
1And Benjamin, Borges and de Man.
10
intimating that translation has a bad name because it has pushed readers away from
reading fakes in the original language, and into preferring an imitated virtue over the
original sin.
The superstices, on the other hand, are the buffer zones (Babel being the most
celebrated and deplored) between natural languages and the transcendental powers –
Gods, the specialist Holy Ghost, etc. – that are believed to have made language in
their own image, likeness and disaster. Only half ironic, Benjamin had this to say at
the close of his “The Task of the Translator. An Introduction to the Translation of
Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens”2:
“Where – like in the Holy Writ – a text is identical with truth or dogma,
where it is supposed to be “the true language” in all its literalness and
without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable.
In such case translations are called for only because of the plurality of
languages. Just as, in the original, language and revelation are one without
any tension, so the translation must be one with the original in the form of
the interlinear version, in which literalness and freedom are united. For to
some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the
lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings.
The interlinear version of the Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all
translation.” (TT 82)
Benjamin was a devotee of the ruined transcendental. To him, a translation

that does not pursue the jagged line between the language of man and the language as
such, relinquished from the fetters of weak messianism and vowed to prophecy up to
the last gasp of the full citation on the Youngest Day, would let the translator fall prey
to the madness of language:
2“DieAufgabe des Übersetzers” (1923), translated by Harry Zohn. Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed.
New York: Schocken, 1968: 69-82. Aufgabe, which gets commonly translated as “task,” may also mean
“problem” or “surrender”. The task of the translator is to solve the problem of surrendering, why not?
11
“Hölderlin’s translations in particular are subject to the enormous danger

inherent in all translations: the gates of a language thus expanded and
modified may slam shut and enclose the translator with silence.
Hölderlin’s translations from Sophocles were his last work; in them
meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in
the bottomless depths of language.” (TT 81-82)
But so was Phaedra to Racine, where the heroine enters the scene in an
already-post-mortem procession followed, like a comet by its tail, by the exhaustingly
perfect language of the play’s five acts. To take this as a last will and testament makes
no sense, unless legislation is to be stuck between life and death to gag the gaping
echo chamber. However, extreme translation, like Hölderlin’s, comes with a danger
to which he was most attentive.
Danger links temptation to redemption, the possible to the real, the feared and
the hoped – dangerously. Wo aber Gefahr ist, das rettende auch, writes Hölderlin:
“where danger lies, salvation (rescue...) lies, too.” After translating Sophocles,
Hölderlin went on to live in an asylum; Phaedra’s intensity sent Racine to live on
writing the king’s official biography. In acts of extreme translation, the superstices
succumb to the interstices, for God’s transcendental stand is crushed in the
immanence of the crossfire. The anagogy of reading turns into its own carnival, God
converts to man’s word, and art’s violence reigns supreme, but only for a short while.
This was Nietzsche’s youthful message when he announced that the coming two
centuries will be aesthetic, “because only in aesthetic terms will everything be
justified.” Extreme translation is as aesthetic as poetic creation, at least in their
illuminated hopelessness – their only recourse is language: pure, playful, deadly
language, to which all judgment is foreign and literality – the epitaph.
Freed from external acts of impression – and also from Derrida’s passive “il
n’y a pas de hors-texte” – language as a battlefield is an image of thought in need of a
further distinction: that between the classical ceaseless movement (of Trotsky’s
revolution; of Peirce’s semiosis; of Augustine’s conversion), and the non-classical
movements (Nietzsche’s eternal return, Bakhtin’s carnival, Benjamin’s language as
such, and Deleuze’s fold). Classical continuity finds harmony in inertia, godliness in
12
obsession, otherness in focus. Stuck to the sacredness of a mechanically conceived

eternity, Augustine, the man of one language and two cities, adapted the theology of
reading to the reading of theology to the point that conversio, or distensio animi
could occur not once, but with every proper – or anagogic – tautological reading of
the Holy Writ. On his own, Trotsky tried to impose to his 1917 cronies his view of the
permanent (Bolshevik) revolution, as a movement of becoming whose closure was to
never come. This tyranny of the dynamic, Faustic as it was, did not rhyme with the
omnipotence of the Czar killed in 1918 or of the one emerging from the mid-20s on.
This becoming devoid of competition led to catastrophe – again and again. The third
case invoked here, is that of Peirce’s unlimited semiosis, by whose rule signs
accomplish themselves in other signs, and so on, without ever leaving the realm of the
semiotic system. In all three cases, translation is undecided because the difference
between the literal and the non-literal is erased there at the first sign thrown by a
transcendental Same. Like any spoken-for universal, the classical ceaseless machines
foreshadow their own end in farcical muteness.
The non-classical moves, on the other itchy hand, open a different realm for
radical translation. Bakhtin’s carnival, an incarnational figure of reversal, which
could not be spelled out during the rough times he lived in, brought materiality back
into cultural critique. Matter is resistance incarnate: not squeezing it out, but rather
making room for its periodical returns, was Bakhtin’s main theological point. The
carnival was, then, not only the ritual return of matter, not only the renewal of the
performing community, but also the rupturing of the inertia of rigid impression and
violent expression characteristic of the established institutions of power, whether
royal, churchly or mental. Translation occurs on the border between the carnival and
its paler, sturdier environment.
Nietzsche’s eternal return, whether taken as the return of nothingness to itself,
or the generative machine of differences, or the essence of experience proper, takes
tautology as destiny. The space of immanence thus created repels the rapacious
moves of the transcendental with unparalleled force, and without appeal to memorial
retention: the eternal is the present as the unzeitgemässig essence of time.
Translation here is prophecy – an intimation that will not be alien to Walter
13
Benjamin. Prophecy is, though, a destined question of taste, as damned as my

attraction to play
Deleuze’s fold is, however, the more stimulating image when it comes to the
image of translation in the crossfire. In his book on Leibniz, Deleuze puts the
monads, along with the baroque villa, to the same test, as their inside and the outside
do not communicate physically with each other. To dispense with the eventually futile
opposition between inside and outside, Deleuze uses the fold as a figure of thought
able to translate one into the other – mutually, and to find that discontinuities are
continuous not like in a Mobius strip, but via a diagrammatic way of linking them. In
the fold, translation is continuously interrupted, and is as necessary as wisdom is to
blindness.
Let’s return to Kant for a fated moment: Kant’s distinction between the
transcendent and the transcendental has been a bone of contention for the dogs of
revolution and for their masters. With all his terminological contradictions, Kant
distinguishes between the transcendent and the transcendental. Transcendent is the
term used to describe those principles which ‘profess to pass beyond’ the limits of
experience, as opposed to immanent principles ‘whose application is confined
entirely within the limits of possible experience’ (Pure Reason A 296/B 352).3
Transcendent principles, ‘which recognize no limits,’ are to be distinguished from the
transcendental employment of immanent principles beyond their proper limits. Such
principles include the psychological, cosmological and theological ideas discussed in
the ‘Transcendental Dialectic.’ Kant also described the ‘objective employment of the
pure concepts of reason’ as ‘transcendent’, confusingly describing them as
‘transcendental ideas’ (id. A 327/B 383). In CJ Kant distinguishes between aesthetic
and rational ideas, with the former referred to intuition according to a ‘merely
subjective principle of the harmony of the cognitive faculties’ and the latter referred
according to an objective principle which is ‘incapable of ever furnishing a cognition
of the object’ (CJ §57).4 The latter is transcendent, as opposed to the subjective
principle of the aesthetic idea, and the immanent concept of the understanding. As in
3Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Trans. by Martin Kemp Smith (1929). With a new
introduction by Howard Caygill. Houndmills & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
4Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790). Trans by Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
14
CPR, the rational ideas are produced by the reason and may be used regulatively in
the search for the systematic unity of the understanding, or in a transcendent manner
‘once reason advances beyond the pursuit of understanding’ (Critique of Judgment
§76); (see Caygill 399-400).5
To translate, impression is effected transcendentally, while expression, its
materiality, coarseness, bodiliness, freedom and abandonment, is transcendent. This
equivalency needs more discussion, to be left for another occasion. “The mud that
goes through the fingers” is the expressed, or the transcendent overcoming of the
experience of impression. Unlike Bataille’s generalization of Hegel’s restricted
economy, this take on the Kantian transcendent is not meant to complete, but to fold
back the transcendent, so that its excesses will not be quenched by transcendental
impositions. Otherwise put, the mutuality of the impressed and the expressed, the
Apollonian and the Dionysian, the product and the detritus resulting from its
production. Such a return of the transcendent not as a transcendental force
administered by middlemen – is radical translation. Radical translation is mutual
transcendence. It is becoming other after having transcended the belief in the other.
Belief is self-grounding. It’s grounded in my( )self, as subiectus to it. It not
only makes me believe that I have a self, but also that that self is essential to the
existence of belief. Nietzsche was the right dog when it came to devouring belief. But
then, beside his bet on life, there is belief. What I believe in, what’s above me, grants
me the sacrificial position that, in its self-justification, justifies my( )self. Once
justified, my( )self needn’t survive anymore: c’est le moi sans l’être. This self-securing
neutrality is the anti-technics, the ground of both subiectus (subject to the law, the
King, etc.) and subiectum (Descartes’ unbreakable subject of knowledge or
Robespierre’s law-maker). This subsub, as blind to “itself” as the Goethean Urmütter,
engenders subjects that drift across rhizomes and maps. That drift, that sliding move
as unstoppable as Kant’s aesthetic judgment, is called translatio. The translatio
between subiectus and subiectum, between the subject to and the subject of language,
is the ceaseless exercise that constitutes radical translation. Translatio represents the
5Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell (1995), 2000.

15
poetic foreignization of languages as historically established. As Rudolf Pannwitz,

reverently quoted by Benjamin, put it:
“Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise.
They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning
German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater
reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the
foreign works. The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the
state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his
language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.” (Pannwitz in TT
80-81)
Extreme translation Hinduizes German, only to transcend the product into a

German that never was, or maybe just passed unnoticed.
There are three kinds of responses to the foreignization such translations
produce:
One:
“In the German tradition [potently marked by the reflexes acquired during the
Romantic period], foreignizing strategies are intensely nationalistic, a
fortification of the language against such forces as French cultural domination
during the Napoleonic wars. Vossler recognizes that imperialism might be the
dark underside of translation driven by a vernacular nationalism.” (Venuti 13)
6
However, the Hebraicizing German attempted by the likes of Buber and

Rosenzweig, and the “Ghetto rotting” of High German championed in Kafka’s late
writings play to a tune that has turned its origin upside down. Benjamin’s calling for
German’s Verfremdung (though Brecht would become an essential influence on
Benjamin well after the 1923 essay had been finished) hints at a complex imposition:
6Lawrence Venuti’s Preface to The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti. London &
New York: Routledge, 2000: 13.
16
that German translations must de-domesticate their rhetorically exoticizing

Romantic notion of language alienation. And that through barbarous novelty.
Two: radical translations have the effect of transforming the “target” language
into a minor one, like certain literary texts, which are heterogeneous in that they
submit the major language to constant variation, delegitimization, and alienation.
Such (translated) texts make up a minor literature, whose “authors are foreigners in
their own tongue.” (Deleuze&Guattari 105) 7
Three: radical translations are too easy to submit theoretically, yet too hard to
exercise practically. When the ‘too easy’ becomes the ideological horizon that lightens
the burden of practical translation, the superstice subjugates the interstice, the latter
becoming the subiectus to the subiectum position in which the former installs itself.
In this all too common instance, the poetic character of language and of extreme
translation is ex-pressed as marginal, residual, even chaotic. It is in this sense that
contemporary melticultural globalism is counter-poetic.
Extreme translation – the crossfire of mutual transcendence of subiectus and
subiectum, of ‘target’ and ‘source’, and of interstices and superstices – does not
partake of this globe submissive to technics and to its general equivalents.
References
Benjamin, Walter, “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (1923), translated by Harry Zohn.
Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. New York: Schocken, 1968
Caygill, Howard, A Kant Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell (1995), 2000
Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Trans. by Martin Kemp Smith
(1929). With a new introduction by Howard Caygill. Houndmills & New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2003
7Gilles
Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 105.
17
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment (1790). Trans by Werner Pluhar.

Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987
The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti. London & New York:
Routledge, 2000
18
Peter ARNDS
Trinity College
Dublin, Ireland
E-mail: arndsp@tcd.ie
LOST IN TRANSLATION: ON KAFKA’S LANGUAGE OF ABJECTION IN

DIE VERWANDLUNG
Abstract: 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 difficulties for the translator result from the fact that
Gregor’s transformation into Ungeziefer and his family’s uncaring treatment of him
as such foreshadow the genocidal practices of the 1930s and 40s. By highlighting a
selection of passages in which Kafka’s writing becomes a harbinger of these crimes
against humanity the article demonstrates the subtle discrepancies between the
original and Corngold’s translation, what gets lost, where at times the translator
amplifies the biopolitical message of the original, but also what completely defies
translation.
Keywords: untranslatable, homo sacer, abjection, genocide, Ungeziefer, humanity,
animality
Kafka’s timeless story Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) from 1915 poses

great challenges to translators. This holds true already for the first and infamous
sentence where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into an
“ungeheueres Ungeziefer.” How can these words best be translated? While there is
general consensus to translate ungeheuer into monstrous in English, the biggest
problem lies with the word Ungeziefer. Stanley Corngold (Norton edition) offers us
“monstrous vermin,” while Michael Hofmann (Penguin) settles for “monstrous
cockroach.” In the French Livre de Poche version Brigitte Vergne-Cain and Gérard
19
Rudent reduce the Ungeziefer to “un monstrueux insecte.” Likewise Corinna

Gepner’s 2004 translation of La Métamorphose uses this option, as does Bernard
Lortholary for Flammarion, 1988; for folio Alexandre Vialatte translates it as “une
véritable vermine,” thus trying to capture the double sequence of ‘un-,’ Catherine
Billman for actes sud translates “une monstrueuse vermine,” and Claude David uses
“énorme cancrelat” for Gallimard, a word that suggests disease and is the French
equivalent of the intensely scatological German ‘Kakerlake’ (cockroach). The
challenge seems to rest specifically in the abjection Kafka inscribes in the double
sequence of the prefix ‘un-‘. The German text teems with this vocabulary of
abjection: Untier, Unrat, Unzahl der Bewegungen, which conjoin as a semantic field
to express Gregor’s loss of humanity, at least in shape, for deep inside he keeps
hanging on to his humanity.
My argument is that the challenges in translating Kafka’s language of abjection
result from the text’s biopolitical context in which Gregor’s transformation into and
treatment as Ungeziefer foreshadow the genocidal practices of the 1930s and 40s. In
his chapter “The Ban of the Wolf” in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
Giorgio Agamben has drawn a line from the Germanic Friedlos (the man without
peace) or homo sacer of the Middle Ages to the victims of the Nazi crimes, in
particular the euthanasia programme and the Holocaust. The Germanic homo sacer
has his biopolitical origins in the Icelandic vargr or Old Norman wargus, a word
from which werewolf is derived (Guðmundsdóttir 280) and denoting both ‘wolf’ and
‘outlaw.’ The outlawed berserk and other criminals were such human wolves
according to Old Germanic law and due to the crimes, mostly murder, they had
committed. This figure is cast out into the state of nature/state of exception, where
human rights no longer reach this victim of expulsion and where the Hobbesian
homo hominem lupus is the only law of existence. Homo sacer is reduced to what
Agamben calls nuda vita, naked or bare life, which implies a reduction from political
to biological life, a phenomenon that, building on Foucault, he then locates in
twentieth-century genocide and other forms of political violence.
Set apart from the community the homo sacer’s very human existence has
become questionable in the perception of the agents of expulsion, a phenomenon that
has existed since Greek antiquity when the essence of human ‘being’ was closely
20
LOST IN TRANSLATION: ON KAFKA’S LANGUAGE OF ABJECTION IN DIE VERWANDLUNG
linked to dwelling inside the polis. For Aristotle humans were political animals living
in the polis and within the reach of law, while the barbarians outside had no full
humanity. In twentieth-century philosophy Martin Heidegger’s discussion of ‘being,’
Sein or Dasein, then is of key significance for a discussion of the expulsion and
wandering of homo sacer in the forest or forest-like places of exclusion as an area in
which he is hidden, forgotten, and possibly killed. Linking the Gothic word wunian to
modern German wohnen, which he associates with Zufriedenheit (satisfaction
[literally being at peace], Heidegger, Vorträge, 150-1) Heidegger has noted the
connection between being at peace and dwelling. Both wunian (wohnen) and the Old
High German buan, which is related etymologically to Bauen and Sein (ich bin),
imply this feeling of being at peace, as the fundamental character of dwelling is the
certainty of being cared-for. Ideal dwelling, Heidegger argues, is man’s staying within
the “Geviert,” the fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, while not being cared
for and the subsequent loss of dwelling imply a detachment from these, especially
from the earth (chthonos). Excluding humans from the community thus meant
excluding them from their autochthony and from ‘being’ itself. This loss of human
being then results in the expellee’s increasing resemblance to a wild animal due to
‘not being cared for’ by the other humans, a process that resonates with mythical
manifestations of hybridity between the human and the animal, echoing such
concepts of monstrosity as voiced, for example, by Foucault: “From the Middle Ages
to the eighteenth century…the monster is essentially a mixture…of two realms, the
animal and the human…. It is the mixture of two individuals…of two sexes…of life
and death” (Foucault, Abnormal, 63).
This monstrous hybridity is closely linked to the notion of impurity. The
medieval outlaw was considered morally ‘unclean’, due to the crime he had
committed. His death was of no consequence to anyone and was exempted from
juridical persecution. Agamben’s line from here to twentieth-century genocide
implies that in the Nazis’ massacres resulting from their politics of racial hygiene
turning people into the likeness of how they are perceived – namely as unclean
animals – is a necessity that follows the perverse reasoning of thanatopolitics.
Although such ‘unclean animals’ cannot be sacrificed they can be killed with more
21
ease and with impunity, that is, without legal repercussion. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, a
human in animal shape, is such an impure creature. This notion of impurity is
contained in the etymology of the word Ungeziefer, derived from Old High German
zebar, the sacrificial animal. In order to be sacrificed an animal had to be a clean one.
Ungeziefer consequently has the meaning of an unclean animal not suited for
sacrifice. With this biopolitical background in mind it becomes clear why this word
defies all attempts of faithful translation.
As a parasitic Ungeziefer Gregor is a wolf (vargr) in the medieval sense of the
word – someone who preys on the community, in this case Gregor’s middle-class
family. He is being expelled into his room, cast out from the community, but still
included in the law that ordains his annihilation when eventually his family kills him.
It is the complex family structure with its densely Freudian scenario that contributes
to turning Gregor into an impure creature in the first place. The text’s oedipal
constellation needs little further comment here. Suffice it to say that Gregor’s father
undergoes a metamorphosis as much as his son. He grows from a powerless man who
depends on his son’s salary to the alpha male of the family. His growing aggression
towards Gregor is signaled by a spate of actions, from banging his fists on the door of
his son’s room to bombarding him with apples, which causes a festering wound that
leads to Gregor’s eventual death. Gregor’s gradual killing commences at the end of
first part where his father kicks him back into his room so that he starts bleeding,
having injured one of his little legs (Beinchen 73), which he “schleppte leblos nach”
(dragged along lifelessly, 16). The German diminutive Beinchen is very effective here
in indicating his physical powerlessness. At the end of the second part the father’s
readiness for violence increases and he starts bombarding his son with apples, one of
which gets stuck in his back causing a wound that subsequently gets badly infected.
This image of the father’s bombardment conjoins with his physical erectness in
expressing his sexualized potency and savage behavior: “Unerbittlich drängte der
Vater und stieβ Zischlaute aus, wie ein Wilder .... Es klang schon hinter Gregor gar
nicht mehr wie die Stimme bloβ eines einzigen Vaters” (72; Pitilessly his father came
on, hissing like a wild man. ... the voice behind Gregor did not sound like that of only
a single father, Corngold, 15). Corngold gets it right when he translates Wilder into
wild man, in fact the translator here amplifies on the biopolitical context of Kafka’s
22
language, as the wild man is a mythological paradigm closely linked to the medieval
practice of expulsion. Speaking in terms of the wolf man, not only does Gregor follow
in the footsteps of the vargr of medieval expulsion, although this paradigm has
shifted now to a creature far less glamorous than the wolf, but Gregor’s father too is a
wolf in his own right, reflecting the sovereign whom Derrida has equated with the
wolf in his lecture series La bête et le souverain (Derrida, 2009). While Derrida
associates the wolf primarily with the despot, Agamben recognizes that the medieval
wolf man, who in being expelled to a life outside of communal law, is uniquely tied to
the sovereign, whose power to abandon individuals equally positions him outside of
the law. This symmetry between the sovereign beast and the persecuted vargr
reflects the animal ‘wolf’ in his dual perception of the powerful hunter versus the
hunted pest.
As I have shown elsewhere (Arnds, 2015), in representing psychoanalytical
processes through a hybrid character between the human and the animal, Kafka’s text
reveals striking parallels with Sigmund Freud’s case study of the “Wolf Man,” the
exiled Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankeiev, from around the same time (from 1910 to
1914 and published in 1918). Freud argues that Sergei Pankeiev’s fear of wolves
results from witnessing a primal scene as an infant of an a tergum sexual act between
his parents, causing his later neurosis. The Wolf Man and Gregor suffer from
castration anxiety, their neurosis producing their exile, from which to an extent
Pankeiev can return thanks to being psycho-analyzed by Freud, but from where there
is no return for Kafka’s Gregor – an exile ultimately deeply tied to Jewishness and the
racial melancholy that determines Jewish culture in the years before the Holocaust
(Garloff 123).
Gregor Samsa is an omen of Jewish annihilation. Like Hesse’s Steppenwolf
(1927), another interwar text that develops the liminality between the wolf and the
human, Kafka’s text from 1915 heralds future massacres, specifically those of the
Third Reich. The hunting of undesirables is evoked specifically in Kafka’s language of
abjection, first and foremost Gregor’s label of an ungeheueres Ungeziefer, a
monstrous vermin. In view of the use of this word by the Nazis to describe Jews and
other minorities, Ungeziefer is an uncanny cryptonym in Kafka’s story deriving from
23
deep within the collective Jewish unconscious. As encryption, which implies the
notion of secret and grave vault, the word is a sinister premonition of the atrocities in
the camps more than two decades later. 8 That it is “ein ungeheures Ungeziefer”
means that this creature has no place in the family or in God’s order, an existence
Agamben has seen as the fundamental condition of Jewish exile, the abandonment of
humans in the camps as state of exception:
The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of
the term ‘Holocaust’ was … an irresponsible historiographical blindness. The
Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new
biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the
sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing constitutes
neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a
mere ‘capacity to be killed inherent to the condition of the Jew as such. … Jews
were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had
announced, as ‘lice’, which is to say, as bare life (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114).
The text teems with references to Gregor’s exilic Dasein reduced to the shape
of a pestilent bug which stirs the fear of infection in his community evidenced by his
family’s various responses to his animal presence: they throw out the food he has not
touched, “als seien also auch diese nicht mehr zu gebrauchen” (77, as if they too [my
italics] were no longer usable, Corngold, 18), and Gregor fears that his mother may
grow sick at the sight of him, she was “Gregors Anblick nicht gewöhnt, er hätte sie
krank machen können” (86), (not used to the sight of Gregor, he could have made her
ill, Corngold, 25). After a brief phase of mourning the family essentially considers him
dead. Their reaction reflects the homo sacer’s status as dead to the community from
the very moment he was banned (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 105). Sacer in this case has
the meaning of ‘being set aside’ from the living, the fate of millions of Jews and other
minorities whose physical removal from the community through deportation to the
8See also Steiner, 121: “Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis … was to be the literal fate of millions of
human beings. The very word for vermin, Ungeziefer, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance; so the Nazis
were to designate the gassed.”
24
camps where all human rights were suspended equaled the pronouncement of their
death.
From the perspective of his family and his employer, Gregor’s human life is
extinguished at the moment he has become an animal, but he is clinically still alive
and thus a constant reminder of their lack of concern for him. The creaturely life
that Eric Santner has identified specifically for Kafka and which resonates with
Agamben’s concept of nuda vita characterizes Gregor even before he has turned into
a vermin. In fact, his metamorphosis could be a manifestation of the way he feels in
his excruciating employment situation – “Er war eine Kreatur des Chefs, ohne
Rückgrat und Verstand” (59), (he was a tool of the boss without brains or backbone,
Corngold, 5). To my mind, Corngold’s translation of ‘Kreatur’ into ‘tool’ does not fully
render justice to the language of abjection Kafka uses. ‘Kreatur’ implies a great deal
more, a live organism neither clearly human nor animal, while ‘tool’ is an abstraction,
and thus inanimate. That things are lost in translation here can also be seen in other
passages. Gregor’s job does not allow for illness, as for the ‘Krankenkassenarzt,’ the
health insurance doctor “es nur ganz gesunde aber arbeitsscheue Menschen gibt” (59;
the world consisted of people who were completely healthy but afraid to work,
Corngold, 5). Especially the German ‘arbeitsscheu,’ which Corngold’s translation as
‘afraid to work’ does not render very closely, is part of a vocabulary that expresses
fascist medical practice and points to the Nazi jargon of Gesundheitspflicht, the
persecution of Arbeitsscheue, the work shy, in labor camps, and ultimately the
complete perversion of the bourgeois work ethic in the annihilation method of
Vernichtung durch Arbeit (destruction through work) in the camps. His employer’s
view of Gregor’s abstention from work reflects the Enlightenment discourse of
disciplining and punishing bodies that are not docile, trying to withdraw from the
rationalist work ethic of the rising middle class. Determined by utilitarianism, this
rationalism is intolerant towards laziness, and classifies the lazy as Aristotelian
idiotes deprived of logos – speech and reason – in a word, as animals. This is
precisely the way Gregor is seen by his fellow human beings. To his employer and
family who fail to understand him he has lost the faculty of human speech, his voice
has become “ein Piepsen” (59), a chirping that garbles (“zerstört”) the words
25
(Corngold 5). Corngold’s ‘chirping’, a word that belongs to birds, does not fully render
Kafka’s original language of abjection, as piepsen may also refer to mice, vermin. His
boss thinks that Gregor’s ‘idiocy’ will infect everyone around him, that he is “trying to
make fools of us ... That was the voice of an animal” (Corngold 10). Gregor’s
animalization is like an infectious illness, the fool being traditionally associated with
animal images as can be observed, for example, in the picaresque tradition. The main
character has given up human reason for animal whims, for caprice. “Ich glaubte Sie
als einen ruhigen, vernünftigen Menschen zu kennen, und nun scheinen Sie plötzlich
anfangen zu wollen, mit sonderbaren Launen [my italics] zu paradieren. ... Wie das
nur einen Menschen so überfallen kann!” (65; I thought I knew you to be a quiet,
reasonable person, and now you suddenly seem to want to start strutting about,
flaunting strange whims … It is strange how a person can get attacked by such
caprice. Corngold, 9). Corngold’s translation of Launen into caprice is even closer to
the biopolitical context than the original, as ‘caprice’ is a word derived from capra
(goat), the scapegoat being one of the traditional animals referring to the expulsion of
evil. The original word überfallen (literally to fall upon someone), however, is more
telling than ‘getting attacked,’ as it expresses both animal aggression and animal
passivity clashing with human agency and reason. Gregor is the human upon whom
the shape of an animal has fallen overnight. In that sense he has been überfallen by
animality, attacked and devoured by it. In contrast with Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Jekyll who contains the animal Hyde within himself, Gregor is the animal that
contains the human. The human lies hidden inside or underneath the animal,
unrecognizable to the world around him. This sub-humanity of his – Gregor as
Untermensch in fascist terminology – is signaled by a variety of motifs. He acts from
below, hides under the couch, and is no longer able to lift his head, which according
to Walter Benjamin marks him as the melancholic afflicted by the saturnine spirit, his
erect body cringed, the back bent forward, drawing the gaze downward in
“indefatigable rumination like a dog eager to follow a trace into depth” (Benjamin vol.
I.1, 329-330). But his change is not only external. His taste buds have become those
of a vermin feeding on garbage, as he prefers to eat only half rotten vegetables, bones,
and unpalatable cheese. Unable to feel his wounds, he thinks: “Sollte ich jetzt weniger
Feingefühl haben?” (76; Have I become less sensitive? Corngold 18). ‘Feingefühl’
26
clearly belongs to the world of humans, a word that strongly defies translation. It
denotes the subtle feelings of which animals may not be capable (who are we to know
though!), while Corngold’s ‘sensitive’ may not be as strong in conveying a sense of
humanity.
Gregor’s surviving internalized humanity, his ‘Feingefühl’, shows itself
primarily in his reaction to his sister’s violin play. “War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so
ergriff?” (98; Was he an animal that music moved [literally: seized] him so). Resisting
easy translation, the word ‘ergreifen’ (to seize) is an interesting one in the context of
music, as it may conjure up the music of Wagner, especially his Götterdämmerung
(Twilight of the Gods) modelled on the world’s end at Ragnarök. In his famous Wotan
essay the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung once discussed this Ergriffenheit (the act of being
emotionally seized) in the context of the Greek god of intoxication Dionysus, whom
Nietzsche has associated with Wagner, and his Germanic equivalent in the
mythological Wild Hunt complex, Wotan/Odin, that ‘Ergreifer’ of souls with whom
Hitler closely identified, especially by way of Wagner’s music. The Ergriffenheit of a
dying animal, Gregor’s heightened sensitivity to music, is a moment in which
impending thanatos, de-humanization, and possibly the keenest expression of
human sentiment (of intense Feingefühl) through art conjoin.
Although Kafka’s original ‘ergreifen’ may remind us of Wagner and the Nazi
obsession with Wotan, it also contains an intense foreboding of Auschwitz,
specifically of the Mädchenorchester von Auschwitz founded in June 1943. In this
orchestra of talented girls, which perfidiously brings together German high culture
with its greatest barbarism, these young women were spared from the gas chambers
as long as they were able to keep playing their instruments with great sensitivity, as
many of their murderers were music lovers. As one of the most intense sarcasms of
genocide, they were reduced to the bare life of Ungeziefer while their humanity was
displayed in rendering German high culture with a sensitivity both heightened and
challenged by the permanent threat of death. It was music that spared the homo sacer
from her complete animalization and annihilation.
Gregor is so moved by his sister’s music that he wants to lure her into his room
and never let her go again as long as he is alive, his love of her music being the last
27
thing that keeps him alive, but there are undertones of incestuous desire here. His
sister’s response to his desire reflects the sudden violent turn from heightened
sensitivity to death-bringing violence that we also see in the commanders of the
camps.
“Ich will vor diesem Untier nicht den Namen meines Bruders aussprechen,
und sage daher bloβ: wir müssen versuchen, es [my italics] loszuwerden.Wir
haben das Menschenmögliche versucht, es zu pflegen und zu dulden, ich
glaube es kann uns niemand den geringsten Vorwurf machen ...Weg muss es!”
(100), (I won’t pronounce the name of my brother in front of this monster, and
so all I say is: we have to try to get rid of it. We’ve done everything humanly
possible to take care of it and to put up with it; I don’t think anyone can blame
us. … It has to go. Corngold 37)
Corngold’s monster traditionally as something to be ‘shown’ (It. mostrare) is a

far cry from the abjection expressed in Untier, a creature at a level even lower than
the animal (so that it becomes an un-animal) and hidden from sight, which is
precisely the way the Nazis perceived and treated the Jews, as well as other
persecuted groups. Corngold’s ‘it has to go’ is likewise a relatively mild translation of
the forceful German ‘weg muss es’ (literally ‘away it must be’), implying complete
annihilation that leaves no trace of Gregor, his consummate disappearance from the
apartment.
Gregor himself thinks that he must disappear and his reaction to his sister’s
disgust is one of self-sacrifice, reflecting his intention not to stand in the way of his
family’s progress: “Seine Meinung darüber, dass er verschwinden müsse, war
womöglich noch entschiedener als die seiner Schwester” (103; His conviction that he
would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s, Corngold 39).
Strictly speaking, the word ‘disappear’ does not fully render the German
‘verschwinden’, which contains the act of ‘shrinking (schwinden) away’ (ver-). Gregor
is filled with a sense of shame similar to that of Joseph K. in Der Prozess (1925, The
Trial) at the moment the latter is about to die like a dog. For Gregor to survive as a
dust-covered bug, who clearly sees himself in the way of his family’s happiness, would
28
result in that sense of shame, and for him too it seems “as if his shame were to survive
him,” and that “the unrestrainable impulse to flee from oneself is confronted by an
equally certain impossibility of evasion” (Agamben, Remnants, 104). It is the classical
shame of the victim. Quoting Levinas’ De l’évasion (1935, On Escape), Agamben
argues that what “appears in shame is therefore precisely the fact of being chained to
oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide oneself from oneself, the
intolerable presence of the self to itself” (Agamben, Remnants, 105), to the extent
that ‘evasion’ in the sense of disappearance, ‘Verschwinden,’ becomes impossible.
This idea of the intolerable presence of the self to itself is implanted in Gregor’s mind
by his sister whom he overhears saying “weg muss es:” it must be gone. This desire of
hers to be rid of her brother of whom she wants no trace and no memory left is the
ambition of the Nazi perpetrators in ridding themselves of millions of camp victims.
There was to be no trace of them, their lives completely blotted out and forgotten.
This loss of human shape and being, the Verschwinden of Gregor and millions
of victims of genocide who literally ‘shrank away’ by starving to death, condemns
them to what the Greeks perceived as the realm of Lethe in its three dimensions of
concealment, destruction, and forgetting. Gregor’s gradual Verschwinden follows
precisely these three meanings of the Greek term as Heidegger discusses them in his
Parmenides lectures at Freiburg University in the winter semester 1942/43, at a time,
that is, when millions were condemned to disappear without a trace in the camps.
Heidegger was, of course, not aware of what really went on in Auschwitz and other
camps, hence the Freudian uncanniness of his lectures – as uncanny as Kafka’s
premonition of Jewish exile and murder. First Gregor’s family attempts to render him
invisible by banishing him into his room (concealment), then they remove his identity
by emptying out his room (forgetting), and his father, who does not spare him as he
throws apples at him, initiates his destruction. Sparing, caring, and the loss thereof
are closely intertwined in this scenario, with the father’s reluctance to spare the
protagonist resulting in the whole family’s reluctance to care for him. Out of a sense
of shame, Gregor supports his own abandonment and his family’s extortion of his
dwelling as his very being by receding further and further into his exile, covering
himself over with a sheet so that his sister does not balk at the sight of him, and by
29
finally sacrificing himself. Gregor creates his own exilic home in the sense of a place
of hiding within the former home. His room becomes a home within and away from
home, where he is excluded but still included at once, thus following Agamben’s logic
that in the state of exception bare life is excluded and included at the same time:
“What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same
time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at once excluded and
included, removed and at the same time captured” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 107).
It is in this state of exception that the language of abjection, of
dehumanization, develops its full potential, in German words of negation (they tend
to be words with negative associations) which pose extreme problems to being
translated into other languages, like Ungeziefer, Untier, Unrat, Unzahl der
Bewegungen, verschwinden. Gregor’s room becomes a place where homo hominem
lupus est, and he seems well aware of its Freudian quality of Heimlichkeit (secrecy)
and Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness). Suspended in his animal shape between his
reluctance to subscribe to society’s work ethic and his elimination as an undesirable
element, he becomes a sinister premonition of the Nazi persecution of nutzlose Esser,
useless mouths to feed, and other undesirables. Quite literally, Gregor’s Heim is a
topos of Heimlichkeit (Freud’s notion of secrecy echoes the Greek Lethe), in which his
family keeps the secret of their son’s transformation, in itself unheimlich in
demonstrating the liminality of the parasite with human sensitivities. His erstwhile
Heimischkeit (the feeling of being at home) morphs into Heimlichkeit, a secret
location from where the Unheimliche emerges with him whenever he appears. His
room represents this space in which the secret is kept, locked up, and in which he is
first concealed, in which he forgets his former identity and that identity is also quickly
forgotten by his family, who unwilling to care for him is ready to get rid of him.
Initially the idea of deportation occurs to them, of resettling him, likewise
reminiscent of the fate of millions of Nazi victims deported in cattle wagons: “Wer
hatte in dieser abgearbeiteten und übermüdeten Familie Zeit, sich um Gregor mehr
zu kümmern, als unbedingt nötig war? ... denn ihn hätte man doch in einer
passenden Kiste mit ein paar Luftlöchern leicht transportieren können” (92; Who in
this overworked and exhausted family had time to worry about Gregor any more than
was absolutely necessary … for he could easily have been transported in a suitable
30
crate with a few air holes, Corngold 31). Corngold’s ‘worry’ (Sorge) and Kafka’s
‘caring’ (sich kümmern) are indeed close, they are part of the German semantic field
to which also belong Schonung (sparing someone) and Pflege (looking after
someone), all of which found no place during the Holocaust.
The lack of the family’s care for Gregor ultimately causes his death. He dies the
death of an Untier, a sub-animal: “es ist krepiert” (104, it’s croaked, Corngold 40).
The word krepieren used in the context of Gregor’s death points to the biopolitics of
genocide that dehumanized humans and human death, reduced it to the perishing of
animals of the lowest order. Originally used by soldiers during the Thirty Years War
(1618-48), Krepieren (Italian: crepare) implies the worst form of death, a death
wished upon vermin. When his family finds Gregor’s dead body, it is as emaciated as
those millions of victims of genocide as the ones completely stripped of their
humanity – “Seht nur wie mager er war. Er hat ja auch schon so lange Zeit nichts
gegessen .... Tatsächlich war Gregors Körper vollständig flach und trocken, man
erkannte das eigentlich erst jetzt” (104; Just look how thin he was. Of course he did
not eat anything for such a long time. …As a matter of fact, Gregor’s body was
completely flat and dry; this was obvious now for the first time, Corngold 40), while
his sister has blossomed into a flower, stretching her erect young body.
Gregor’s family belongs to a social class that tries to transcend working class
towards middleclass but, in order to do so, it has to get rid of an undesirable minority
that stands in the way of that progress. At a more personal level, Gregor, the vermin,
whose parasitism denotes that bourgeois class’s undesirable other, the working class
bent over like animals, also heralds Hitler’s self-loathing, his hatred of Jews that he
considered to be vermin, because “he felt Jewishness to be an evil within himself”
(Waite 363). In the end, however, Kafka’s text resonates with Agamben’s argument
that those who have seen the Gorgon, who have touched bottom (Agamben,
Remnants, 120), and whose humanity seems completely destroyed are the ones who
remain human, echoing what the Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini once expressed in his
novel Conversazione in Sicilia (1941) written still during fascism. Vittorini’s narrator
is a defender of the down-trodden, the small people, the hungry and poor who in the
author’s eyes are more a part of humanity than those in power. In his discussion with
31
his mother, who disseminates injections to those suffering from either consumption
or malaria, he expresses it thus:
But perhaps not every man is a man; and not all humanity is humanity. This is
a doubt which arrives in the rain when you have holes in your shoes, water
seeping through the holes in your shoes, and you no longer have anyone in
particular dear to your heart, you no longer have your own particular life,
you’ve done nothing and have nothing still to do, nothing even to fear, nothing
more to lose, and you see, outside yourself, the world’s massacres. . . So not
every man is a man. One persecutes and another is persecuted; and not all
humanity is humanity, only those who are persecuted. You can kill a man and
he will be all the more a man (mas hombre). And so a sick man, a starving
man, is all the more a man; and humanity dying of hunger is humanity all the
more. (Vittorini, 249-50) [My translation]9
Vittorini’s concept of mas hombre reminds us that the victim is more human
than the perpetrator, who in his sovereignty to decide over life and death is the real
beast according to Derrida, reducing their targeted victims to the level of beasts.
It is the biopolitical undercurrent in Kafka’s language of abjection that leads me to
contend that the word Ungeziefer poses extreme challenges to the translator.
9: ‘Ma forse non ogni uomo è uomo; e non tutto genere umano è genere umano. Questo è un dubbio
che viene, nella pioggia, quando uno ha le scarpe rotte, acqua nelle scarpe rotte, e non più nessuno in
particolare che gli occupi il cuore, non più vita sua particolare, nulla più di fatto e nulla da fare, nulla
neanche da temere, nulla più da perdere, e vede, al di là di se stesso, i massacri del mondo. . . Non ogni
uomo è uomo, allora. Uno perseguita e uno è perseguitato; e genere umano non è tutto il genere
umano, no, ma quello soltanto del perseguitato. Uccidere un uomo; egli sara più uomo. E cosí è più
uomo un malato, un affamato; è più genere umano il genere umano dei morti di fame.’
The “insecte,” however, seems to carry greater weight in French than it does in English or German, if
we listen to Balzac and Camus, for example: “Être sans valeur, personne méprisable. Quoique vous ne
soyez que des insectes, je veux tirer de vous une vengeance éclatante, et je saurai la prendre, reprit le
gentilhomme (Balzac, 231 ; Although mere insects, I would call down a signal vengeance upon you, and
I know how to, said the nobleman. [Donal Lyons]). Ou bien je ne voulais pas te faire mourir et tu me
suspectes injustement, moi, ton empereur. Ou bien je le voulais, et toi, insecte, tu t’opposes à mes
projets (Camus, Caligula, 50 ; Either I was not willing to put you to death and you suspect me unjustly,
I, your emperor - or else I wished it, and you, insect, opposed my plans [Christopher Williams]).
: ‘Ma forse non ogni uomo è uomo; e non tutto genere umano è genere umano. Questo è un dubbio che
viene, nella pioggia, quando uno ha le scarpe rotte, acqua nelle scarpe rotte, e non più nessuno in
particolare che gli occupi il cuore, non più vita sua particolare, nulla più di fatto e nulla da fare, nulla
neanche da temere, nulla più da perdere, e vede, al di là di se stesso, i massacri del mondo. . . Non ogni
uomo è uomo, allora. Uno perseguita e uno è perseguitato; e genere umano non è tutto il genere
umano, no, ma quello soltanto del perseguitato. Uccidere un uomo; egli sara più uomo. E cosí è più
uomo un malato, un affamato; è più genere umano il genere umano dei morti di fame.’
32
‘Vermin,’ French ‘vermine,’ comes close to the original, as does ‘cockroach,’ French
‘cancrelat,’ while French ‘insecte’ would be furthest removed from it. 10 The
psychoanalytic dimension in Kafka’s text is inextricably linked to the condition of
hybridity and expulsion whose roots harken back to the medieval wolf man. The task
of the translator would be to try to convey as closely as possible the historical and
cultural implications of this word, as this cryptonym is specific to Kafka’s racial
melancholia, the notion of Jewish exile, and the persecution of Jews in Germany, a
task that ultimately appears to be impossible in view of the significance of the
etymology of the word for the homo sacer in a German context.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford
UP, 1995.
----. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books,
2002.
Arnds, Peter. Lycanthropy in German Literature. London: Palgrave MacMillan,
2015.
Benjamin, Walter. Kleine Prosa. Baudelaire-Übertragungen. Gesammelte Schriften.
Ed. Tillmann Rexroth. Vol. IV.I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.
----. One Way Street and Other Writings. London: Verso, 1979.
Balzac, Honoré de. Ursule Mirouet. 2 vols, Paris: Souverain, 1842.
Camus, Albert. Le Malentendu and Caligula. Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1958.
Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Volume 1 and 2. Translated by
Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975. London,
New York: Verso, 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. The Wolf Man and other Cases. London: Penguin, 2002.
10The “insecte,” however, seems to carry greater weight in French than it does in English or German, if
we listen to Balzac and Camus, for example: “Être sans valeur, personne méprisable. Quoique vous ne
soyez que des insectes, je veux tirer de vous une vengeance éclatante, et je saurai la prendre, reprit le
gentilhomme (Balzac, 231 ; Although mere insects, I would call down a signal vengeance upon you, and
I know how to, said the nobleman. [Donal Lyons]). Ou bien je ne voulais pas te faire mourir et tu me
suspectes injustement, moi, ton empereur. Ou bien je le voulais, et toi, insecte, tu t’opposes à mes
projets (Camus, Caligula, 50 ; Either I was not willing to put you to death and you suspect me unjustly,
I, your emperor - or else I wished it, and you, insect, opposed my plans [Christopher Williams]).
33
----. Werkausgabe in zwei Bänden, ed. Anna Freud and Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, vol.
1, Elemente der Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1978.
Garloff, Katja. “The Jewish Crypt: W.G. Sebald and the Melancholy of Modern Jewish
Culture.” In: The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory. 82.2 (2007):
123-40.
Guðmundsdóttir, Aðalheiður. “The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic
Literature.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Vol. 106, No. 3
(Jul., 2007): 277-303.
Heidegger, Martin. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
2000.
----. Parmenides. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
Hesse, Hermann. Der Steppenwolf. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold. New York:
Norton, 1996.
----. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Trans. Michael Hofmann. London:
Penguin, 2007.
----. Die Verwandlung. In: Gesammelte Werke. Erzählungen. Edited Max Brod.
Taschenbuchausgabe in acht Bänden. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989. 57-
107.
----. La Métamorphose. Trans. Brigitte Vergne-Cain and Gérard Rudent. Paris: Le
Livre de Poche, 1989.
Santner, Eric, L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: Chicago UP,
2006.
----. “Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the Writing of Abjection.” In: The
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Translated and Edited by Stanley Corngold. New
York, London: Norton & Company, 1996. 195-210.
Steiner, George. Language and Silence. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
Vittorini, Elio. Conversazione in Sicilia. Milano: Bur Rizzoli, 1988.
Waite, Robert G. L. Hitler: The Psychopathic God. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
34
Felix NICOLAU
The Technical University of Civil Engineering

Bucharest
E-mail: felixnicolau1@gmail.com
IMAGETEXT AND EKPHRASIS AS CHANCES OF REVIVAL IN

TRANSLATION STUDIES
Abstract: 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 understanding, if we assimilated the postmodern lesson about Grand
Narratives (J–F. Lyotard) and the subjectivity of recorded history, then we have to
question ourselves about the role of translation and translators in a post-industrial
society which blends globalized edutainment and corporatist efficiency, prejudice,
reverse colonialism and anti-establishment movements. What type of equivalence are
we supposed to choose in order to persuade today? The ekphrastic approach of
translations may be better tuned to out gadgetized and image-informed epoch.
Key words: concrete poetry, ekphrasis, graffiti, intersemiosis, imagetext
As we know, the saga of intersemiotic translation, involving an almost infinite

semiosis, began with Roman Jakobson’s seminal essay from 1959, On linguistic
aspects of translation. Intersemiotic translation is a way of by-passing the semiotic
system of language. The Russian-American linguist defined this less common type of
35
METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY 2.1 (2016)
translation as a translation of verbal signs into non-verbal signs. In the same paper he
postulated that only interlingual translation is “translation proper” (in Hatim and
Munday 2004: 5). In the meantime, Translation Studies has evolved dramatically
including nowadays audio-visual translations with their sub-strata: sign language,
intralingual subtitles, lip synchronization for dubbing and interlingual subtitles.
There is no barrier left between linguistic signs and non-linguistic signs. Thus, the
semiotic system of pure language becomes almost outdated. In today’s global culture
a system of semiosis with mixed registers of communication is becoming the
dominant approach.
Translations include nowadays pictorial and iconic-linguistic registers. In
1994, W. J. T. Mitchell (Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal
Representation) analysed terms like iconicity and imagetext. The accent fell on the
participatory intermediality, able to open infinite possibilities for the condition of
translatability, owing to the fluency of mirrored and intertwined iconicity. But the
prejudiced views took advantage of the consecrated definitions of sign. So, what
entities would qualify for the status of sign? Petrilli (2003: 31) considered a few
distinctions:
[T]rans-, inter-, dia- are prepositions and prefixes that specify the
modality of being of the sign, the sign process, semiosis […] Semiosis is a
transsign process, an intersign process. Something that is not capable of
relating to something else that signifies it, utters it, translates it,
interprets it, responds to it is not a sign.
In order words, are pictures, paintings, gestures, and sounds signs? Can they
be the subject matter of translation theorizing? Taking a further step onward, Peeter
Torop (2004: 64) asserted the idea of a “partial overlap of signs and languages or sign
systems of different arts”. Transfer, transmission and exchange are understood now
on a larger scale than ever and Roman Jakobson, in spite of subordinating
intersemiotic translation to the “proper” translation between languages
(interlanguage translation, implying texts) has an undisputable merit for having
recognized the possibility of translating nonverbal messages: “Intersemiotic
translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of
36
IMAGETEXT AND EKPHRASIS AS CHANCES OF REVIVAL IN TRANSLATION STUDIES
nonverbal sign systems’’ (in Venuti 2004: 139). He also provided examples of
transmutation paradigms from verbal art to dance, cinema, music or painting. This
overlapping equated to transmutation is the mark of incongruity and heterogeneity.
So far, the transfer of signs has been admitted only between homogeneous systems.
Once the linguistic stage of Translation Studies got dated, intersemiotic translation
posited the challenge of translating not only verbal signs into non-verbal signs, but
also categories of non-verbal signs into other categories of non-verbal signs. Already
Algirdas Julien Greimas (1966: 12) perceived the emerging dynamics of intersemiotic
translation: “every signifying totality [ensemble] which is by nature different [has a
different character] than natural language can be translated, more or less accurately,
in any given natural language’’. The problem of accuracy looms ominously in the
background, but we have to embrace a permissive attitude towards a nascent
modality of universal communication. Umberto Eco (2001: 67) also assented to such
a tolerant approach when he considered translation a metaphor, a transference, or an
adaptation.
Time for opening the textual gates
The enlargement of translation scope is the equivalent of a semiotic leap.

Basically, translations imply strategies related to the reformulation of messages with
the preservation (or, depending on the context, enhancement or diminution) of
aesthetic, semiotic and contextual implications. As messages can be held and
transmitted by not-yet-signs, all the advancements in Translation Studies can and
should be retained and applied in intersemiotic translation. The recognition of sign
quality is getting more and more comprehensive, so that we can speak of visual,
audio, and tactile signs. But what matters more is the symbolic cargo of various sign
systems. Intersemiotic translation transfers not only clear-cut messages, but also
allusions, suggestions, and impressions. Impressionism is crucial in understanding
and interpreting intersemiosis, which means that the personal approach will prevail
more often than not.
If we accept André Lefevere’s point (and how could we not?) that translation
resides under the auspices of authority, legitimacy and, bluntly said, power
(Translation/History/Culture. A Sourcebook, 2003), then we also should accept that
37
this biased transfer comprises the world of signs too. And if all translation is indirect
speech, as it reformulates the initial message into the source language, it means that
“bugs” have the possibility to penetrate the original fabric. That is why some
researchers recommend accompanying the gist translation by an exegetic one, which
means to explain and elaborate on the source message.
One step further would be to understand for good that translation is not only
about transferring words, but also signs and signals. Within such an extended range
we can check for the viruses spread inside our various systems of communication.
Multiple sensory systems include vision, audition, and touch as polysemiotic multi-
signs. Verbal utterances mix with typography and layout. Multimedia translation is
built on interdisciplinarity and it better fits our less and less verbalised world
(Gambier, Gottlieb 2011: XI-XII). We understood the importance of contrastive text
analysis and contrastive stylistics; now it is the end line for a new start: contrastive
sign-system analysis.
In 2007 it was remarked that Translation Studies is informed by a “Babel of
theories” (Kuhiwczak, Littau 2007: 4). Two years before, Susan Bassnett had stressed
the importance of a posteriori ideological and cultural factors that affect translation
and translators. Consequently, if we do not consider the whole interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary context of translation, we are bound to be infested by power-related
subliminal messages.
Norman Shapiro’s illusion of transparency in translation involved the
complete invisibility of translator. It’s like a superhuman, insusceptible machine
translation would have been invented. Lawrence Venuti spotted only the prejudice of
fluent discourse and readability, but he also contended this aim at transparency. He
discussed the characteristics of bleak transposition resulting in “translatese”,
“translationese” or “translatorese”, but he chose to ignore the text-minded theorists’
narrow approach. If experienced translators are able to avoid jargonisation,
slanginess, pidginess (a flood of foreign words, doughy or blotted syntax), and dull
thuds (some sense of closure) by domestication, they will not be able, however, to
decode and re-encode the completeness of a message unless they are open and alert
to intersemiotic translation.
38
Translation Studies was able to emancipate itself from literary theory and
linguistics during the “cultural turn” of the 1980s - as Mary Snell-Hornby highlighted
- and now the time has come to open its rigid boundaries for intersemiotic
translation. Different types of intertextuality have been recognised for quite a while
now; so we can move forward to intersign and intersystemic transfers.
Translation is a “dynamic mediation between social worlds expressed in
language” (Ricci, Van 2011: 104), as long as through language we understand a
coherent and cohesive structure of signs. Only by enlarging the notion of language we
can aim at re-establishing the innocence of attitude-infused translation (105).
Limited knowledge, as we know, is dangerous knowledge. Long time ago,
Roman Jakobson wrote the paper “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959) in
which he indicated three types of translation:
1. intralingual translation
2. interlingual translation
3. intersemiotic translation (verbal signs being translated into non-verbal
signs).
Meanwhile, the disciplinary field has been enriched with audio-visual
translations, which include sign language, intralingual subtitles, lip synchronization
for dubbing, interlingual subtitles, and music-image-dance transfers (Hatim, Munday
2004: 6). Obviously, many people could retort that this is the equivalent of a
communicative translation and, in Irène Kristeva’s vision, the communicative
translator is the perpetrator of a double treason, as s/he “trahit à la fois l’original qu’il
déforme et le public auquel il présente une œuvre déformée” (in Lungu-Badea,
“L’ethos du traducteur”, 2010: 145). The paradox of such an approach is that the
faster one gets access to a larger public, the more one diminishes the expressiveness
of the original message. But of course the regime of intersemiotic translations is
parallel to that of intrasemiotic ones: there are complex and primitive achievements,
depending on the quality of the public the translator targets. Or, what Izabella Badiu
described as «haute editions» and «basse editions» (in Lungu-Badea, “Traductions
sur le marché. Ethiques multiples”, 139). There may be multiple ethics in translations,
but the message should not be distorted, if abridged or simplified in terms of
language.
39
As we can see, there are opinions in favour of the transparency of the

translator and others which back up the creative side of the translational activity.
Georgiana Lungu-Badea maintains an intermediary position: “tout traducteur est un
Janus bifrons aestheticus: auteur de second degré” (38). Other theorists, in exchange,
come dramatically in the defence of translators: “La traduction d’un texte littéraire
implique la répétition de l’acte créatif”. (Mitura, “De l’esthétique dans la traduction”,
”69-80, in Lungu-Badea, Georgiana, 70). Such an interventionist enterprise is
justified by others only in the case of a full-fledged culture: “Le traducteur doit
honorer son statut d’intellectuel, au sens moderne de cette équivalence, ce qui l’oblige
à s’impliquer, quelque modeste que ce soit, selon les possibilités et la vocation, dans
les batailles de l’actualité littéraire” (Maliţa, “Pertinence de Mme de Staël pour l’esprit
des traductions du XXIe siècle” 99-110, in Lungu-Badea, Georgiana 100).
Maybe intersemiotic translation resides more in discourse than in verbal

translation, the latter being fond of language and speech. As we know, discourses are
intimately linked to a certain context and belong to the realm of pragmatics. The
passage from words to images/gestures and sounds, is not always smooth; sometimes
we need a transitory limbo: “en travaillant sur le texte original, en le transformant, en
le remodelant, le traducteur obtient une sorte d’intertexte” (Pageaux 1994: 60)
A transdisciplinary world
In a world more and more dedicated to third-level simulacra, wherein there is
no connection between an original reality and its virtual correlative – as Baudrillard
anticipated –, the word “context” has accumulated unexpected meanings. In 1989,
Ali Darwish, in The Translation Process: A view of the Mind, signalled that the
meaning of a sentence is determined by its semantic relation with other sentences in
that text. Expanding this textual consideration towards the inter- and trans-
disciplinarity of our world, we grasp new developments of semantic relations: texts
cannot be fully decoded and interpreted without reference to images, sounds and
haptics. This transconnectivity is imperious in the case of culturemes, or phenomena
40
which are impossible to relocate into another culture without altering their
parameters (Gambier 2004: 5).
Jean-René Ladmiral mourned the loss resulted from transfers: “en passant
d’une langue-culture à une autre, la forme est irrémediablement et totalement
perdue: il faut en faire son deuil” [“Esthetiques de la traduction” (9-21), in Lungu-
Badea 2010:16]. The theorist identified many aesthetics of translation, not only one,
together with deploring the losses of substance inherent to the process. This is where
the inter-systemic approach intervenes and recuperates allusions, hints and cultural
concepts that otherwise would be lost in translation.
Georgiana Lungu-Badea also dwelled upon “Le role du traducteur dans
l’esthetique de la réception. Sauvetage de l’étrangeté et/ou consentement à la perte”
(23-40). As we can infer, she accepted inevitable losses and placed Translation
Studies “dans les zones des gris” (25). The non-white-non-black interregnum is a
blessing for a world in which people tend to categorize obsessively every form of
knowledge. The process of translation is responsible with reopening/relaunching
meanings more than with dropping details on the way. New researches simply revive
the dispute between biblical (syntactical literalness) and non-biblical (pragmatic
translation, adequate to the expectancies of the target public).
Fonts and transcreation after mainstream theories
In non-academic fields, the understanding of translation proves to be,

surprisingly, larger sometimes. For instance, in advertising slogans are built using
the tactics of repeating a verbal message in combination with different semiotic
systems. Font variation is an intrinsic part of this process. A comparison between
Times New Roman and upper-case VERDANA reveals that the former has its origin
in Old Style fonts and was designed for newspaper use as early as 1930s; the latter is
a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter in the mid-1990s for
increasing the legibility of texts on screens. In terms of qualitative understatement,
the former invokes prestige and seriousness, whereas the latter stresses the clarity
and simplification useful in web design.
41
In the same vein, the term transcreation is more and more used in the context
of video games to describe a type of translation that rewrites the soundtrack in order
to create target-culture congruent effects of humour. This transcreative
anthropophagic use of the original to foster new productions in the target language
contests the notion of fidelity to the original and is a proof of the efficiency of
intersemiotic transfer.
There are several stages in the recent history of Translation Studies:
1. The linguistic (or pre-linguistics) stage, up to 1950, with an emphasis on
literary texts. The hot debate was upon the opposition between word-for-word and
sense-for-sense translation.
2. The communicative stage (mainly between 1950 and 1970). Literary and
non-literary texts are considered with the purpose of categorising text registers and
including a larger range of readership (less-educated to specialist). For the first time
linguistics was applied to Translation Studies.
3. The functionalist stage (mainly between 1970 and 2000). Non-literary texts
from the “real world” emerged in the limelight. The intention of a text and its
essential message (the phatic function) prevail over the study of the language of the
source text. This translational approach resembles a commercial operation. The
author is perceived like a vendor, the text and the translation as tenders and the
readership impersonates the consumer.
The representative theory for this interval is the “skopos theory” (Greek:
“purpose”, “goal”) – a false-friend for the English “scope”, which was formulated in
Germany in the 1980s by Hans Vermeer. This theory focused on interactional
dynamics and pragmatic purpose and sustained that the target text is bound to be
shaped up by the “function” or “skopos” of the translation. The socio-economic
context was the prevalent one.
4. The ethical/aesthetic stage (from around 2000 until now). The contexts in
which a translation will be used together with the “personality” of the target language
become serious concerns.
All these stages were described in textual terms, but they can be easily
reformulated so that they may include intersemiotic translations.
42
During the functionalist stage emerged the epistemological scenario of

métissage or interweaving. It was Claude Lévi-Strauss who in his essay “Structural
Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology” (1945) exposed the principles and aims of
interdisciplinarity: neighbouring disciplines that should inspire each other and
stimulate collaboration. However, Hillis Miller highlighted that such an approach
still presupposes the separate integrity of disciplines. Not even Roland Barthes could
foresee the true nature of interdisciplinarity when he envisioned the disruption of the
solidarity between the old disciplines in order to engender a “new object and a new
language”. The cross-fertilization of disciplines would end up as a mega-discipline in
his view. It was only with the advent of cultural studies of translation that the
polysystems theory laid emphasis on enlarged cultural transfers.
Understandably, intersemiotic translation or “transculturation”, as
interpretation of verbal signs with the help of non-verbal signs – as in the ekphrasis
process – is a recent date gain. More than ten years ago, it was admitted that
intersemiotic translation achieved the status of a semiotic operation process
(semiosis). But, as semiosis is described as a multi-layered process, and as Charles
Pierce defined semiosis as a triadic relation among a Sign, an Object and its
Interpretant, it is mandatory to enlarge the meaning of the word “Sign” and to give
the translation accolade to intersemiotic transfers too.
Special semiotic systems
a. Nushu
Nushu is a system of writing that can be described as “Woman’s Writing” in

Chinese. This is a system exclusively used by women and it was developed in secrecy
over hundreds of years as an alternative way of education in the Jianyong County of
Hunan province. Its style is more cursive than written Chinese and only some
characters are borrowed from Chinese, whereas the others seem invented. Like
Chinese, Nushu is written from top to bottom in columns which, in their turn, are
written from right to left. A distinctive element can be spotted in the delicacy of
characters, which are thinner than Chinese ones and not so square-shaped. This type
of writing testifies to women’s resilience in restrictive, man-favouring environments.
43
(http://www.ancientscripts.com/nushu.html)
Various researchers commented differently on their findings regarding the

topic. Zhon Shuoyi declared that 500 to 600 kinds of Nushu characters could be
collected. Zhao Liming considered that 80% to 90% of Nushu characters had been
derived from Chinese characters, which would be indicative of the fact that this
mysterious language was made up of different styles of simplified Chinese characters.
But Nushu has an emotional mark which is intertwined with calligraphic
mastery. In this language, women of old times expressed their sorrows, worries,
autobiographies, traditional songs and local histories, marriage events and so on. In
more recent epochs, Nushu was able to absorb political turmoil too, proving thus its
complexity. In relation to the Japanese invasion of China, in 1944, there are anti-
Japanese songs varying from village to village. Many of these contain sheer slogans as
“Folks, get up!”. The interest of these manifestations resides in the fact that anti-war
protests are disposed in the traditional form of old songs, like making one line from
seven words. The differences from other Chinese anti-Japanese songs are identifiable
in the complaining tone of Nushu songs/texts even since the beginnings of this
language. The other songs simply aired their anger, whereas Nushu texts have a
tradition in underlining sorrow and hardship.
Nushu represents a case in point of re-coding a previous code, which is pretty
much a double encoding. It resorted massively to calligraphic suggestiveness and
44
took the Chinese ideograms closer to the Japanese ideogram patterns. Simplification
in this case coincided with feminizing the design of Chinese characters in accordance
with a more sensitive content.
b. Ekphrasis and graffiti
Graffiti are salient examples of transmitting messages along non-institutional

channels of communication. They constitute a form of art that contains drawings or
inscriptions, or both, and their name is derived from the plural form of an Italian
noun: graffiti. We should normally use the singular – graffito -, but this would be
viewed as a pedantic attempt. The supporters of aesthetic autonomy contest the
artistic status of graffiti as these would include social messages.
I am not inclined here to discuss the artistic value of graffiti, mainly because
most of them are obviously a form of thrashing the cityscape. In many cases, graffiti
are preoccupied no so much with social claims, but with promoting brands, personal
frustrations or desires. What interests me here is the absorption of graffiti into the
larger realm of ekphrastic writing.
I should start by saying that ekphrasis is an ancient vivid description created
by the Greeks. The reader of such a message is supposed to envisage the object
described as if it were physically present. It is quite possible that the original thing
never existed, which only proves the imaginative cogency mastered by ekphrasis.
Many readers of Greek and Latin texts didn’t pay attention to the historical veracity of
the events as such; in exchange, they focused on shaping habits of thinking and
writing by studying the imaginative skills of various writers.
The ekphrastic tradition opens with Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in
Book 18 of the Iliad. This passage draws a comparison between visual and verbal
means of description and underlies movement and sound elements that cannot
normally be represented on a shield. What did this shield figure out? It was
hammered into five sections representing images of the elements, two cities, a
wedding celebration, a murder trial, a marching army, a war, some beasts,
ploughmen, a vineyard, a meadow, and youngsters dancing. So the 18 th chapter of
The Iliad contains this vivid description of almost the whole universe which
45
stimulated imitators like Hesiod (Heracles’s shield), Vergil (Aeneas’s shield), and
Nonnus (Dionysus’s shield). Obviously, this piece of military equipment is ennobled
by being used as canvas for painting.
But such optimistic ekphrasis was twisted in modern times. W. H. Auden
redesigned Homer’s vision in the poem “The Shield of Achilles” wherein he populated
the shield with apocalyptic representations: barbed wire, rape and murder,
bureaucrats, and sentries. Stepping in Francisco Goya’s gloomy footsteps, modern
ekphrastic poems concentrated solely on works of art. A new translation of stories in
images was undertaken: instead of the windy descriptions so appreciated in
Antiquity, the translator-artist strove to interpret, confront and negotiate with his
subjects.
For instance, both Auden and William Carlos Williams adressed in their
poems Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (16 th
century). In the painting what matters is the toil of a farmer ploughing his field and
only in the bottom-right corner Icarus’s capsized legs are visible while he plummets
into the sea. The accent falls on the commonsensical, matter-of-fact approach to life.
Williams grasped this hint and used it in his poem. Auden also translated correctly in
his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” the vision on the tragedy frozen in the painting.
Ekphrastic descriptions as written texts about pieces of art that never existed
were realized by many illustrious writers. John Keats wrote in 1819 “Ode on a Grecian
Urn”, wherein he blended images of things normally met on ancient Greek vases with
others imagined. Unlike Homer, Keats shifted the emphasis by bringing forth his
experience of visualizing the vase and this approach triggered a transformation in the
genre of ekphrasis.
In the second half of the 18th century art tourism soared and art critics like
John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and William Hazlitt published set-pieces about art across
time. John Ruskin also described in an ekphrastic manner J. M. W. Turner’s painting
“Throwing Overboard Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming on”, better known as “The
Slave Ship” (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). He included this presentation in Modern
Painters, 1843, where he resorted to such mixtures of visual details to movement and
sound. In order to be persuasive, Ruskin used plenty of adjectives and a rich, but
unfamiliar vocabulary. Such a luxurious style showed the influence of the King James
46
translation of the Bible and Shakespeare. Nowadays it is hardly possible for readers
to get an image of this painting in their minds only by reading Ruskin’s text.
However, the ekphrastic passage is in tune with the flamboyant style of the painting.
In the Victorian epoch, in spite of its cultural affectation, this description didn’t allow
readers’ imagination to wander off the vision Ruskin was sharing.
b1. Is it profitable to translate graffiti?
There is a binary perception related to the status of graffiti: some people

acknowledge their artistic status, others don’t. If we accept the first opinion,
automatically we have to consider graffiti as an art form which necessitates
translation. Every genuine form of art is polysemic, so more or less specialized art
consumers are supposed to decipher, partially, of course, the complexity of the
artistic representation. Graffiti is an art form which is anti-ekphrastic, or ekphrastic à
rebours, as letters are projected as images, and not the other way round, as it would
be normal.
There are markings which stay for nothing deeper, so they risk to be seen as
mere scribbled vandalism. But most of these letterings contain hidden messages and
overt aesthetic qualities. Graffiti art appeared in the late 1960’s and can be connected
to prehistoric cave drawings and representations.
(http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-graffiti-definition-history-types.html)
From the moment sprays with paint started being used by street artists, graffiti
art was known as spraycan art. Later on, when the originators of graffiti became
47
more aware of the artistic implications of their hobby, they craved for a larger
audience for their depictions. What other better “canvas” could they find than subway
trains and, later on, trains themselves? Consequently, graffiti acquired side-names
like subway art, train art, or freight art. These denominations originated in the
phenomenon of graffitists painting their “messages” on railroad, freight cars and so
on. Although works by various graffiti artists were accepted into galleries and
museums, the most effective galleries in terms of audience numbers were these
means of transport.
(http://www.theartofstorytellingarchives.com/page-ig/)
Historically speaking, there are specialists who contend that old forms of graffiti are
preserved on walls of Egyptian monuments or in Pompeii. This claim is plausible if
we take into account the meaning of the Italian word grafficar, meaning “to scratch,
to scribble, to write”.
From a typological perspective, there are many patterns of graffiti. They may
appear as individual markings such as slurs, slogans, or political claims. These types
are usually handwritten and are imprinted on bathrooms, corridors or exterior
surfaces. One simple form is the tag, which represents a fancy, scribble-like writing of
the name or nick-name of the “writer”. The tag is more an issue of identification and
territoriality than an aesthetic achievement.
48
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Tva3Ti-88jw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Whatever aesthetic quality tagging may possess, it resides in the style of

writing. But I will enlarge upon this aspect a little bit later. Now I want to insist on
tags as gangs’ markings of territory and messaging that imply “news” from the
neighbourhood.
In terms of aesthetic subtlety, there must be practised the distinction between
graffiti and murals. The latter comprise a wider range of representations, so their
figurativity is enhanced beyond lettering. There are many styles: round or bubble
letters, the intricate wild style, in an almost undecipherable type of calligraphy,
computer and gothic lettering, or 3-D lettering with fading and blending colour
effects. The mastery of artistic procedures is what tells the tagger from the graffiti
artist; and the talent, of course. One technique of quickly creating a complex “piece”
is the use of stencils which are subsequently filled with spray paint. The stencil of the
artwork is created by the artist, so its artistic quality cannot be disputed. In a
comparable way, the stencil can be drawn on an adhesive paper and stuck in public
places.
49
(http://abduzeedo.com/beauty-stencil-art)
As a rule, murals beautify urban-scape and are commissioned. They resort

substantially to colouring and different manners of painting. In their case, translating
the message and interpreting the aesthetic refinement is crucial.
Coming back to graffiti as communicative ritual, I have to add that whatever
aesthetic qualities they may possess they are concentrated in the aspect of the tag.
Such a tag can be monochromatic and in a common writing style. They can also be
imprinted using the throw-up technique, which makes use of two colours, or using a
bubble-like lettering. There is then the stamp style with straight letters creating a 3-D
effect, or the piece, actually the shortened form of a masterpiece, which is achieved
with many colours and gets, thus, closer to the condition of a mural. Additionally,
some cartoon characters can be added to the graffiti artist’s name, as this one is the
core of the whole drawing.
In order to get the status of “King” or “Queen” in this art, one has to create a
spectacular tag and, in addition, to make it visible for a large number of people. For
instance, when an artist manages to create burners, that is vivid colouring, vibrancy,
and crisp, without drips outlines, s/he has the chance to reign over a subway line,
which assumes thus the status of an art gallery.
50
(http://streetartnyc.org/blog/2012/11/26/rockin-their-styles-in-bushwick-yes1-
demote-owns-sege-one-and-logek/)
Another promotional channel for graffiti has been the hip-hop phenomenon,
which has come together with rap music. It would be simplistic to interpret graffiti as
a hobby or a protest associated with poor, urban kids. More than half of graffitists
come from Caucasian middle-class families and their age fluctuates between 12 and
30.
The complexity of graffiti is proved by the collaborative creativity of these
artists. This strategy was used even by Renaissance maestros who many times drew
only the outline of a painting and then commissioned their apprentices to finish it off.
In graffiti art, many crews can collaborate and every crew is headed by a king or a
queen, who is the most accomplished artist among the components of the crew.
As in multimedia art, the surface covered with graffiti is considered an integral
part of that piece or art. By spraying their representations on walls or trains,
graffitists also protest against unjust political and economic orders. Consequently,
graffiti can be labelled as revolutionary art contesting private property and some
capitalist values. This is an example of social graffiti which, of course, necessitates an
ideology-debunked translation:
(http://tophdimg.com/social-graffiti.html)
51
But most often than not graffitists merely enjoy their hobby and behave like
genuine artists. They maintain “schools” wherein novices learn how to access various
painting styles, how to adjust nozzles and how to fit and employ different types of
aerosol caps onto spray caps for spectacular artistic effects.
Authorities tend to regard graffiti as non-commissioned art and blame on it
huge funds spent on cleaning urbanscapes. Graffitists defend their work by referring
to other representations imposed onto citizens: billboards, campaign ads, flyers,
statues and so on and so forth. In this respect, there are examples of gallerists or
curators who “translated” graffiti as an art form. Claudio Bruni, owner of Galleria
Madusa in Rome, hosted the works on canvas of Lee Quinones, one of the few
graffitists who bombed, i.e. painted, an entire train, all the length and height of it.
Pop artist, director and writer Andy Warhol had collaborations with graffitist Jean
Paul Basquiat. All these accolades donned on graffiti art hugely contributed to its
legitimization as an artistic activity which needs authorities’ support - by offering
surfaces to be spraycanned – to develop towards constant aesthetically-accomplished
representations.
In order to justify this system of transforming letters into images by “de-
lettering” them, some specialists contend that graffiti representations are older than
10,000 years and that they can be spotted among the cave paintings of Palaeolithic
Age. These letterings are not the support of non-understandable, behind-the-door
messages in their decoding stage, but we could not deny the necessity to interpret
them. So, at least half of the standard procedures used in a translation enterprise are
useful in this case. Among the early examples of proto-graffiti are a brothel
advertisement in Ephesus and a depiction of Jesus on the side of a school (circa the
3rd century A.D.). This is only a supposition, as the head of the crucified man looks
like a horse head.
52
(https://scottnevinssuicide.wordpress.com/2015/04/page/11/)
In Pompeii, historians uncovered some etchings related to sexual boasting or to

documenting different events in the city.
From early times, graffiti took side with those who opposed the mainstream
society and this is why some people nicknamed them “urbane guerrillas”. Once
globalization proved successful, some brands “tamed” graffiti by absorbing their
techniques and public displays. Nowadays, it’s quite common to see on city walls
pseudo-graffiti figuring brand names and logos (Nike, Puma, Lacoste etc.).
The belittled political agenda can be noticed in the graffiti aiming at the
position of high art. In this case, aesthetics prevails over radical politics and
subcultural fetishisms. There are contenders who sustain that using graffiti to make
statements generates only illegal “eyesores”. It is true that many cities have spent
considerable amounts for cleaning repulsive graffiti. What is interesting is the
disparity in terms of critical appraise found on various internet sites. Administrative
and official sites disregard graffiti, whereas personal blogs or unconventional artistic
sites incline the balance in favour of street art. The former party invokes an
infringement of law – as if laws were some divinely revealed articles -, whereas the
latter do their best to legitimize graffiti as an aesthetic activity, even though this could
mean taming graffiti. Watching graffiti in museums is an act of apprehending history,
but graffiti exposed in art galleries, among “regular” paintings, could trigger an
uncomfortable sensation. It is like transferring part of a wall or metal hunks snatched
from the body of trains into smart-looking halls. Graffiti is automatically thought of
53
as persisting in urban, non-“trimmed” areas. That is why Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt
buying graffiti painted by Bansky in an art gallery is a glamorous event completely in
contradiction with street art’s traditional manifestations. The question is: graffiti
exposed and profitably sold in art exhibitions can still be accredited as graffiti?
The answer is rather obvious if we remember that graffiti started from tagging
one’s name then moved to parodying different statements. Another issue is about
serial on-the-go pieces like stencils and stickers which have a diminished artistic
status.
Although we cannot speak about graffiti as random vandalism, we are bound
to evoke clean-up costs that can be shocking. For instance, in 2006 Chicago budgeted
$ 6.5 million with this purpose solely.
Unexpectedly, a favourable reception of this phenomenon came some forty
years ago from writer Norman Mailer, who brandished the graffiti of the New York
subway as “The Great Art of the 70’s”. Also Eric Felisbert, author and graffiti artist in
his youth, spoke about graffiti culture as a product of civil rights movement: “It was
never political, but many people were brought up with that, and to express yourself
by breaking the law became a natural process for them”.
But we should not forget that many encoded messages of graffiti were actually
threats, even death threats, addressed to rival spraycan “artists”. That is why, for a
correct de-coding of graffiti, we should gather information about some key-terms.
Here it is a minimal glossary:
Bomb = to write prolifically;
Crew = organized group of writers;
Floaters = graffiti on trains at window level;
King/Queen = the best writer in every possible category;
Motioning = writing on a subway car while it is circulated;
Tag = a writer’s name and signature;
Throw-up = a piece rapidly executed and many times consisting of only an

outline;
54
Wallpaper = the repetition of a tag until it becomes a pattern;
In spite of Mailer’s celebration of graffiti, some city mayors took harsh

measures against street artists. Trains were protected with armed guards and dogs,
carriages were put behind razor wire at night and in some places the sale of spray
cans to minors was banned. Citizen initiative against this type of vandalism was
encouraged and graffiti-related arrests dropped, consequently, from 2,400 in 1984 to
300 in 1987.
A less chemical, but more aggressive imprint of tags is scratchiti. These consist
of etching letters on carriage windows using all sorts of sharp objects.
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/scratchies/galleries/72157626847514071/)
Arifa Akbar and Paul Vallely wrote in a 2015 issue of the “Independent” in
favour of lawful production of graffiti in places like Tate Modern, where almost all
types of artistic experimentation are sheltered. Defacing walls and trains is
considered an economic crime.
Street art is, thus, a polarising phenomenon, being differently regarded in
various countries and on different continents. For instance, in Canada a court ruled
that a 28-year-old graffiti painter could go out into town only accompanied by his
mother. Some others were even sent to prison for more than a year for the guilt of
having vandalised public property. The US sociologists who survey this phenomenon
stated that 85 per cent of graffiti is mere tag, whereas 10 per cent is gang
communication. If we take this de-coding for granted, it would ensue that a crushing
55
85 per cent of graffiti is only dirt. But if we add to the rough statistics the work of
graffiti artist Ben Eine, who spray-painted the word “nightmare” along a 33 metre
wall exhibition in east London, with the intention of propounding an alternative
vision of Christmas, we realize the complexity of graffiti. Many graffiti can be ugly,
but their messages stay for social protests. Graffiti may not be genuine art, but it still
pays the effort of translated them.
Graffiti supporters keep drawing reparatory parallels to advertising, which, in
their opinion, privatises the public space. They sustain that ads are strategically
distributed across cities with the purpose of coercing and manipulating. Graffiti
would represent an activity of reciprocation, as consumers have no real possibilities
to communicate with the agents of advertising, namely companies.
Advertising can be decoded as a psychological, subliminally charged
vandalism. Graffiti and advertising resemble if we watch them into a mirror, but their
connotations are dramatically antagonistic. In graffitists’ opinion, genuine art is
defined by its combative appetite. The aesthetic side is only an adjacent ingredient of
graffiti; what matters is truth, whereas beauty comes in a second position.
“Aerosol art” stands up for communities and this involvement lends a certain
degree of duality to its translation: vandalism in the eyes of (upper)-middle class, art
in the eyes of lower classes. Postmodernism firmly stated the ideologised side of art
and science. If graffiti can be given the accolade of art, then such an art has to admit
to a therapeutic involvement.
(http://www.collater.al/en/orecchiette-spray-revolution-2011/)
56
To sum it up, there are plenty of arguments against graffiti as being an ego trip
meant simply to deface property. Whether we accept this interpretation or not,
nobody could deny the communicative core of graffiti and in judging it we have to
interpret and translate their codes, messages and contexts.
Conclusion
We are still facing a painful crossing from words to images. “Painful” because
this abrupt process is somehow damaging for the human mind. Both denying
approaches – that of text-oriented translation and that of image-oriented one – are in
the wrong. In the end, the process of translation implies transferring thoughts and
ideas from a source medium to a target medium. It is only about signs and contexts.
The red-hot disputes about the nature and dignity of signs should be the domain of
the past. Climbing to an absolute level, there is no qualitative distinction between
interlingual translation and intersemiotic translation. The same message can be
transferred to various sign-environments with the help of a large range of
translational techniques and equivalences.
Bibliography
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Sémantique structurale. Recherche de méthode.

Paris: Larousse. 1966.
Eco, U. (2001). Experiences in Translation. Trans. by A. McEwen. Toronto,
Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press.
Gambier; Yves & Henrik Gottlieb (eds.). (Multi) Media Translation: Concepts,
Practices, and Research. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, 2001.
Hatim, Basil & Jeremy Munday. Translation. An Advanced Resource Book.
New York & London: Routledge, 2004.
Kuhiwczak, Piotr & Karin Littau (Eds.). A Companion to Translation Studies.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. 2007.
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Lefevere, André (Ed.). Translation/History/Culture. A Source Book. Taylor &

Francis e-Library. 2003.
Lungu-Badea, Georgiana, Alina Pelea, Mirela Pop (eds.), (En)Jeux esthetiques
de la traduction. Ethique(s) et pratiques traductionelles.. Editura Universităţii de
Vest, Tmişoara, 2010.
Pageaux, Daniel-Henri. La Littérature Générale et Comparée. Paris: Armand
Colin, 1994.
Petrilli, S. “Translation and Semiosis”. Introduction. In S. Petrilli (Ed.),
Translation, Translation (pp. 17-37). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. 2003.
Ricci, Ronit and Jan Van, eds. Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices,
Histories, St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester. 2011.
Torop, Peeter, Locations in Intersemiotic Space. In V. Sarapik (Ed.), Place and
Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics IV (pp. 59-68). Tallinn:
Estonian Academy of Arts. 2004.
Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation,
Routledge, New York, 2005.
58
Laura PAVEL
Faculty of Theatre and Television, Babeş-Bolyai University

Cluj, Romania
Email: laura.pav12@yahoo.com
RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION:

THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY
Abstract: 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 theory. Here, one should take into account the specifier
“radical” associated with “interpretation,” which challenges the too rigid
interpretable/uninterpretable dichotomy. The comparative reenactment of notions
such as “untranslatability,” “radical translation” and “radical interpretation” may lead
to a mutual critique of their interpretative power and limits. I also reconsider the
concept of “charity” in connection to the translator as an interpreter, in the context
of Davidson’s arguments on “radical interpretation.” The rather dry rationale
underlying a theory of truth and interpretation, as upheld by analytic philosophers,
can gain in conceptual liveliness and even in literary relevance if one privileges an
ethical/anthropological approach to the translator’s “charity” towards his/her reader,
as well as towards the delegated authority of the author.
Keywords: radical translation, radical interpretation, truth-for-the-alien,
charity, apparatus, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson
The Role of Conceptual Personae: James Joyce and the Radical Interpreter
59
In a highly acclaimed essay, “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” philosopher

Donald Davidson proves more inclined to write in an almost aestheticized, quasi-
fictional manner than in the rather ascetic analytic tradition of logic-based theories of
language and meaning-making. He adopts a fascinating rhetorical style that involves
the use of person deixis (we, us), as if he were less interested to prove the
truthfulness of his statements than eager to stir our empathy and our emotional and
rational participation. Referring to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Davidson contends that
the text reveals to us, its bewildered readers, the very origins of communication, as if
our identity were hereby built anew, from scratch: “He [Joyce] puts us in the
situation of the jungle linguist trying to get the hang of a new language and a novel
culture, to assume the perspective of someone who is an alien or exile” (Davidson
1991, 11). The posture that Davidson confers to Joyce and, finally, the condition it
claims for us, both his and Joyce’s listeners/readers, is an unexpectedly distanced
position, that of being mere outcasts:
“As we, his listeners or readers, become familiar with the devices he has
made us master, we find ourselves removed a certain distance from our
own language, our usual selves, and our society. We join Joyce as outcasts,
temporarily freed, or so it seems, from the nets of our language and our
culture” (Davidson 1991, 11).
We are supposed, then, to “join” the novelist in this linguistic and anthropological
type of adventure, as radical translators (to use Quine’s notion, which inspired
Davidson) and radical interpreters, by plunging into a totally other language and by
facing our somewhat alien selves in the process. We are, thus, made to assume
Joyce’s linguistic chaosmos,11 as Eco famously described it, as exiles or outcasts.
Moreover, we are challenged to interpret Finnegans Wake’s linguistic and fictional
alterity, whereby we can actually translate ourselves into an entirely new language
and into a radically different worldview. This whole argumentative narrative about
11See, in this respect, Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce,
translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. For Eco,
the possible worlds of Joyce’s novels comprise their own poetics, and Finnegans Wake actually
performs and accomplishes a “continuous poetics of itself.” (p. 62).
60
RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION: THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY
how we are “temporarily freed” needs further analysis, which I will resume a little
later.
If one were to reassess the consequences of Donald Davidson’s analytic

philosophy of language for both literary theory and translation studies, one might
assume the ironical stance of dwelling on the innumerable footnotes in other
interpreters’ glosses over the topic rather than commit to a fully argumentative text of
their own. However, a few decades ago, the theses of American analytic philosophers,
with their propensity for logic and scientific grounds, had only fragile echoes in the
field of literary studies. Thus, up until the late 1980s, Austin and Wittgenstein had
been quoted within the field of literary theory, but mainly with their less “technical”
philosophical approaches. In his turn, Richard Rorty was usually praised for his
contention that philosophy is to be seen more “as a kind of writing” (to quote the title
of his essay on Derrida from 1978) than as a consistently logical search for truth.
The core of contemporary literary studies is still, to a certain extent, obviously
influenced by Continental thinking and especially by Derridean deconstruction. In
this context, the relevance of such accurately analytic philosophers as Davidson and
Quine for literary discourse is difficult to reassess, since their applicability within the
field might seems rather limited. Richard Rorty, whose own philosophical discourse
deploys a narrative and rhetorical mode of writing, as well as an ironist’s vocabulary,
has revealed how Davidson’s ideas on language and meaning accommodated some of
the challenges posed by literary interpretation. An entire volume has been dedicated
to the wave of Literary Theory after Davidson (edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock
1993), in which literary theorists explore the dense web of Donald Davidson’s
philosophical propositions so as to forge hermeneutical keys for their own critical
approaches and aesthetic standpoints. On the other hand, according to Kalle
Puolakka, another subtle commentator of Davidson’s philosophy, over the past few
years
61
“there has been a growing interest in investigating the ways in which

some fundamental elements of Davidson’s philosophical views overlap
with those that are at the heart of hermeneutics, particularly Gadamer’s
philosophical hermeneutics.” (Puolakka 2011, 8).
However, Gadamerian hermeneutics is only one of the Continental theories and

philosophical methodologies that can be associated with Davidson’s theses, as the
divide between analytic and Continental traditions of thought has indeed started to
be bridged.
Several concepts advanced by Davidson, such as his celebrated formula
“radical interpretation,” echoing W. V. Quine’s equally powerful notion of “radical
translation,”12 the complementary syntagm “jungle linguist,” and his “principle of
charity,” could rightly be seen as theoretical landmarks in the process of translating
or interpreting the words and the nonverbal performance of the cultural and
linguistic Other. Translation qua interpretation seems to imply not only a linguistic,
but also a cultural and an anthropological transgression. Davidson’s assertions on
meaning and interpretation can actually be “translated” into a type of vocabulary
familiar to the Continental body of philosophy and cultural theory, in such a way as to
maintain their accurately analytic inflexions and argumentative power. Thus, Deleuze
and Guattari’s conceptual personae could be considered a sufficiently generous
notion to accommodate both the process of radical interpretation and its agents, the
radical translators or interpreters, since
“for their part, conceptual personae are philosophical sensibilia, the

perceptions and affections of fragmentary concepts themselves: through them
concepts are not only thought but perceived and felt” (Deleuze & Guattari
1994, 131).
12The following excerpt is relevant for Quine’s theory of “radical translation,” based on the notion of
the indeterminacy of translation (and also the inscrutability of reference): “We saw in our
consideration of radical translation that an alien language may well fail to share, by any universal
standard, the object-positing pattern of our own; and now our supposititious opponent is simply
standing, however legalistically, on his alien rights. We remain free as always to project analytical
hypotheses and translate his sentences into canonical notation as seems most reasonable; but he is no
more bound by our conclusions than the native by the field linguist’s.” See Willard Van Orman Quine,
Word & Object (1960), new edition, foreword by Patricia Smith Churchland, preface to the new edition
by Dagfinn Fǿllesdal, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013, p. 224.
62
If we are to give in to the temptation to deterritorialize and to reterritorialize some

of the concepts of analytic philosophy, so as to have them mirrored by a few notions
of Continental theory, then several terms deserve being invoked, as far as Davidson’s
theory of interpretation is concerned. Besides Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual
personae, I also resort to their term deterritorialization, from L’anti-Oedipe/Anti-
Oedipus (1972), which can be called upon as a rather loose method of comparing,
displacing, negotiating meanings and of reappropriating diverse entities, topoi and
conceptual nuances within the heterogeneous fabric of today’s cultural analysis.
Another term that could reflect and explain some of Davidson’s sentences on the
literary discourse of Joyce is a commonplace obsession of anthropology, otherness
and alterity, and, last but not least, the interdisciplinary, all-pervasive notion of
performativity ‒ understood here as the action of performing linguistic and
anthropological interpretation/translation. But the possible equivalent “translations”
of Davidson’s theory on “truth” in interpretation are not limited to these notions,
since others also symptomatically come to mind in this context: let us reconsider the
term “dispositif,” or “apparatus,” as used by Foucault and revalued by Giorgio
Agamben. According to Agamben’s interpretation of “un dispositivo,” language itself
is “perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses.” (Agamben 2009, 14).
The apparatus of language, for instance, like any type of “dispositif", produces
its own “processes of subjectivation,” if we follow Agamben’s argument. Thus, in
trying to read and “translate” Davidson’s own statement about radical interpretation
through the subjectivation of the interpreter, the specifier “radical” is all the more
powerful, since it alludes to an almost irreducible gap in communication and
translation, as well as to a sort of de-subjectivation. At this point, in order to name
the rupture between self-identity and the position of interpreting radical otherness
(as it is to be found in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), Davidson introduces, in his
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, “the alien,” as yet another key character, or
as a conceptual persona of sorts:
63
“What he must do is find out, however he can, what sentences the alien
holds true in his own tongue (or better, to what degree he holds them
true). The linguist then will attempt to construct a characterization of
truth-for-the-alien which yields, so far as possible, a mapping of
sentences held true (or false) by the alien on to sentences held true (or
false) by the linguist. Supposing no perfect fit is found, the residue of
sentences held true translated by sentences held false (and vice versa) is
the margin for error (foreign or domestic).” (Davidson 2001, 26)
There are at least two threads of his rich argument about the “truth-for-the-alien”13
that deserve a deeper exploration. One is the apparent presence of the interpreter and
of the speaker in the same time and place, the presentness and immediacy of their
flux of shared experience. Once we accept, beginning with the turning point of
“James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” that Joyce “takes us back to the foundations and
origins of communication,” this privileged and somehow strange situation we are
driven into becomes a particular experience in between, say, Joyce and us, evincing a
back-and-forth dynamics or a feedback loop of mutual exile and self-distancing.
Hence, this is first and foremost an experience lived by us, one that belongs to us, the
readers and interpreters of his literary and linguistic alterity and of our own remote
position towards our old, “usual selves.” A whole narrative about this adventure gains
shape, based on the anthropological experience of becoming another self, almost an
alien one, which might be called a self-for-the-other. It is an act of interpreting the
other and oneself altogether, a process that is pervaded by a certain degree of verbal
and nonverbal performativity. On the other hand, the already mentioned conceptual
construction that Davidson calls “truth-for-the-alien” is to be reached, as he
contends, due to a “principle of charity.” This notion implies such a dense knot of
13The alien character of the linguist was also highlighted by Quine. It is to be understood in connection
with his theory on the indeterminacy of translation and with his notion of ontological relativity. As
Roger F. Gibson points out, Quine’s thesis “is not that successful translation is impossible, but that it is
multiply possible. The philosophical moral of indeterminacy of translation is that propositions,
thought of as objectively valid translation relations between sentences, are simply non-existent.” See
Roger F. Gibson. “Chapter 29: Quine,” in Robert L. Arrington, ed. The World’s Great Philosophers,
Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 258.
64
conceptual nuances that it cannot be easily grasped by analytic and semantic

approaches alone.
Introducing Charity. Translation beyond Meaning and Belief
The idea that radical translation and radical interpretation require the
acceptance of a “principle of charity” is actually what makes Davidson’s arguments go
beyond a truth-semantics, as well as beyond a philosophy of language. Once the
interpreter is seemingly endowed with “charity,” radical interpretation comes to be
associated with different other theoretical stances: a hermeneutic theory, an ethical
theory, and an anthropological approach on the intelligibility of the other, on his/her
more than linguistic, I would say, otherness. Such an otherness encompasses the web
of alien, estranged beliefs and meanings, be they individual or communal. All of these
are nevertheless embedded into an aesthetic, perceptual perspective on the speech of
the other. Both the speaker and the interpreter perform linguistic statements and
have reversible authority positions in relation to one another. In “A Nice
Derangement of Epitaphs,” for instance, an essay from 1986, the posture of the
speaker and his/her expectations from the part of the interpreter are as important as
the capacity of the hearer to “translate” his/her utterances. A speaker, then, is
supposed to “have the interpreter in mind,” since “there is no such thing as how we
expect, in the abstract, to be interpreted” (Davidson 1986, 170). Moreover, in his book
Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, the philosopher argues for a specific
“requirement of learnability [of a language], interpretability” (Davidson 2001, 28),
which conveys the social factor of the encounter, on the basis of a shared intelligible
agreement. Such a requirement is what enables the interpreter to avoid “Humpty
Dumpty” meanings, e.g. those utterances that, as in the case of Lewis Carroll’s
character Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found
There, mean, whatever he intends them to, without taking into account Alice’s own
intentions to “read” his mind. Humpty symptomatically pretends that “glory” would
65
mean “a nice knockdown argument,” and no wonder that his extravagant verdict
leaves Alice quite bewildered.
Still, interpretability is intrinsic to the principle of charity, which “prompts the
interpreter to maximize the intelligibility of the speaker, not sameness of belief”
(Davidson 2001, XIX) and opens up the hermeneutic stance towards an ethical
theory. The interpreter comes to acknowledge, in the proximity of the translatable
text or speech, the set of values and beliefs of the other. To perform charity towards
the meanings and the self-consistency of the other can be a paradoxical task for the
radical translator as interpreter:
“Charity in interpreting the words and thoughts of others is unavoidable

in another direction as well: just as we must maximize agreement, or
risk not making sense of what the alien is talking about, so we must
maximize the self-consistency we attribute to him, on pain of not
understanding him” (Davidson 2011, 26).
In fact, the act of charity has a clearly performative nature, as it is continuously

related to the conditions of speech, to an act of speech in praesentia, happening
between the interpreter and the speaker. In other words, charity demands, in order to
be activated, the performance of speech and its interpretation, the presentness of an
act of interpretation and translation, say, from one’s own idiolect to another’s
singular, apparently irreducible mode of speaking a language.14 In fact, charitable
14 Literary theorist Gerald L. Bruns has taken on the task of demonstrating that Davidson’s philosophy
of language is convergent with Continental thinking and with the literary turn in philosophical
discourse. He discusses the conditions which allow two languages to displace each other, so the
principles of radical interpretation and of charity are necessarily invoked: “It might seem an open
question as to whether any two natural human (‘earthly’) languages meet the standard of mutual
alienation that the word ‘radical’ is meant to suggest, but Davidson thinks that because we speakers of
the same language each have our own unique way of speaking it (each our own idiolect, each evidently
his or her rich repertoire of such things), we are sufficiently alien to one another for the principles of
radical interpretation (e. g., the principle of charity) still to apply.” See Gerald L. Bruns, “Donald
Davidson among the Outcasts,” in Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy. Language, Literature,
and Ethical Theory, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999, p. 42.
66
interpretation could be considered to presuppose an acknowledgement of the other’s

access to a certain level of belief and meaning altogether, which goes beyond our
ability to understand and translate this level of otherness for ourselves. Commenting
on Quine’s notion of radical translation, Davidson concludes that we are actually not
able to know what the speaker means unless we know what he believes, and vice
versa: we have to know what someone believes in order to we know what he means.
And he immediately adds a statement about the benefices of charity being embedded
in radical interpretation:
“In radical interpretation we are able to break into this circle, if only
incompletely, because we can sometimes tell that a person accedes to a
sentence we do not understand.” (Davidson 2001, 26)
This position might involve a sort of hermeneutic self-restraint upon ourselves

as interpreters, since we are willing to accept that “a person accedes to a sentence we
do not understand…” It is as if we, the interpreters, remain within the boundaries of
an under-interpretation, instead of running the risk of over-interpreting otherness.
Then, our charity is expected to reveal the borders of what is apparently
untranslatable, mostly in the sense of uninterpretable, or rather of what cannot be
exposed to us in view of being interpreted. In other words, it brings forth a knot of
meaning and belief which is not to be grasped by cognition, but merely acknowledged
by a certain understanding of the relativity of truth conditions. Performing charity in
interpretation calls for the duality truth-for-the-alien/ truth-for-oneself. And maybe
this paradoxically charitable and radical interpretation also calls for an implied third
party and for an educated openness to translation, due to the conscience of being on a
linguistic and cultural threshold.
Being on the threshold between two different meanings and truths and having
to accept their mutual alienation and their mutual act of charity means “break[ing]
the circle” and emphasizing the “self-consistency” of the other, while accepting
67
his/her access to sentences and contents that are not always transparent for us.
Reading the other from the liminal position of outcasts, as made exemplary by
Joyce’s language, entails following him into a “world of verbal exile.” 15
Beyond the dual assessment of what is translatable and interpretable, on the
one hand, and what otherwise seems untranslatable or alien to us, the role of the
translator as interpreter undergoes a certain relativization, as it is not based on a
claim of power and authority, but grounded in the very principle of charity. The term
“radical” itself is set under critical scrutiny and somehow relativized through
“charity.” To abide by a principle of charity is to always question, from the point of
view of the interpreter/reader/listener, the conditions of translatability of cultural
identities, ideas and discourses. Translation seen as performance of charity probably
contains a key to how one could engage in a hermeneutic experience, as well as in an
anthropological rite of passage. To act charitably towards the inhabitant of a
distanced cultural community means realizing that his or her presumably
untranslatable words and notions – in fact, those “truths-of-the-alien” – operate
beyond their discursive status and that they pertain to the communal traditional
beliefs, as well as to the web of aesthetic energies which pervade them.
A “Dispositif” for the Translator/Interpreter: the “Passing Theory”
The reader of Davidson’s text on interpretation can promptly associate his idea
of charity with some of the claims of European moral philosophy, namely with the
ethics of responsibility towards alterity, formulated by Emmanuel Lévinas. Still, I
prefer to invoke another concept derived from the Continental body of thinking, in
order to pass as through a more familiar filter Davidson’s theories: “le dispositif”
(Michel Foucault), or apparatus, which I have briefly mentioned in the beginning of
this essay, a concept that I would adopt, albeit in light of its reinterpretation by
Giorgio Agamben. Thus, it is not so much disciplinary or power-oriented “dispositifs”,
15The verbal exile that Joyce provokes, through the displacement of familiar languages, is once again a
metonymy for the process defined by Davidson as radical interpretation: “…Joyce provokes the reader
into involuntary collaboration, and enlists him as a member of his private linguistic community.
Coopted into Joyce’s world of verbal exile, we are forced to share in the annihilation of old meanings
and the creation ‒ not really ex nihilo, but on the basis of our stock of common lore ‒ of a new
language”. See “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” in Philosophy and the Arts, p. 11.
68
as understood by Foucault, which would be of interest here, as a certain instance that

Agamben16 metaphorically defines as follows: “At the root of each apparatus lies an
all-too-human desire for happiness. The capture and subjectification of this desire in
a separate sphere constitutes the specific power of the apparatus” (Agamben 2009,
17). Representing a strategic device, an institution, a power system, the whole canvas
of social discourses, or the network of language of culture, the “dispositif" is seen in
its capacity to capture “all-too-human” desires and, therefore, to provoke processes of
either subjectification or “desubjectification.”17
However skeptical and critical Agamben might seem towards “dispositifs”,
when he states that emancipated subjects result from the fight between living beings
and apparatuses, one could argue that his own conceptual scheme qualifies as just
another philosophical apparatus. In Davidson’s analytic philosophy of language,
there is one particular syntagm, i.e. the “passing theory,” which comprises a set of
very intriguing arguments about cultural and linguistic translation and
interpretation, understood as a non-obstructive and even emancipatory type of
apparatus. As compared to the interpreter’s “prior theory,” which refers to his
expectations about what a certain speaker means by his/her utterances, a “passing
theory,” by contrast, “is not a theory of what anyone (except perhaps a philosopher)
would call an actual natural language” (Davidson 1986, 169). He adds a few more
16 Here is a significant part of Agamben’s all-encompassing definition of apparatus: “…I shall call an
apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept,
model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only,
therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial
measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen,
writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and--
why not--language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses-one in which thousands
and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing
the consequences that he was about to face.” See Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?,” in What is an
Apparatus? And Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009, p. 14.
17 Agamben refers here to a disciplinary society, as conceived by Foucault, in which the apparently
“free” identity belongs to subjects caught up “in the very process of their desubjectification.” See
Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” p. 20.
69
clarifying sentences about the processual, performative, practice-based and non-

conventional nature of the passing theory:
“‛Mastery’ of such a language would be useless, since knowing a passing

theory is only knowing how to interpret a particular utterance on a
particular occasion. Nor could such a language, if we want to call it that,
be said to have been learned, or to be governed by conventions”
(Davidson 1986, 169).
Davidson’s surprising option for the free practice of speech and for the
continuous revision of prior theories and linguistic regulations, for acknowledging
the particularities and the context of every singular utterance, creates a sort of
flexible “dispositif" of interpretation. Understanding and communication between a
speaker and an interpreter or hearer should not be based solely on linguistic
conventions and rules: they should also rely on the clues given by speakers to
interpreters, on the convergence between their intelligible ways of uttering true
sentences, and on the plausible “passing theory” improvised by the receiver. The
passing theory is therefore situated beyond power positions and it is clearly open to
the “principle of charity.” Literary theorist Gerald L. Bruns argues that, “instead of
multiplying languages, Babel-like, Davidson buries the idea of language in the
everyday, second-to-second practice of constructing passing theories.” (Bruns 1999,
51).
The question of translatability and that of mutual interpretability are linked,
for Donald Davison, with an adaptable, performative apparatus for everyday speech,
which conveys “the ability to converge on passing theories from utterance to
utterance.” (Davidson 1986, 172-173). His dynamic – philosophical and
communicational – “passing” “dispositif" exposes several conceptual personae, such
as the radical interpreter or Joyce himself, who is regarded as a metonymical master
figure that makes us feel estranged, for a while, from our own language and from “our
usual selves.” And this is exactly “the perspective of someone who is an alien or exile,”
a paradoxically charitable posture. Since we have no other choice but to “join Joyce as
70
outcasts,” this means both a hermeneutic and an ethical stance, which he acts out in
front of us and for us.
References
Agamben, Giorgio, “What is an Apparatus?,” in What is an Apparatus? And

Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009.
Bruns, Gerald L., Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy. Language,
Literature, and Ethical Theory, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,
1999.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way (ed.), Literary Theory after Davidson, University
Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Davidson, Donald, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Philosophical
Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, ed. Richard E. Grandy and
Richard Warner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Davidson, Donald, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, second edition,
Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001.
Davidson, Donald, “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” in Philosophy and
the Arts, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein,
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.
Davidson, Donald, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Eco, Umberto, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James
Joyce, translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989.
71
Puolakka, Kalle, Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation.

Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
Rorty, Richard, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in
Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980), Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982.
72
Cătălin CONSTANTINESCU
Iassy University
E-mail: catalin.m.constantinescu@gmail.com
POSTMODERN READINGS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

SPACE AND IDENTITY
Abstract: 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 postmodern sociological theories of
identity, that are referring to identity in the general framework of terms as society,
power, self and imagined communities. Identity and space are intertwined, hence
they are complex phenomena, that can more adequately be examined from the
vantage point of postmodernism.
Keywords: space, identity, literary representation, power, negotiation, social
dimension
At first reading, Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s novel suggests a huge potential

to be turned into a movie, as narration employs consistent and original spatial
developments. We could speak about productive spatiality by means of which the
author – without giving in to flat landscape descriptions – creates an actual space
in terms of visual, movie-wise possibilities.
In Florescu’s novel, the double meaning of space stands out: on the one
hand, Banat defines the main character (Jacob Obertin), on the other hand Banat
defines itself as multicultural space (hence our tendency to use in the present
research definite elements and hypotheses formulated by postmodern and
postcolonial theories of identity involving multiculturalism). Certainly, the reader
might wonder if this is not a historical rewrite of the space known under the name
73
of Banat. Throughout the reading, we have found that the space matter is closely
related to identity, with potential epistemological openings (involving
contributions from the fields of anthropology, sociology and philosophy).
The belief that the reading of the novel from reader-response criticism
perspectives is altogether possible is consolidated by accessing the website of
Heimatortsgemeinschaft (HOG) Triebswetter; on their website - Triebswetter
Geschichtliches -, we may read a special section dedicated to the novel Jacob se
hotărăște să iubească. This is proof, once again, that literary fiction, when
addressing the identity matter, can lead to massive discharge of energy and
significance. Florescu’s novel stirred violent reactions from the local community in
Triebswetter, immigrants in Germany, who projected themselves in the reading of
the fictional space to the point of questioning the author and his editor, criticizing
as follows18:
A Romanian describes Triebswetter as a village in Banat where he never
lived and imputes external habits to the German residents. He
describes them as dirty, smelly, drunk murderers, gypsy chasers,
arsonists, hostage-takers and uses names of existing persons and their
ancestors in negatively revamped stories from Triebswetter’s family
register with a powerfully eloquent, excellently formed writing
masterstroke. He really made an effort to falsify our identity and
history. Here, one finds out what the unsuspecting reader should know
and everything the novel’s promotion conceals with deliberate
vehemence.
This is not a history novel of Banat Swabians, this is not a family epic of
the Triebswetter family Obertin, this is a criminalization of our
ancestors and forefathers of Lorraine, this is a falsification of the Banat
Swabians’ identity, this is a lampoon against the Triebswetter people in
particular and Banat Swabians in general.
The actual name Triebswetter and all actually existing family names
being adopted from Triebswetter’s family register with their short-
stories, negatively revamped, must not be a subject for a novel, that
doesn’t distinguish between reality and fiction.
18 http://www.balzer-franz.de/hog-trw/Roman-English.htm.
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POSTMODERN READINGS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPACE AND IDENTITY
From my point of view, the fact that Jakob (with a “k”, the German
spelling) is the bad and evil one and Jacob (with “c”, the Romanian
spelling) is the nice and good one, reveals everything. The author plays
with identities, he can change with one letter (see Thüringer
Allgemeine).
This is an insult to, a humiliation and a discrimination of the Romanian
communist DICTATORSHIP’S VICTIMS!
The interpretation game could endlessly continue with multiple objections and
identity interpretations ethnically assumed: the responses could continue on the
part of the Romanian ethnics and so on. All these despite the fact that the author
gave enough testimony regarding the stake of this novel.19
Certainly, it can be considered an actual and extreme example of
interpretive community, as Stanley Fish formulated. He used the theoretic
meaning of the collocation to indicate that the significance of a text is built
without it, according to hypotheses and cultural options that refer to
interpretation. Fish considered that the way a person acts is related to their
belonging to interpretive communities – which extends a certain type of
interpretation and conveys a particular meaning to interpretation. It is impossible
to know whether an individual belongs to our community, because any act of
communication we would involve in to understand if we belong to that community
would be interpreted. All this happens because we are unaware of the limits of
interpretation and therefore cannot evade the community we belong to. The
19According to Cătălin Dorian Florescu, Jacob se hotărăşte să iubească is a novel about the search
for the right place, about fulfilling one’s destiny and about finding love and happiness (interview by
Virginia Costeschi for bookmag.ro, 2.11.2012). According to Florescu, the novel should be built
around a tragic human story and “it should reflect the tragedy of the entire humankind (just like a
seed contains the plant),” a tragic story told under the sign of realism and magic realism, as the
novel announced itself with its first sentence: “In any storm there hides a devil”. According to the
author, it took him more than ten months to get all the information for the book. He started from a
few original reports about Tomnatic and then about the colonists from Alsace and Lorraine. In
fact, it is all about one person that survives out of thousands. (“There is always the one who,
despite all obstacles, manages to make a life for themselves. In my novel, that one is Jacob. This is
the great tragedy of human existence, enclosed in Jacob's small scale tragedy. He is the one who,
with the help of love, manages to escape all dangers”.)
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aesthetics of reception and reader-response criticism laid emphasis on the reader

as complementary part in the literary process.
The phenomena of identity and literary representation are closely related.
In literature, representation denotes diverse moments and processes of the
literary act: the production of the text, especially the vision upon and relation to
reality, the connection to the reader, etc. The literary studies of the past decades
nourish the hypothesis that literature is a means to know man (the human model),
to emphasize its existential dimension and to analyze the literary text as
hypothetical anthropologic document (Daniel-Henri Pageaux). According to Santa
Cordoș, literature can be more and more decisively defined as a representation of
identity, as an identitarian representation, keeping the dynamics between
individual and communitarianism (Cordoș 2012).
In the universe created by Florescu, there are multiple factual aspects of
space that can be met. The enumeration follows to the discursive chronology of
the novel Jacob se hotărăște să iubească:
1) The open space of the field;
2) The enclosed space of the stable;
3) The mediating space (the inn, the street) of meetings: Seppl’s inn (note that
all innkeepers throughout history were called Seppl);
4) The space where identity is outlined (Lorraine first, as nucleus of the Obertin
genealogy, then Triebswetter).
Equally fruitful and open to comment stands the original assignment of
profound meanings to space, beyond the concrete imagery: for Jacob, the
cemetery (hiding place) is a palce of redemption and also revelation (loss of
identity as son, in favour of the character Sarelo)20:
20„Mi-am adunat tot curajul de care eram în stare, am împins placa de pe mormînt şi am scos
capul. Nu ningea şi se potolise şi vîntul. Cavourile şi pietrele de mormînt erau acoperite cu un strat
alb, gros. Nu se mai vedea bine nici măcar gardul care despărţea cimitirul de cîmp. M-am întins,
m-am scuturat şi am simţit cum mîinile şi picioarele amorţite mi se trezeau iar la viaţă. M-am
strecurat spre poarta cimitirului pe cărările abia vizibile.
[...] M-am întors în ascunzătoarea mea şi eram convins că în curînd vor pleca şi ultimii ruşi şi că
voi fi adus înapoi acasă. Am aţipit, cînd brusc, am auzit nişte glasuri care se apropiau de cimitir,
dar nu mi-am dat seama în ce limbă vorbeau. Printr-o crăpătură am văzut lumina mai multor
lămpi cu petrol, oamenii păreau să se sfătuiască între ei. Apoi au luat-o spre cavoul familiei Damas.
Acum auzeam limpede şi limba care îmi era cunoscută de mai multe zile, de la Timişoara, de cînd
ruşii căutaseră rachiu la noi.
Soarta vorbea ruseşte, dar cînd s-a oprit apoi în faţa cavoului, am auzit un glas cunoscut: «Ieşi,
băiete. S-a terminat», mi-a cerut tata. Am împins placa la o parte, apoi lumina intensă a unei lămpi
m-a făcut să-mi acopăr ochii cu braţul. Am simţit două mîini puternice care m-au tras afară, fără ca
eu să măpot împotrivi.
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“ I gathered all the courage I could find in myself, pushed the tombstone open and
looked out. It was not snowing and the wind had calmed down. The charnel
houses and tombstones were covered with a white, thick layer of snow. I couldn’t
even see the fence that separated the cemetery from the field. I stretched myself, I
shook and I could feel my numb hands and feet come back to life. I crept towards
the gate following barely visible paths. [...] I went back into my hiding place and I
was convinced that soon the last Russians would leave and I would be taken back
home. I snoozed for a while, then suddenly I heard voices coming closer to the
cemetery, but could not understand their language. Through a crack I saw the
light of a few gaslamps, the people seemed to deliberate. Then they headed for the
Damas family charnel house. At that point I could clearly hear the language I had
become familiar with for a while, since Timișoara, since the Russians searched for
liquor in our house.
Fate spoke Russian, but when it stopped in front of the charnel I could hear a
familiar voice: «Come out, boy. It’s over», my father said. I pushed the stone to
one side, then the bright light of a lamp made me cover my eyes with my arm. I
felt two strong hands pulling me out and I couldn’t resist. The first figure I
perceived was Sarelo’s, the second was my father’s. He said: «I’m sorry, boy. They
thought you were Sarelo and wanted to take him away from me. The priest himself
couldn’t convince them. You, I can forsake, but not him.».” (My translation)
Similarly, we could say Timișoara’s concert space is invested with two meanings:
space of education (during Jacob’s childhood) and hostile space at the age of
maturity (as space of betrayal and condemnation)21:
Prima siluetă pe care am observat-o a fost aceea a lui Sarelo, a doua a tatei, care a zis: «Îmi pare
rău, băiete. Au crezut că eşti Sarelo şi au vrut să mi-l ia. Nici preotul n-a putut să-i convingă. La
tine pot să renunţ, dar la el nu».” (Florescu 2014: 186)
21 „La urma urmei, eram un evadat, care sigur nu avea voie să umble liber pe străzi. Oraşul acela
care mă primise în copilărie, care fusese bun cu mine, în care rîul nu mă dorise – oraşul acela
devenise acum sumbru şi ameninţător, ca un răufăcător care voia să mă înghesuie pe o stradă
întunecată şi să-mi smulgă inima din piept. Deja îmi părea rău că mă întorsesem la Timişoara. Mă
simţeam iarăşi trădat, lăsat în voia sorţii, dar de data asta nu din cauza unei întinderi inspurtabil
de pustii, ci din pricina strîmtorii la fel de insuportabile, din cauza multelor trupuri care mi se
puneau în cale, răuvoitoare şi înveninate.
În spatele fiecărui chip bănuiam un denunţător, deşi ceilalţi se temeau, probabil, ca şi mine.
Fiecare era pentru celălalt un posibil denunţător. Cînd mă simţeam neobservat, mă uitam la
77
“After all, I was a fugitive, I clearly couldn’t wander the streets freely. The city that
had welcomed me in my childhood, had been good to me, with the river that never
wanted me, that city was now somber and menacing, like a criminal who would
jostle me to a darker street and take my heart out of my chest. I already regretted I
hadn’t gone back to Timișoara. I felt betrayed once again, left to my fate, but this
time not because of an unbearably desert vastness, but because an equally
unbearable tightness, because of the numerous bodies that stood in my way,
malicious and poisonous.
Behind any face I suspected a denouncer, although they were probably as afraid as
I was. Everyone was a possible informer in the eyes of someone else. Whenever I
felt unseen, I would look at people and I was sure I couldn’t trust any of them, I
was sure they had undergone the deepest and the least visible reversal. This time it
was an opportunistic hunger.” (My translation)
The meaning Jacob sought for was associated to the house in Timișoara,
but also to the one in Triebswetter. The search for a new meaning was defined by
the confrontation with his family, with his father, at first view an „Oedipus’ cliché”
become classic, but pragmatic and visible in the context of Jacob Obertin’s life
story (having been deprived of the son status and inheritance), as the house in
Triebswetter was actually the place that defined Jacob’s (the assumed Jakob)
father the most. As for individual identities, it must be said that the identities of
Jakob, of his father and of his mother, Elsa Obertin (the surname he takes after
marriage) are settled from the beginning of the novel. The collective history
contained in this novel can be better understood in the context of the foundation
of the Triebswetter community by the settlers coming from Lorraine 22:
“The rain stopped for a while, as if the master’s words had to be heard by
everybody as clearly as possible. In his shabby clothes, Frederick felt awkward
oameni şi eram sigur că n-aş fi putut avea încredere în nici unul, că în ei se petrecuse cea mai
profundă, cea mai puţin vizibilă răsturnare. De data asta era o foame oportunistă.” (Florescu 2014:
262-263)
22 „Ploaia s-a oprit puţin, ca şi cum vorbele stăpînului trebuiau să fie auzite de toţi cît se poate de
clar. În hainele lui sărăcăcioase, Frederick se simţea nelalocul lui lîngă domnii aceia, care fuseseră
căraţi în spate pînă la platformă, ca să nu-şi murdărească cizmele.
«Frederick Obertin, vă numesc judecător al satului... » Baronul s-a întrerupt, apoi s-a uitat
neajutorat într-o parte şi a întrebat în şoaptă: «Avem deja un nume pentru sat?». Toţi au ridicat
din umeri, nici la asta nu se gîndise nimeni pînă atunci.
«Pe asemenea vreme tulbure, excelenţă, nu se poate numi decît Trübswetter», a şoptit la rîndul lui
Frederick.” (Florescu 2014: 220)
78
near those gentlemen, who had been back carried to the platform so they wouldn’t
get dirt on their boots.
«Frederick Obertin, I name you judge of the village... » The baron paused, looked
helplessly to one side and whispered: «Do we have a name for the village yet?».
Everybody raised their shoulders, this was yet another matter no one had thought
of before.
«In such a troubled weather, Your-excellency, it could only be called
Trübswetter», Frederick whispered back.” (My translation)
The construction of identity is a social practice meant to convey the
possibility of identification with or in opposition with other individuals’ or
collectivities’ identity during the process of social interaction. The construction of
identity is a continuous process that takes the form of action and reaction in a
social context. To examine the expression of identity in a certain process of
interaction can contribute to the understanding of motivations for expressing that
identity and thus it can explain interaction and the processes through which
individuals and collectivities chose to settle their identity at one point in history.
Also, the construction of identity implies debate on the topic of community and
belonging.
Identity can be multiple, fractured or mixed in the context of
reformulations brought by psychoanalysis, structuralism, post-structuralism or
feminist criticism. Some interpretations state that the interest in identity and the
politics of identity can be considered a consequence of the relation between
marginalization (associated to the politics of resilience) and affirmative
construction of identity (associated with the politics of difference).
Literature is a typical case of “convention,” if we were to borrow
terminology from postcolonial studies of anthropology: Akhil Gupta and James
Ferguson (1997, 2001) talk about “convenient fiction,” that is, a type of fiction
everybody has agreed upon and that became a convention itself. The agreed-upon
fiction that sets culture in specific spaces occupied by certain peoples is a type of
fiction that does not apply to the present-day world and probably never has.
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The two authors (Gupta, Ferguson 2001: 33-51) challenge the classic
anthropological hypothesis according to which cultural identity is coherent with
space or place. The term “culture” is multidimensional, progressive, and
disputable rather than essentialist – culture would never be given, but always
negotiated. Foucault’s discourse on the relation between knowledge and power
shouldn’t go ignored in the debate on identity. When they drew up the cultural
maps with the purpose of compressing and organizing the world, anthropologists
described cultures as being essentialist. According to Gupta and Ferguson, the
world is made up of “hierarchically interconnected” and not inherently
fragmented spaces. Instead of assuming that each space has an autonomous
identity directly connected to a community, Gupta and Ferguson look into
hierarchical power relations of interconnected spaces that create the fixed
identities. From this perspective, it can be considered that the process that leads
to the idea of fixed identity belongs to colonial history (Edward Said states the
same in Orientalism).
In order to maintain the hierarchical relation between spaces, it is crucial to
strengthen the importance of the idea of collective identity that is different from
other communities – in a hierarchical order though. A collective identity is always
based on its being different from others. In order to maintain the superiority of
the colonizer’s space, the identity of the colonized is constantly undermined to the
point of turning weaker compared to the colonizer’s. Similar to Edward Said’s
orientalism, Gupta and Ferguson explore the historic processes to construct
difference by forcing the reconsideration of “convenient-fiction.” According to
Gupta and Ferguson, the relation between identity and space sheds (a different)
light on the construction of the subject (the individual) and leads to the reflection
of another correlated phenomenon: the resilience. The emotional structure that
allows the significant relationship to the particular places established and
experimented in a personal, specific manner implies the imperative designation of
the “self” and “the other” (ego and alter), by means of identifying with larger
collectivities. Gupta and Ferguson borrowed the term “resilience” from theorists
such as Sherry Ortner (1995), Lila Abu-Lughod (1990), Martha Kaplan and John
Kelly (1994), but the fundamental significance of the term belongs to Michel
Foucault (The Subject and Power, 1983). A few clarifications become necessary:
80
1) The subject, in Foucault’s vision, is possible and belongs to someone by

means of control and addiction. The subject is linked to its own identity
through conscience and self-knowledge.
2) Power means a complex strategic situation in a certain society. According to
Foucault, power can only exist when integrated in a disparate field of
possibilities and it is not necessarily the natural result of a consensus.
3) Resilience becomes relevant when related to “the strategies of power,” and
these strategies are mobile, multiple and changing.
Gupta and Ferguson regard resilience as an experience that constructs and
reconstructs the identity of the subject. As form of experience, the effect of
resilience on the identity of the subject can be transforming and can also lead to
the reconfirmation or invigoration of the existing identities, ironically contributing
to their dominion. Resilience, as part of the identity equation, can be met in
Michel de Certeau’s work (L’Invention du Quotidien, 1980; The Practice of
Everyday, 1984), as Kevin Hetherington (1998) pointed out.
Going back to Foucault, identities can be understood only as relations of
separation from others – seen as category entities. For the experience of resilience
to produce change within the subject, it must be able to be connected to some
forms of practice of collectivity. Here, representation plays and important part.
The representation of resilience is conclusive in the process of legitimation that
takes place in the context of identity authentication.
At the level of emotional structuring that we mentioned earlier, the most
special characteristic of the “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams) must be
underlined in the context of the debate on identity: “the opportunity” (Schmitt,
1986), to which another dimension adds: identity and identification are tightly
related to delicate matters, such as belonging and exclusion.
The social space and the affirmation of identity are deeply interdependent.
The construction of identity seen as a process of identification is a process of
cultural space awareness (Hetherington, 2011: 17). This process leads to the
creation of symbolic spaces rather than the adoption of an existing one. Identity is
81
not acquired only by identifying with groups of individuals who share the same
beliefs, but by use of apparent, expressive and integrated performative repertoires.
Earlier on we asserted that places, spaces are viewed from the angle of the
structure of feeling. Within micro-societies, rituals involving transgressions can
take place without menacing the order of those societies; the low level of social
differentiation implies the fact that these transformations, acting as ritual
processes, serve rather to reproduce the everyday life of those societies then to
endanger them. Foucault (1986) calls such spaces “heterotopias.” Their purpose is
to provide a precise location where social structures are challenged by “egalitarian
communities” that develop affective social forms with the purpose of restoring or
multiplying structures of rules, norms, social identities. The space of identity, also
space of resilience or change can produce alternative social orders.
The supposed isomorphism of space, place and culture contributes to the
fiction of culture as an objective phenomenon associated with a determined space,
creating problems when it comes to the cultures of a multicultural space. As we
know, the term multiculturalism was produced with the desire to subordinate the
plurality of cultures in a certain frame of national identity. And the term “sub-
cultures” attempts to justify the preservation of different cultures in relation to the
dominant culture in a common geographic space. Postcolonial studies (Gupta,
Ferguson 2001: 35) sought to explain whether the phenomenon of colonization
leads to the creation of a “new culture” both for the colonizers and the colonized
and whether it might undermine the idea that nation and culture are isomorphic.
The relation between space and culture is a central theme in postcolonial studies.
Social change and cultural transformation are situated and analyzed in
interconnected spaces. Inherently fragmented spaces assumed by the definition of
anthropology as study of cultures (plural) should be taken into consideration
under the aspect of natural separation, and not as being hierarchically
interconnected. This is the reason why cultures and social mutations become an
element of the phenomenon of differentiation through contact, not of cultural
contact (Gupta, Ferguson 2001: 35). Basically, these two authors suggest shifting
emphasis from the dialogic relation of geographically separated societies to
exploring the processes of production of “cultural differences” in a world that
brings together interconnected, interdependent, cultural, social, and economic
spaces.
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As can be noticed, the representation of space in social sciences is

dependent and in close correlation to images of rupture and disjunction. As Gupta
and Ferguson noticed, the discontinuity premise represents the real starting point
in the theorization of the contact between cultures and societies. And today it is
quite accepted the idea that the identity of a place occurs when it has a specific
contribution in a system of hierarchically organized spaces and cultural
construction, as a community.
According to Hetherington, identity is a phenomenon that can be absorbed
by the debate on identification and organization, and, of course, spatialization. To
a certain extent, it can mean identification to a certain place, a particular, special
place either at local or national level. It can also mean a place, a space for the
affirmation of identity. Hetherington integrated
Michel Maffesoli’s (1996), Raymond Williams’ (1965) and partially Carl Schmitt’s
(1986, 1988) theories, attesting that expressivity is of utmost importance when the
process of expressive construction of identity and the politics of identity are taken
into consideration (literature is a beneficial field for such constructions).
With regard to the identity theme, life story structures are viewed as less
firm and certain, whereas the possibilities to write conventional narratives on
family, work or space diminish (Hetherington 2011: 23). Literature (including
fictional biographies) would not be possible outside the reality of the human
beings inventing their own stories through subjectivity, apart from their identity.
Hetherington explored the role that expressive forms of collective identity play in
the development of individual identity. The purpose is to constitute an adequate
environment for the study of identity, adopting the anthropologic approaches of
identity construction, associated to symbolism and expression.
Fundamentally, identity is based on belonging, expression and expressing, public
and practical assuming, identification and conscience.
In their introductory study (“Introduction: Framing and Reframing Land
and Identity”) to Land and Identity (2012), Christine Beberich, Neil Campbell,
and Robert Hudson noticed that the idea of territory served for a long time as
83
foundation for the idea of nation and state, as expression of identity and
populated land. The territory, the home, the identity come across as themes
resuscitated and redefined by cultural studies and postcolonial criticism, under
the influence of Henri Lefebvre, who asserted that “the production of space” owes
to the fact that space has been populated and used by all the theories in the past,
so now it may seem neuter, being still so ideological and political. Edward Soja
confirms Lefebvre’s idea (and he cites him), according to which space is literally
filled with ideologies: “Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and
politics [...] Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural
elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It
is a product literally filled with ideologies”. (Soja 1989: 80)
In reference to the negotiation and interpretation involved in the process of
space identification, it has been affirmed (Beberich, Campbell, Hudson 2012: 35)
that landscape – as describable territory in all narratives, be they fictional or not –
is that complex, multiple territory of experiences that are going to be read, felt,
imagined, used. Beberich, Campbell, and Hudson state that Henri Lefebvre and
Homi K. Bhabha transformed the meaning of territoriality (through criticism of
the idea of neutrality), justifying the land is contested and marked by ideological
fights first and foremost, to the detriment of the meaning of political, poetic, and
even physical territoriality.
In fact, Edward Soja emphasized that the term “spatial” (unlike adjectives
such as “social,” “political,” “economic,” and even “historical” – which suggest
human activities) indicate rather a physical or geometric image, outside of the
social context or social action, as part of the environment, of the social structure,
instead of formative structure of society. To Soja, spatiality means “socially-
produced space,” which he favors over the imprecise alternation “human
geography”/“social space”. (Soja1989: 80)
What else can a human settlement like the Obertins’ Triebswetter in Jacob
se hotărăşte să iubească be? The given space is different from the “socially-based
spatiality,” that is, the space of social production and organizing. The perfect
example: Florescu’s Triebswetter constitutes “spatiality” and not simply “space”.
Space itself can have a primordial character, but the organization and significance
of space is a product of social shift, transformation, and experience. (Soja 1989:
79-80)
84
In our view, the most pertinent analysis model is Stuart Hall’s (The
Question of Cultural Identity, 1992, second edition in 1997). He shows that
cultural identity is both a phenomenon of becoming and a state of being. Identity
is subject in a game played by history, culture, and power. In fact, for us to
understand identity, Hall suggests the distinction among three types of identity
(Hall 1992: 597):
1) subject of Enlightenment discourse,
2) sociological subject,
3) postmodern subject.
The Enlightenment subject of identity took into consideration the concept of
individual, unique human being, fully centered, rational and conscientious. The
essential center of the self was the identity of the person.
The sociological subject of identity confirms that the essence of the (human)
subject is not autonomous anymore and that it is formed in relation to the
significant Other, mediating values, significance, and symbols (that is, culture).
This interactive definition belongs to George Herbert Mead or Charles Horton
Cooley, labeled “symbolic interactionism,” following the footsteps of Scottish
moral philosophy (Ferguson, 1792; Smith, 1759) which advanced a theory of
identity preoccupied by the nature of the self.
“Structural symbolic interactionism” comes from Sheldon Stryker (Symbolic
Interactionism: A Social Structural Version, 1980) and designates a set of ideas
on the nature of the individual and the relations between individual and society.
Symbolic interactionism is essentially a construction of social reality: when the
reality of a situation is defined, that situation becomes a significant reality.
The postmodern subject is represented as not having a fixed identity. Therefore
we think it is very appropriate to include national identity in the larger frame of
cultural identities. According to Hall, the national culture we are born within is
one of the basic sources of cultural identity. (Hall 1997: 611)
National identity is not something one is born with, but a reality obviously formed
and transformed in relation to representation. Nation is not just a political entity;
85
it is something that produces significance, that is, a system of cultural

representation. The individuals are participants to the idea of nation as it is
represented in its national culture. And a nation is a symbolic community. (Hall
1997: 612) National cultures are modern creations. By means of national
education systems and standardization of one single vernacular language inside a
nation, national cultures have become a key-factor of industrialization and a
stimulus of modernity.
A national culture implies symbols and representations, being – primarily – a
discourse, in other words, a way of constructing significances that influence and
organize both our societies and our conception about communities. National
culture constructs identities producing significances related to the nation we can
identify to – an imagined community (Benedict Anderson), especially at the level
of discourse. And the discourse of national culture is not as modern as it may
seem. According to Hall, this discourse constructs identities ambiguously placed
at the border between past and future. He cites Immanuel Wallerstein and
emphasizes his observation: the nationalist ideologies of the modern world are
ambiguous expressions of the desire to be universally assimilated and,
simultaneously, to turn to the particular, reinventing differences. To conclude,
national culture works as a source of cultural significance, as axis of identity and
as system of representation. Hall adopts Ernest Renan’s formula referring to the
constitutive elements of national unity: the memory of the past, the desire to live
together, the perpetuation of heritage. (Hall 1997: 616) We should preferably refer
to the elements of a discursive mechanism and not to unified national cultures. As
there are profound divisions and differences, they are unified by means of
exercising different forms of cultural power.
The sociological theory of identity elaborated by Peter Burke and Jan E.
Stets (2009) lays emphasis on correlated significance of identities and behaviours,
inspired by William Powers and the idea of perceptual control. The concept of
identity can be developed inside territories of symbolic interaction, but to Burke
the control of perceptions is more important than the control of behaviour, which
Powers considers dominant. For Burke and Stets, identities can be related to key-
concepts of structural symbolic interaction.
Identity would represent a set of significances which define the individual
when either of them plays an important part in society, belongs to a certain group
86
or assumes particular traits and characteristics which lead to their identification

as unique human beings. (Burke, Stets 2009: 3) Human individuals have multiple
identities because they play multiple parts, belong to several groups and assume
multiple personal traits; the significances of these identities are shared by the
members of society. The theory of identity aims to describe and to explain the
specific significances of multiple identities that individuals claim, the way
identities influence behaviour, thinking and emotional life, the way identities keep
us connected to society. Sociologists are interested to understand the nature of
social structures, of forms and their models, the way they develop and transform.
Social interaction appears between identities (or roles), not necessarily
between persons. According to Burke and Stets, interaction also means the
meeting point of two perspectives: agents and structure. To understand it, we
need to keep in mind the two levels: individual and society. The examination of
social action and especially interaction highlights two different realities: the use of
symbols and the use of signs. Ever since Herbert Blumer (1962), it has been
considered that individuals use symbols (words, language, and things designation)
within symbolic interaction in order to eliminate the chaos in the world.
Symbols offer significances for the designated objects and categories. Also, they
constitute the foundation of behaviour expectations for those involved in the
process of social interaction. In their turn, these behaviours are symbolic and
subject to convention. Inside social interaction, it is not behaviours themselves
who prevail, but their significances. This is why Blumer referred to symbolic
interaction while Stryker underlined where these interactions take place (in
society) and the fact that they depend on structures: symbolic social interaction.
Identity can be either personal or social. The social one is based on the
individual’s being part in a group; the personal one is based on the consciousness
of the individual who sees himself different, unique in relation to other
individuals. Role identity is based on the individual’s social structural position. In
the theory of role identity, significance is derived partly from culture, partly from
distinct interpretation of role by individuals.
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Individual identity would be derived from undertaking the other’s role in a

situation, thus responding to their expectations; collective identity is derived from
cognitive processes, such as group classification – when someone sees themselves
as embodiment of the prototype inside the group –, and group evaluation – when
someone evaluates positively the members of the group but negatively the people
outside it. Collective identities cultivate conformity, associated to a group. (Burke,
Stets 2009: 121-122)
Yet, the distinction between role identity and social identity is primarily analytic,
because in reality role identities and social identities are often mixed. When social
identity activates itself in a certain situation, we witness a process of
depersonalization, through a shift of perspective: from unique individual to
member of the group, from “I” to “we”, so that personal identity and social identity
represent exclusive and mutual bases of self-definition.
We think that in the analysis of identity at both literary and cultural level,
the most applicable approach takes into consideration the postmodern concept of
identity, as the postmodern subject of identity is one of fragmentation. In
literature we come across contradictory, unpaired, multiple identities, as they are
defined by Stuart Hall: „Identity becomes a ‘moveable feast’: formed and
transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed
in the cultural systems which surround you.” (Hall, 1992: 277)
To conclude, the perspective of postmodernism is the one bringing a more
nuanced and articulate understanding of the complex phenomenon of identity
construction.
References:
Berberich, Christine, Campbell, Neil, Hudson Robert (eds.) (2012). Land

and Identity. Theory, Memory and Practice, Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi
Burke, Peter J., Stets, Jan E. (2009). Identity Theory, Oxford: Oxford
University Press
Cordoş, Sanda (2012). Lumi din cuvinte. Reprezentări şi identităţi în
literatura română postbelică, București: Cartea Românească
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Costeschi, Virginia (2012). „Cătălin Dorian Florescu: ‘Vreau să văd

puhoiul acela de oameni care să meargă la un eveniment literar ca la un meci de
fotbal: cu mare pasiune’”, in: bookmag: http://bookmag.eu/catalin-dorian-
florescu-interviu/, accesed on 08.01.2015.
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totenwelt-1.9749774, accessed on 09.01.2015
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Hall, Stuart, Held, David, Hubert, Don, Thompson, Kenneth (eds.),
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Hetherington, Kevin (1998). Expressions of Identity: Space,
Performance, Politics, London: Sage Publications
Heimatortsgemeinschaft (HOG) Triebswetter: http://www.balzer-
franz.de/hog-trw/Roman-Salut.htm., accessed on 09.08.2015
Oyserman, Daphna, Elmore, Kristen, Smith, George (2012). „Self,
Self-Concept and Identity”, in: Mark R. Leary and June Price Tangney (eds.),
Handbook of Self and Identity, New York: The Guildford Press: pp. 69-104
Soja, Edward W. (1989). Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion
of Space in Critical Social Theory, New York, London: Verso
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Gupta, Akhil, Ferguson, James (1997/2001) „Beyond ‘Culture’: Space,

Identity, and the politcs of Difference”, in: Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson (eds.),
Culture, Power, Place. Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Duke University
Press, pp. 33-51
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Cristina DIAMANT
Faculty of Letters, Babeş-Bolyai University

Cluj-Napoca, România
E-mail: cristina.c.diamant@gmail.com
REVERSE EKPHRASIS AND BAKHTINIAN RE-ACCENTUATION:

CODING ALICE AS A NYMPHET IN GRAPHIC NOVELS
Abstract: 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 different intercultural negotiations. This paper is a piece
of reader-oriented criticism which sets out to explore the visual semiotics at play,
especially the meanings conveyed by the particular use of frames, the selection of
proxemics, social cues, angles, even of the coloring itself.
The two graphic novels to be explored, Moore′s Lost Girls (2006) and Hoshino′s
Heart no Kuni no Alice/Alice in the Country of Hearts (2008) present interest as
(sub)cultural “translations” within the framework of pop culture. Their framing of
ethical concerns differs from that of the so-called “high-brow” literature or of the
mainstream throw-away sensationalist writings that proliferate various images of
willing nymphets. Naturally, aesthetics also remains to be a concern, given the
markedly visual nature of these works, with their meaning and appeal emerging from
a combination of image and text. The pressing questions to be addressed are what to
show and how to do it, especially how to code her image and “translate” it in the
culture of the artist, all while adapting beauty ideals so that the image of the Victorian
era girl and the nymphet collide. The last point is especially problematic since, to
Nabokov, the nymphet only exists in the eye of the nympholept. He explains the
failures of Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne by showing that their films made her
91
conventionally attractive and, thus, obscured the very deviance and particular
distorted vision of the nympholept, which amplifies some elements rather than
others. Dolores Haze was chosen not for a budding womanly sexuality, but especially
for her underdeveloped, tomboyish physique unto which the nympholept could
project his desires for a fairytale-like frozen time. The two portrayals of Alice look like
ordinary girls removed from the image of the real Alice Liddel, as they are instances
of reverse ekphrasis and visual quotation, being reinterpretations of the already
classic, further popularized by Disney, image of a blonde girl in a blue maid-like
dress.
Key words: cultural convention, gaze, nymphet, nympholept, re-accentuation
*Disclaimer: Early versions of several paragraphs included here in an edited and

expanded form were originally published in the 1/2015 Echinox issue on comics
(https://issuu.com/echinox/docs /2015_nr_1_-_comics) and the 2015 volume
containing the proceedings of the international students′ conference Research and
Education for a Knowledge-Based Society which took place in Sibiu between the 15th
and the 17th of May 2014.
“Alicious, twinstreams twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland?”

(James Joyce)
More than half a century has passed since Nabokov first published Lolita and a
strange phenomenon is to be observed. His nymphet’s name has come to mean,
according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, simply “a
seductive adolescent girl” (Patnoe 2002, 112) or, if one is to rely on the Merriam-
Webster Dictionary, a “precociously seductive girl”. It would seem that the collective
memory has chosen to take for granted what Humbert Humbert said before giving
the account of their first sexual encounter: “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury!...I am
going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me” (Nabokov 2010,
132). A Nabokovian good reader, however, the kind who would “notice and fondle
details”, as defined by Nabokov on the very first page of “Good Readers and Good
Writers”, will also notice that this is not the Dolores Haze of the novel. What is now
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REVERSE EKPHRASIS AND BAKHTINIAN RE-ACCENTUATION: CODING ALICE AS A NYMPHET IN
GRAPHIC NOVELS
happening in the academia, but even more so in popular culture, is a proliferation of

Lolitas which complicate further our reading of the novel. Should one wish for fewer
Lolitas or even for just the one imagined by Nabokov? Some critics prove to be more
optimistic than others and, in this respect, Peter Clanfield and Tim Conley show in “
‘You Talk Like a Book, Dad’: Pedagogical Anxiety and Lolita ” (2005) that the many
present day Lolitas populating culture as alternative versions, some more or less
nuanced than others, may not only embody a potentially instructive range of
(mis)readings of Nabokov’s narrative, but the source text itself, with its own often
dramatic interior struggle between voices for narrative dominance, also offers us
valuable ways of reading contemporary developments both in popular culture and in
the academia.
Consequently, the many re-readings and (sub)cultural translations of Lolita,
including the so-called “kinderwhore”, are to be regarded as what Mikhail Bakhtin
terms “re-accentuations” or intergeneric transpositions: the inevitable process of
“images and languages” mutating their meanings and interpretations since our very
definitions and connotations of words, tropes, or discourses also change in a socio-
historical context. As Bakhtin puts it, “Every age re-accentuates in its own way the
works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the
uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-accentuation” (Bakhtin in
Clanfield and Conley 2005, 21). However, we are not free to escape the warning
against potential uncritical acceptance of re-accentuations. These are dangerous since
they may significantly oversimplify or otherwise distort one’s image of the master text
to the point where the original trope is virtually unfamiliar to a contemporary
audience. The case of Lolita in particular, with its strongly marked rich, dialogic
nature, means that it is also more prone to re-readings and to being re-accentuated in
other times, places, or, as we shall see, in other media. While Bakhtin focuses on
novels, he also acknowledges the importance of the third re-accentuation, that “of
images during their translation out of literature and into other art forms” (Bakhtin in
Clanfield and Conley 2005, 21). Notable examples of erroneous re-accentuations,
which do more harm than the little good of spreading the word about the novel,
include the March 1992 issue of Esquire magazine, which happily announced that
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“Humbert Humbert may have been mad, but he wasn’t crazy. He knew a good
nymphet when he saw one. And damned if little Dolores Haze didn’t know what she
was getting herself into. But, of course, all younger women are not Lolita.” (Clanfield
and Conley 2005, 21-22). From victim-shaming to attempts of lending the nymphet a
voice, as, for example, Kim Morrissey does in “Poems for Men who Dream of Lolita”,
it is almost with no surprise that we answer the media’s coverage of the case of the
1992 “Long Island Lolita”, Amy Fisher, the teenager who shot the wife of her much
older lover. Both Time and Newsweek used references to Lolita rather than “Fatal
Attraction” (1987), although this film was the one to include a jealous, murderous
young female figure. This seems to suggest that Lolita is “more broadly recognizable
as an icon of aggressive feminine sexuality” (Clanfield and Conley 2005, 23)., and so,
in the eyes of the many, Lolita has metamorphosed from being the victim into the
perpetrator. Another re-accentuation to keep in mind is that of Marianne Sinclair’s
1988 book, Hollywood Lolita: The Nymphette Syndrome in the Movies: through the
selection operated, the implicit message is that a nymphet (or, to use her spelling,
“nymphette”) simply is one, and, as she is not brought into becoming one, there is no
issue of consent. The graphic novels to be used in this paper for an analysis of the
ways in which the nymphet status can be visually coded go against this commonplace
misconception in ways that privilege an experienced reader’s understanding.
As numerous critics have observed, it is the double-voicing at the heart of the
novel which is essential for a proper understanding of the effect of Humbert on the
young Dolores Haze. This effect was also achieved through the use of transgressed
conventions not just limited to describing Lolita as especially prone to appreciating
cinema-like gimmicks. Elizabeth Power′s “The Cinematic Art of Nympholepsy: Movie
Star Culture as Loser Culture in Nabokov’s Lolita” (1999) draws our attention to the
fact that “Humbert defends his molestation not in terms of a literary but in terms of a
cinematic romanticism. The nymphetry that Nabokov puts at Humbert’s disposal is
more notable for its filmic than its literary artifice” (Power in Clanfield and Conley
2005, 25). If the original text already employed conventions of different visual media,
it would seem only natural to expect said media to pick up Lolita using more or less
the same cinematic strategies. Arguably less optimistic than some popular culture
enthusiasts, Elizabeth Patnoe warns us against the symbolic killing of Dolores Haze
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again and again in its appropriations of her. Even so, we should also take this with a
grain of salt, since some re-accentuations can restore some of her life and reduce the
triteness of her perception in the context of what Michel de Certeau calls in The
Practice of Everyday Life (1984) the act of “cultural poaching”.
Using the distinction theorized by Umberto Eco in The Limits of
Interpretation (1990) between “interpretation and use”, namely that “[t]o critically
interpret a text means to read it in order to discover...something about its nature. To
use a text means to start from it in order to get something else” (Eco in Clanfield and
Conley 2005, 33), we shall use two graphic novels, the American Lost Girls (2006) by
Alan Moore and the Japanese Heart no Kuni no Alice/Alice in the Country of Hearts
(2008) series when discussing the re-accentuation of the nymphet’s image. The two
operate what Roman Jakobson called “transposition”, namely a third type of
translation, through which a text changes its code, so that both the symbolic and the
iconic modes are activated. These works act like a partial intersemiotic translation, or
what one may call a “reversed ekphrasis” as the nymphet migrates from the world of
the novel to the world of images. In my defense, while the novel made a clear
distinction between Humbert’s high-brow preoccupations and Lolita’s love for the
“funnies”, Vladimir Nabokov himself, a ruined Russian aristocrat, a world-famous
lepidopterist, a distinguished academic, and an accomplished novelist who detested
second-rate art nonetheless hugely enjoyed newspaper cartoons, comic strips, and
watching comedies, being able to bring a scholarly, even occasionally pedantic
precision to discussions with his wife Vera (Vickers 2008, 2).
The difficulties one might encounter in such re-readings are due to the fact
that the school system tends to allow for fewer images in the classroom the older the
students are, while reality remains just as intensely visual. Outside the classroom, one
is confronted with magazines, advertisements, newspapers, and a plethora of
“iconotexts” (Peter Wagner) where text and image are interdependent and only
together establish an emerging meaning. The issue is that, since the implicit message
of the school system is that the image stage should be one an individual grows out of,
“[t]he skill of producing texts of this kind, however important their role in
contemporary society, is not taught in schools. In terms of this new visual literacy,
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education produces illiterates.” (Kress and van Leuuwen 1996, 15). It would seem as
though the Comics Code Authority got it all wrong: we should not force images out of
children’s life, but teach them so as to grow into adults who can read, “translate”, and
work with images responsibly. Currently, for most people the meaning of language is
“intentional”, even inherent in the forms, while the meaning of images is merely
“unconscious” and heavily depends upon the context. The Western tradition also
contains an age-old disdain for what is termed the “old” literacy, i.e. a reader moving
one’s lips, as well as subvocalizing are looked down upon as traces of a prior, spoken
culture that serves as a learning scaffold for inexperienced readers. This contempt is
also reserved for the “new” literacy which makes use of using images and visual
designs, especially in cyberspace, leaving all the praise for the current literacy which
is regarded as the sophisticated one, as Humbert nauseatingly tells us. When reading
graphic novels, what we need is what James Elkin calls in “Visual Studies: a Skeptical
Introduction” a “visual literacy”. They are not competences, since that would be
utilitarian and prescriptive, nor are they “visual languages” as defined by Nelson
Goodman and Umberto Eco, but what Bishop Berkeley calls the universal language of
nature. Much like what generative grammarians tell us, it may be universal, but it is
still acquired. This movement towards a “new” literacy, like Richard Rorty’s linguistic
turn, generates a whole new type of reading and one may have in mind Jacques
Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, as well as the way in which he favored a graphic
and spatial mode of writing, or Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of the philosophical
obsession with the problem of the image, which has made philosophy into a form of
iconology.
When I use the word “image” as in “the image of the nymphet”, I contrast it
with the term “picture”, since you can hang a picture, but you cannot hang an image
and “[a]n image is what appears in a picture, and what survives its destruction – in
memory, in narrative, and in copies and traces in other media” [translation mine]
(Barthes 2007, 16) and, unlike the picture, it also involves social activity and
interaction. Its meaning is intersubjective. Let us now attempt to trace the ways in
which the seeable and the sayable may clash in Alice’s story as a nymphet as explored
in the two graphic novels.
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Curiously, there is actually one reference to Lewis Carroll in Lolita, namely

when Humbert at one point makes out “a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of
combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair” (Nabokov 2010, 257). The potential erotic
ambiguity of Alice had been amply speculated before. In Lewis Carroll: A Biography
(1955), Morton Cohen writes the following:
We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles’s preference
for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the
preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to
children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that
his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared
acknowledge, even to himself. (Cohen in Vickers 2008, 26)
While this is neither the time nor the place to discuss it, it has certainly entered
popular culture and even Nabokov himself, an admirer of Carroll, hesitated in an
interview with Wisconsin Studies, speculating that:
Some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched
perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He
got away with it, as so many Victorians got away with pederasty and
nympholepsy. His were sad, scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-
undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and
dreadful charade. (Nabokov in Vickers 2008, 27)
Let us keep in mind for now that Nabokov, who translated Alice in Wonderland into
Russian, remarked that Lewis Carroll was, in a sense, the first Humbert Humbert.
The two portrayals of Alice, drawn and colored by Melinda Gebbie for the
American graphic novel and by Soumei Hoshino in the Japanese one, are those of
rather ordinary, unremarkable girls in the two drawing conventions, but neither
actually looks like the Alice Liddel for which Alice in Wonderland was originally
written. It is worth noting that the real-life Alice Liddel had short brown hair, but
that, when the book was first published and Carroll commissioned an artist to draw
the illustrations, he suggested for Alice two models, two blonde girls he had
photographed. Alice was of another world to begin with, as she had no face to be
found in reality. The Alice of Alan Moore’s graphic novel has a childish candor and an
oval face, while Soumei Hoshino’s Alice is a typical character of shōjo manga or
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Japanese graphic novels intended for a young female audience, with large, Bambi-like
eyes, tiny mouth, long, flowing hair, and elongated limbs, the nose sometimes
entirely omitted for aesthetic reasons. She is already a product of a “glocal” process
(Roland Robertson) that combines originally local traditions with global tendencies.
In the days before mass communication, beauty standards tended to vary greatly
from region to region. Most Eastern Asians showed a preference for willowy women
with small breasts as these were traditionally deemed to be graceful and attractive.
Japan, in particular, before the Emperor urged the nation to pursue Western beauty
ideals in the 1860s, praised the image of the woman who blackened her otherwise
unsightly white teeth and bound her torso to make it as narrow, cylindrical, and
curveless as humanly possible, the very opposite direction from the one taken by
Europeans using the corset.
Alice Fairchild of Lost Girls, whose last name is just another sign of the irony
omnipresent with Moore, has childish reactions, but her appearance carries hints of
the maturity to come, like Lolita in the film adaptations, while the manga’s Alice
Liddel retains cynical reactions and a youthful appearance, childish only when she
forgets to check her reactions such as when she permits Peter White to approach her
only in his “cute” rabbit form, not in his “threatening” human one. Typical of the so-
called Lolita subculture popular with young girls in Japan, especially in Harajuku and
Akihabara where there are specialized boutiques and themed cafés promoting this
identity and lifestyle bordering on the limits of age play, Alice Liddell’s dress
“deemphasized the bust and hips with a flattened bodice, high waistline, and full skirt
that extends past the knees (with volume created by layers of underskirts that further
conceal the hips). […] A Classic Lolita poses to evoke the illusion of being a very
young girl, i.e. with knees together and toes pointed inward, head slightly lilted to one
side” (Winge 2008, 53). Although different, we recognize both to be Alice because
they observe the code we are used to: both are blonde and wear the iconic blue maid-
like dress. Our recognition of them as Alice is instant, but when contrasting them it
becomes self-evident that visual communication, too, is always coded. The only
reason we do not always feel it as such is when we are not passively aware of the code
because we are familiar with it. Wonderland becomes Humbert’s elected world, “a
paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flame” (Nabokov 2010, 168), of bliss and
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immorality strangely coupled. Here, the nymphet is an exile, “trapped within the logic
and structure of a honeymoon” (Freeman 866), struggling to make sense of an
unfamiliar setting, but she “cannot rely on the romantic cult of nature, asexual and
familial sentimentalism” (Freeman 1998, 866), while the nympholept tries his best to
remain “incurious”. The nymphet’s story is on a different route when no longer set in
the real world, as Martin Amis predicted: “No doubt the Lo-Hum story would have
worked out wonderfully, in Hollywood, in dreamworld or ad-land. But this is only
America, car-tool and lawn-sprinkler America, and Hum is Lo’s stepfather, and three
times her age, and for two years he rapes her at least twice a day” (Amis 1994, xiii-
xiv).
Another key difference between the two lies in the very use of color,
following different visual conventions, namely that of American comics visually
parodying sentimental illustrated children’s stories and fin de siècle painting while
the Japanese manga is predominantly black and white with the exception of a handful
of pages at the beginning of each volume. The Alice of Lost Girls is colored using soft
pastels which gently follow the volumes, art nouveau flatness never being complete in
the graphic novel and the colors have an occasionally dusty or smoky feeling to them.
The manga uses only block color or screentones at most because, as Tanaka suggests,
the Japanese look at the world as a system of lines while Europeans trained their eyes
for light and shadow. The consequence is the attitude towards transformations and,
in the case of sequential art, to pacing. Working with lines, “[e]ven if we change the
shape a little bit, it still looks like the same thing. Japanese people know that. But
westerners think in terms of light and shadow. If you change the light, everything
changes. Japanese people know that no matter how much you change a shape, the
elements are still there.”(Kelts 2007, 213-4). Her face also looks extremely different,
considering it is supposed to be more or less the same character. While Melinda
Gebbie’s Alice adheres to quasi-realism, the Alice of the manga is drawn without a
nose more often than not and her eyes are, canonically speaking, disproportionately
large. Before the 1960s, shōjo manga was predominantly created by men who
implicitly promoted the passive ideal of the monthly magazines such as Shōjo Kai
(Girls’ World) in 1902, and so “enlarged eyes and pupils, with long lashes; long and
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thin arms and legs; and petit noses, mouths, breasts and hips” (Gravett 2004, 75)
turned into a code which signaled youth, cuteness, and submissiveness. Anime Style
editor, Hideki Ono, speaks of this selection as subtraction, so that the shōjo main
character has “hair [that] is drawn to the fine details – every strand. But the ear is not
shown. They only draw the parts they want. The eyes are big for sensitivity, the
breasts are big, but no one wants to see nostrils, so you leave them out.” (Ono in Kelts
2007, 214). This code is reinforced in how-to manga style drawing guides for
Western audiences, so that readers are no longer shocked to see “big eyes with larger-
than-normal pupils. I also raise her eyebrows and draw her mouth slightly open to
convey her innocence. I draw a very small shadow nose to enhance her cuteness. “
(Okabayashi 2007, 250). What shōjo manga has done was actively mutate meanings,
so that large eyes are synonymous with the kokoro (heart) or the hara (belly) as
symbols of one’s inner self, while, traditionally, the outer self is located by the
Japanese in the face. Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of manga, did not take the iconic
large eyes of manga female characters from Disney only, as urban legends have it.
The Takarazuka actresses come into play since, as a child, he noticed
the actresses’ eyes, heavily highlighted with mascara and twinkling with the
reflections from the bright spotlights. He found that this stage technique for
projecting emotions through the eyes also worked in manga. [...] Tezuka also
understood that, in the unspoken affairs of the heart, the eyes are the prime
communicators of feeling, our first language. (Gravett 2004, 77)
Let us now see how Alice is first presented to the reader. The Alice of the American
graphic novel is first introduced as a body and nothing more, imposing a voyeuristic
approach as we only see her as zoomed-in body parts mediated by the mirror. The
Alice of the manga is first seen waking up from a noon nap in the garden, just as
unknowing and unsuspecting as the reader for whom the first page, with its cryptic
reference to a “game” about to start, is a puzzle. We then observe her not in a moment
of solitude, but interacting with her older sister, Lorena, in a dialogue which
foreshadows the structure of the narrative to soon unfold. If the book Alice’s sister
reads in Lost Girls is simply an untitled one, boring Alice because it lacks pictures
and it is “improving”, thus promoting Victorian ideals, Lorena’s reading is a mise-en-
abyme of Alice’s adventure, announcing the ambiguity obtained through refracting
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mirrors: is it at once a psychology book, a fairy tale, and a novel. Notice the
psychoanalytical overtones in her discussion with Nightmare and her anxiety
afterwards, as she is firm in her belief that Wonderland, where everyone desires her,
must be her own pathetic delusion precisely because she feels undesired in reality,
recognizing what Humbert called “the Freudian prison of thought.”, (Nabokov Lolita:
A Screenplay, 728). Alice’s secondary dilemma, projected over the image of a
hypothetical faceless prince in a sparkly background and later fading into a close-up
frame of her memory of Blood, the Mad Hatter, first flirting with her, is revealed in
fairy tale-like terms. While she mockingly muses that, seeing the proverbial prince on
a white horse would make her happier to see him fall off that horse, she stops to
wonder what her desires would be if he was not, in fact, any sort of prince on a white
horse to begin with. Alice is dissatisfied with the end of the story, which is taken
straight from Alice in Wonderland, and so deems the whole story meaningless if “So
she wakes up, is that it?” (Hoshino 2008, 4). However, Peter White, the Prime
Minister of Wonderland who is a man-looking rabbit, kidnaps her when Alice is
pretending to be asleep as she hopes that she does not have to react and deal with his
absurdity. Consequently, she is abducted in body, not in spirit.
What both graphic novels take from Lolita and express in the conventions of
the new media is what Frederick Karl identifies as the ambiguity of “a claustral,
enclosed feeling” masked by the emphasis on “spatiality and constant movement”
(Karl in Giles 2000, 13). It is worth remembering how Nabokov suggested that the
initial spark for the novel was the first drawing of a monkey: the bars of its cage. The
irony hidden in the Beardsley School scene of the novel surfaces when Miss
Cormorant, advocating for a better understanding of the children of the new world,
remarks that “We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things.
Words without experience are meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson
care for Greece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?” (Nabokov 2010, 168).
She might be unknowingly selecting the two aspects of life Dolores, transformed into
Lolita, knows very well or, rather, it is Humbert who, under the pretence of his
“photographic memory”, gains the trust of his reader and knowingly twists her words
to hint at his keeping Lolita confined despite the illusion of freedom the teenager
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might have enjoyed. The nympholept does not pamper her, but buys/bribes her while
seeing Lolita as commodity herself, while he is already busying himself with thoughts
about other nymphets for when she will have outlived her use. Alarmingly even, he
indirectly makes her his accomplice in his fantasy, indulging the thought that he
might enjoy, through her, a Lolita the Second and even a Lolita the Third. The same
looming fear of the inevitable aging of the child is to be found in Fyodor Sologub’s
Melkiy bes (Petty Demon), a late decadent Russian novel found in Nabokov’s family
library which has been seen as a sort of Lolita à l’envers:
Only the children, those eternal, tireless vessels of God's joy in the earth, were
alive, and ran, and played. But sluggishness was beginning to weigh even
upon them, and some faceless and invisible monster, nestling behind their
shoulders, peered from time to time with eyes full of menace into their faces,
which suddenly went dull. (Sologub in Bethea 2004, 51)
There is a sense of both escape and confinement, a tension and interplay between the
two: Alice the nymphet may wander off, yet she is anything but free as she is trapped
by her own image which arrests the gaze of others. The subjective versus objective
distinction, which made the original novel dialogic, is not lost in the transposition,
but it is made possible in the visual by the use or absence of a perspective angle. The
reader may observe, in this respect, the American graphic novel’s preference for
objectivity and the predominantly subjective framing of the manga. The very shape of
the frames also opens new possibilities of signification. Let us take a brief overview of
what they can tell the reader. Circles, if used, are deeply ambiguous. Generally
speaking, they may denote the “endlessness, warmth, protection (Dondis, 1973: 44)”
(Kress and van Leuuwen 1996, 52). However, let us keep in mind that the more
abstract a sign is, its semantic extension also increases. Alan Moore and Melinda
Gebbie allow, at times, the reader to take comfort in this intuition of protection, but,
once one notices that the framing itself is coded, changing according to the main
story told at the time, be it that of Alice, Wendy or Dorothy, it acquires new
meanings. There is an intertext at use, namely the so-called erotic Tijuana Bibles of
the 1930s, as each chapter has 8 pages. Not surprisingly, Alan Moore appreciates
them both for breaking the stereotype against what comics can or cannot do and for
their tongue-in-cheek treatment of iconic figures, with “the sexual content seeming
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dirtier when in the context of some previously spotless cultural icon. There is also the
subversive pleasure that is to be had in puncturing the anodyne and the sexless vision
of society presented by the Sunday funnies” (Moore 2013, 48). While Wendy’s story is
told in elongated panels, giving the sense of confinement explained by her Puritan
upbringing, Dorothy’s story has panels which expand horizontally, like the hot flat
landscapes of her Kansas home, as Annalisa di Liddo observes in the chapter “Alan
Moore Comics - Finding a Way into Lost Girls” of her 2009 volume, Comics as
Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. The frames of Alice’s story are oval, signaling either
openness and endlessness or confinement, as the mirror and image which traps her.
Since angularity is usually thought to be of the mineral because “[i]n organic nature,
squareness does not exist” (Kress and van Leuuwen 1996, 52), it may hint at the
rational as opposed to the sensual. Through this, the frames of Alice’s story betray our
expectancies: we think of curvaceous lines which permit organic growth, but they are
of the crystalline world, produced, and refined through exact control.
The manga shows a marked preference for squares, which may mean either
power, progress or a force of oppression, and for trapezoids. The latter, like the
triangle, “is a (fused structure of) a participant and a vector, because it can convey
directionality, point at things. The meanings it attracts are therefore less like
‘qualities of being’ than like processes, as in the well-known revolutionary poster by
El Lissitzky” [Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919]” (Kress and van Leuuwen
1996, 53). The tendency towards angularity signals “action, conflict, tension (Dondis,
1973: 44)” (Kress and van Leuuwen 1996, 53) and, what is more, vertical elongation,
used in the most tense moments creates, through its more pronounced distinction
between top and bottom, a bias towards opposition, suggesting to the reader that
what is important will dominate the top. Because of the preference for trapezoids,
what the readers find in the manga is a plethora of examples of horizontal elongation,
generating the kind of structure in which what is positioned to the right is presented
as “Given” and what is on the left is the “New” since the Japanese read from the right
to the left. This assumption is taken for granted by the Japanese, yet it recalls, as a
code, the satiric scrolls of the artist priest Toba (1053-1140) where, “[a]s on a modern
computer, the readers’ eyes could ‘scroll’ through the landscape, moving right to left
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as the scrolls were opened out. Perhaps that flowing view and reading survives in
manga? [..] It is no accident that the vertical white gaps ‘gutters’ between frames are
frequently made to abut more closely than the horizontal gutters, in effect making
each row of frames more readable, not unlike a screen” (Gravett 2004, 18). In this
context, an attentive reader might notice that Alice is generally shown on the right,
the “Given” with which we are supposed to empathize, while the many nympholepts
craving her attention, even violently demanding it, generally take the position of the
“New”. The “Given” is information that is already familiar to the reader and which
serves as a “departure point” for the message, a kind of Archimedean point of
reference from which to reconstruct the changing fictional landscape, while what is
positioned on the other side is presented as “New” or information not yet known to
the reader, hence worth of special attention. The extensive use of close-ups in the
manga owes a great deal to its implicit goal of making the reader become emotionally
involved, but it also makes manipulation possible. When participants in an image are
connected by a vector, we are urged to believe that there is a narrative. If the process
between the participants is a transactional one, then one of the characters is an Actor
and the other is the Goal. If the process is reactional, then there is no Actor, but a
Reacter, and no Goal, but a Phenomena. The problem arises when we see close ups of
non-transactional Reacters who look bored, animated, or puzzled, at something we
cannot see. This can become a source of representational manipulation. A caption
may, for example, suggest what the Reacter is looking at, but, needless to say, it can
be something else than the object of the Reacter’s gaze when the picture was taken or
when the thought found in the speech bubble was formed (Kress and van Leuuwen
67). Therefore, the ample use of close-ups and medium shots of the nympholepts only
heighten the sense of confusion the reader experiments.
Let us now ponder why the mirror frame is significant only in Lost Girls,
while the manga makes use of more or less the same imagery (roses and potions, for
example) while showcasing no mirror proper, only physical and psychological
doubles. What the manga focuses on is the dynamism of the story, the fluidity of
character. Let us not forget that the ideal shōjo is more than selfless: she is I-less. The
American graphic novel uses the mirror both as framing and as a narrative excuse,
tying together the various episodes Alice recollects. As Roland Barthes remarks, the
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mirror is narcissistic for the Western man, but for the Eastern, it is essentially a
symbol of the very emptiness of symbols, reflecting nothing but other mirrors. The
Eastern mirror is empty and a Tao master suggests a man’s spirit should be like a
mirror, desiring nothing and retaining nothing (Barthes 2007, 86). Had the manga
used the image of the mirror it would have been just another symbol for the defacing
of the self and that, for the Japanese, is associated with freedom and a purity that is
to be desired rather than an oppressive state. For a Western reading, though, the
mirror pluralizes what Foucault calls the heterotopic nature and it theatralizes it. The
sense of confinement is achieved in the manga through social cues, not through
framing. Whenever discussions extend over more than two or three speech bubbles,
Alice diverts her gaze, even when smiling. This may not seem much, but considering
that Nightmare has already told Alice that this is the world of her desire, a world
where she is the embodied desired ideal, let us keep in mind what Morris says about
the importance of social framing:
As he answers the girl’s last statement he begins talking and reaches the
point where normally he would look away, but instead he is still staring at
her. This makes her uncomfortable, because she is forced either to lock eyes
with him, or to look away from him while he is talking. If he continues to talk
and stare while she deflects her eyes, it puts her into the ‘shy’ category, which
she resents. If she boldly locks eyes with him, he has forced her into a ‘lover’s
gaze’, which she also resents. (Kress and van Leuuwen 1996, 126)
The medium shot (at the knees), the medium-close shot (at the waist), and the close-
up are also important in the framing at work. This is accounted for by their being
associated with different fields of vision. The close-up roughly corresponds to close
personal distance as in the case of friends or, in the case of the extreme close-up
(anything less than the head and the shoulders), it is already the intimate distance,
because we see the face or head only. A far personal distance means seeing the other
person from the waist up, as it happens with the manga’s Alice when the reader is
withdrawn from the intimate distance which normally favours empathy, yet feels
intrusive at times. Sometimes, we see the whole figure of the nympholepts, which
means that, as readers, we are at close social distance from them. These notions,
105
derived from “proxemics”, as Hall calls them, are helpful in assessing the emotional
response the manga wants to elicit. As Maurice Grosser, a portrait painter, reveals, at
a distance of more than thirteen feet, we view people “as having little connection with
ourselves”, and hence “the painter can look at his model as if he were a tree in a
landscape or an apple in a still life” (Kress and van Leuuwen 1996, 131). At a portrait
distance, “the sitter’s soul begins to appear” and, when “within touching distance, the
soul is far too much in evidence for any sort of disinterested observation” (Kress and
van Leuuwen 1996, 131). According to Sixten Ringbom in Icon to Narrative, the Rise
of the Dramatic Close Up in Fifteen Century Painting (1965), the close-up emerged
during the Renaissance for this very reason: to convey “the subtlest of emotional
relationships with a minimum of dramatic scenery” (Ringbom in Kress and van
Leuuwen 1996, 133). The medium-close shot, preferred for figures of authority, may
also convey a different meaning, since patterns of distance can also become encoded,
“voices” of a certain status being framed in a specific way. According to David Morley
and Charlotte Brunsdon in The Nationwide Television Studies (1978), close-ups are
preferred when a subject is emotional, while the breast pocket shot is the typical
framing of the “expert”. The nymphet tends to be defined by her fluid emotional
response and the nympholepts tend to withdraw knowledge from her so as to control
or manipulate her, but once this understanding of proxemics is applied to the manga,
the consistency of this strategy becomes even more visible. Another key strategy is the
point of view. The manga prefers to use the frontal angle when presenting Alice, while
when we see her in the company of other characters, what we get is an oblique view.
More strikingly, whenever one of the nympholepts is in a confrontational situation,
we get an over-the-shoulder view. What does this tell us about whom we are
supposed to empathize with? As Gunther Kress and Theo van Leuuwen explain, the
frontal angle carries a message of inclusion, an implicit statement that what is seen is
part of the reader’s world, something one is involved with, while the oblique says that
this is not part of the reader’s world, but their world. This might be the secret as to
why the reader does not feel truly disturbed reading Heart no Kuni no Alice despite
the numerous bloody scenes and its grim constant reminder that life is worthless and
people replaceable. Made to empathize with Alice, not only because we find out the
inner workings of this world at the same pace as she does since she is never slow to
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draw logical conclusions so as to accelerate this process whenever possible, we

nonetheless perceive her circumstances as alien and, though she is constantly under
threat stated and un(der)stated, we are silently reassured that she will not be among
the ones killed next.
Her position in this world is also determined through the way she frames her
desires and needs. The other characters demand things directly, while she asks for
them or even pleas, which causes an ever so subtle imbalance of power. Her scolding,
too, has none of the effects she hoped for: rather than to be taken seriously, it
becomes one of the nympholepts’ declared fetishes and they provoke her for it. The
power struggle is never too explicit as the top-down angle, the point of maximum
power, is less frequently used than the frontal angle, the point of maximum
involvement. In the American graphic novel, the situation is even more alarming;
neither Bunny nor Mrs. Redman ask Alice for sexual favors, but take advantage of her
without busying themselves with her consent. Only when Alice Fairchild grows into a
“batty old spinster”, now a nympholept herself, does she voice her desires and act
upon them directly. Both when a nymphet and when a nympholept, Alice is usually
seen from a frontal angle. The most explicit of the scenes with Mrs. Redman are,
however, seen from a top-down angle, reinforcing the unvoiced threat. Is Lost Girls,
because of its explicitness, just that, a lewd book depicting visually the wayward ways
of a young girl aging or is there something more to it? Nabokov admitted in “On a
Book Entitled Lolita” that some of his readers were misled to believe that Lolita was
pornography and “expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these
stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored and let down.” (Nabokov 2010, 299-
300). While Lost Girls does have Lewis Carroll’s Alice, here ironically named
Fairchild, engage in more and more complex erotic activities, story-telling as
catharsis, identity construction, fiction, and memory still take up a great part and the
framing is highly responsible for this. Sensual perception and the reconstruction of
the past in the form of the narrative seem to call one other, and Alice is still living the
aftereffects of a childhood cut short. In the first scene with the “talking mirror”, the
answer to the plea for a fictional diversion is a sensorial one: “Oh, I don’t know any
stories. Your little white breasts, they’re so lovely. They’ll never be as beautiful once
107
you’re grown. Will you touch them for me?” (Moore 2006, 10). Also in terms of
framing, Lost Girls mocks the pretence of omniscience, as seen in chapter 11 of Book
2, when Harold sends a letter to his boss complaining about the dullness of
Himmelgarten, while the erotic frenzy juxtaposed over his voiceover ironically
undermines all his assumptions. While the manga had us empathize with the shōjo
and experience the growing discomfort of the desire-filled gaze of the others, the
American graphic novel forces us, much like Nabokov’s screenplay version of Lolita,
not only to be voyeurs ourselves, but also to catch others in the act of peeping.
Despite this aspect, it does not achieve as great a rendering of the Bakhtian
heteroglossia as it could have.
In terms of style, the artist’s most evident visual influences in Lost Girls are
Art Nouveau and Impressionism, though volumes are not completely forsaken. What
both artistic currents have in common is the affinity for curved contours and on a
“sort of musicality”, as indicated by Dez Vylenz’s interview with Melinda Gebbie. Her
sweet lines are complemented by the influence of Impressionist painting, which
emerges from her peculiar use of color. In the same interview, Gebbie claims she told
Moore when starting to work on Lost Girls that she “want[ed] color to be an actual
part of the storytelling device” (di Liddo 142). Her soft, sensuous pastels turn colder
in Alice’s traumatic memories, as opposed to the warm nuances of Dorothy’s
narrative in Kansas. While Wolk accuses Alan Moore of formal fetishism which
generates a rather stiff narrative construct, this does not break the line started by
Nabokov. When asked by Alfred Appel, Jr. for Wisconsin Studies about the
experience of other novelists, who speak of the way in which “a character takes hold
of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action,” Nabokov retorted in Poe-like
fashion:
I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who

have had it must be very minor or insane. No, the design of my novel is fixed
in my imagination and every character follows the course I imagine for him.
I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am
responsible for its stability and truth. (Nabokov in Pifer 1978, 54)
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GRAPHIC NOVELS
In a sense, Alan Moore might be answering Victorian prudishness with Victorian

obsession for the schematic and for form. The main focus of Lost Girls is not so much
the narrative proper of the nymphet, but the political aspect of depicting her
misadventures. The issue of censorship is largely political in character: as Kendrick
puts it in The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (1987), the primary
goal of censorship is not to eradicate “obscene” materials, but to ensure that the
obscene is recognized and demarcated as such, thereby preserving society's moral
parameters (Kendrick in Giles 2000, 64). This also holds true for Japan:
For over 250 years during the Edo period (1600-1868), government control
over political expression was absolute. For many artists, dabbling in erotic
expression has always been far safer than dabbling in politics, yet still a good
way to tweak the noses of the authorities. Even today, those engaged in
producing erotic or pornographic material often have a rather romantic
image of themselves as rebels working against the establishment. (Schodt
2012, 57)
Though there is a great difference in the explicitness of the material discussed, Leslie
Fiedler, in his 1958 review entitled “The Profanation of the Child”, deemed the story
of Lolita to be “an irreligious book rather than a pornographic one” because its most
unsettling aspect is the “blasphemy against the cult of the child” and its skill at
parodying concomitant “myths of sentimentality” (Fiedler in Giles 2000, 13). Its sin
is, it would seem, making pedophilia less “unthinkable” by it depicting it
“beautifully”. The two graphic novels also contradict the Victorian image of Alice the
child, taking the young girl as the starting point and constructing the nymphet or the
shōjo of the Lolita subculture around her, not allowing the reader to forget her
existence outside the gaze which validates her as erotic object, but invalidates her as
subject.
Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and Soumei Hoshino’s Heart no Kuni no Alice both focus on
the Lolita-like image of Alice, misread by nympholepts who follow a pattern of cruelty
added to the narrative’s cruelty of pattern, but they are faced with different concerns
and operate different re-accentuations. Alan Moore confronts the erotica scare head
on and, in doing so, focuses on Alice Fairchild’s bodily and sensual experience. The
intertextuality with the Tijuana Bibles of the 1930s by means of its construction also
109
hints at the taboo at the heart of the work, and the defense of pornography given by
Monsieur Rougeur is extremely close to Nabokov’s own discussion of erotic fiction in
“On a Book Entitled Lolita”. What Alan Moore calls for is no longer making a special
case out of sexuality in fiction, also reversing the trend identified by Roland Barthes
in “The Empire of Signs”. To do so he does not escape references to aggression,
culminating with an image of a soldier in the Great War with a poppy-like wound at
the end of the graphic novel, a bitter irony after poppies had been used as Alice’s own
erotic drugged-fueled madeleine, as, in America, violence is idiomatic.
The manga is not as overtly eroticized, understandably since this would not
have served any purpose as there is already a place for hentai (perversion) in the
honne (inner nature). Alice is not shown to forget herself because of her desire as the
threat of violence always looms above her. What Soumei Hoshino sets out to show is
the constantly deferred effort of the shōjo to have her identity recognized or, at the
very least, to not have her agency called into question when the nympholepts want to
validate their claims upon her body. Essentially an “outsider” and treated as one, she
is reminded of her special status and treated as the one irreplaceable character. Like
Lolita, however, this special treatment owes everything to sheer probability and is,
thus, felt to be a transient state: Blood the Mad Hatter, Boris the Cheshire Cat, and
the Ace of Hearts all admit to knowing, in theory, what outsiders are, but they are
interested in Alice because she is the first they encounter since they have joined “the
game”. The enchanted hunters pursue the shōjo, though she refuses the ritual war
hunt. The readers never stop too much to wonder how Alice might have fallen out of
grace had another outsider arrived, but the occasional hints at “the previous game”
never allow them to get too comfortable. Having the readers empathize with the shōjo
disguises, for a while, the interest of the nympholepts as a compliment, especially
since they are framed as “experts”.
Despite their differences, both graphic novels illustrate a combination of
the sublime (and sublimated Eros) with the abject, the latter as theorized by Kristeva
in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), namely as situated “ ‘at the
crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion’, describing it as a liminal
phenomenon that disturbs identity and system by its tendency toward the ‘immoral,
sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles’ ”
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(Kristeva in Giles 2000, 55). Lolita was, for Humbert, both a fetishized substitute,
made more obvious by Nabokov’s screenplay version, and a sublime simulacrum.
Alice Fairchild suffers from fetishization more acutely, while the Alice Liddel of the
manga falls easier into the hyperreal. If Humbert addresses the reader, begging
“Please, reader…Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me…” (Nabokov
2010, 129), the nymphet is also only brought into existence by the gaze of a
nympholept and depends on his will. There is no other place where she might exist,
there is no home to return to, once her nymphic quality has been established through
verbal and visual cues, including social ones. When the Humbert of the screenplay
asks Lolita if she will leave him, she correctly asserts that she has nowhere to go.
What Humbert may dream is to be left alone in his Wonderland of choice, “my mossy
garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up” (Nabokov 2010, 18). And,
one might add, never grow out of the image projected upon them, as the
nympholept’s task is “to transform its landscape from the status of a natural
environment into a constructed, and therefore reversible, object” (Giles 2000, 11).
This is “translated” and made visible in the visual language of the graphic novels
precisely by varying the angles and frames while showing a marked preference for
some conventions over others. While some readers have deeply misunderstood Lolita
to be romantic, the graphic novels are less ambiguous about the violence of the
hierarchy. Whatever the nympholepts may claim, as Harold Bloom claims, the story
of the nymphet is not one of love, but of violation of love, of betrayed trust (of the
nymphet), and, one may add, of inevitably betrayed hopes (of the nympholept).
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Adrian TĂTĂRAN
Babeș-Bolyai University
E-mail: tataran.adrian@ubbonline.ubbcluj.ro
ANARCHISM, ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM AND THE TRANSLATION

PARADIGM
ABSTRACT: 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 aesthetical assumptions in the context of the crisis of
representation, and both encountering the same practical and theoretical difficulties.
The analysis will have two main focuses: one will examine the link between
translation and the contrarian turn of comparative literature; and the second one will
read the minoritizing model of translation through the anarchist
antirepresentationalist ethic and aesthetic, in order to illustrate their convergence as
alternative, radical lines of thought.
Keywords: anarchism, minor literature, comparative literature,

antirepresentationalism, translation paradigm.
Comparative literature and translation: the contrarian turn
“The question is", said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different
things."/ "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master –
that’s all."
Lewis Carroll
The 1993 Charles Bernheimer report on the state of comparative literature as a

field of study addressed some of the conclusions of two previous reports (the 1965
Levin report and the 1975 Greene report), with the manifest intention to specifically
115
mitigate a certain previous hostility towards translation, while stressing the ethical
engagement implied by any comparative study of literature. It also advocated the
broadening of the field of inquiry as to include the ideological, cultural, social and
institutional context in which meaning emerges. While prioritizing the study of
foreign languages, Bernheimer further mentions the inclusion of the theory and
practice of translation in the comparativist approach, arguing that
“(…) translation can be seen as a paradigm for larger problems of

understanding and interpretation across different discursive traditions.
Moreover, the comparatist should accept the responsibility of locating
the particular place and time at which he or she studies these practices.
” (Bernheimer, 1995: 44)
Equally important in the Bernheimer report is the shift of focus from the
literariness of a text, as a sort of essential property, to the study of the literary
discourse en situation, in its’ infiltrations and interactions with the other fields of
discourse and idioms shaping social differences, exposing conflicts and following
ideological power-plays. Translation in this sense is no longer to be understood as an
ancillary technique of transposing a text from a language into another as accurately
as possible, just in order to supply comparatists with much needed literary material.
Translation is comparativism already, not as method, or a set of theoretical
assumptions establishing a discipline, but as poetics, or
“(…) an elucidation of the art of making as applied to its own practices”

(Saussy, 2006: 24).
Comparatism is already translation as the operation of making visible the

encounter itself, exposing the tacit and explicit assumptions at play, the particular
dynamic of positioning that makes every encounter an open-ended experiment, a
risk.
In her response to the Bernheimer report, Emily Apter places the emergence of
American comparative literature in the circumstances of the Second World War
intellectuals’ exile from Europe. This, argues Emily Apter, gave a special nuance to
the comparativist inquiries, a certain “epistemological placelessness”, a “criticism
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ANARCHISM, ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM AND THE TRANSLATION PARADIGM
wilderness” founded on “linguistic estrangement” and “secession from the main

culture” (Apter, 1995: 89). It made “homelessness” the mode of critique and the
melancholic “exilic consciousness” an engine of literary and existential praxis.
Comparative literature could thus be (re)read as “comparative exile”, a marginal,
denationalized space of “not-being-there”, perpetually haunted by an “eviction
scenario” (Apter, 1995: 93).
While Saussy’s predecessors, including Bernheimer, still expressed with
various intensities in their reports the concern that comparative literature hadn’t
succeeded in establishing a coherent method, a perimeter or a clear disciplinarily,
giving thus voice somehow to a seemingly inherited fear of forced eviction, the 2006
report insists that the statute of “counterdiscipline” (Saussy, 2006: 11) has not been a
vulnerability. Comparative literature, Saussy argues, has gained traction as a set of
ideas and practices, rather than as an established and fixed academic discourse. By
becoming a pragmatic art of the in-between, also by showing a constant hospitality to
“miscellaneous, disfavored, outmoded or too-good-to-be-true approaches” (Saussy,
2006: 34), comparative literature opened up an experimental model of encounter
and translations across linguistic, cultural or political borders. Therefore it is not just
another discipline that needs to be reified into an institutional identity, but a new
paradigm of understanding, that brings an ethic of (co)operation into play, teasing
meaning out of disciplinary enclosure, producing it heretically against hegemonic
accumulations, and as a “contrarian model” (Saussy, 2006: 27).
The specification of literary study as a form of resistance by Saussy, especially
as a form of resistance against a global model of communication and informational
economy, as well as his preference for a counterdisciplinary epistemic model, might
appear at odds with comparative literature’s own functional premises, seemingly
fueled by a dream of common understanding. What is to be resisted though is a
comparativist triumphalism which, under the guise of a consensus project,
reproduces a uniform domination and framing pattern, fully informed by the same
reductionist practice as reduction to the same. Furthermore, the relevance of the
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comparativist practice, especially when it amounts to a reflection on how narratives

are constructed, circulated, put together or assimilated, is never purely textual, but
political and ethical: comparative literature can easily function as an instrument of
colonial ideology as well as a subversive practice. In the former case, the comparatist
can surreptitiously take the role of the evictor, subsuming to a single, unifying
perspective a multitude of idioms and narratives, while the translation
(comparativist) operation itself is concealed and naturalized. This is why translation,
as Bernheimer suggests, can offer a solid base for any interpretative ventures,
especially when it also bring into play the comparatist’s / translator’s position as a
part of the actual translational situation, in a direct, open, and pragmatic manner.
Meaning is not imposed from above on a text or a narrative, nor is it simply repeated
submissively, as if it would be an actual essence intrinsic to the text, but collectively
created in the encounter and as the encounter. Or, as Bogdan Ghiu explains,
translation is – or, rather, can be - an immanently ethical and political thinking-with-
the-other (Ghiu, 2015: 29), a dialogical account of estrangement and of hospitality,
always experimental. Translation is a workshop, not a closure, vulnerability rather
than a transparent operation that releases no particular meaning. Self-concealed
translation attached to a totalizing narrative can, on the contrary, be instrumental to
the reinforcement of power and hierarchical structures and used for the containment
and domestication of strangeness (Baker, 2006: 25).
In this context, what Ghiu advocates is a translational epistemic that would
build on an actual practice of difference, that would not aim at rooting out the bad
weeds of otherness, or at discursively taming it, but would instead assume the
untranslatable as a creative line of flight (Ghiu, 2015: 120). As a contrarian model,
this translational paradigm may inspire a multitude of pirate republics of letters as
nomad micro-federations of defectors, non-affiliates, undocumented trespassers,
rogues, exiles, “strangers within their own tongue” (Deleuze&Guattari, 1986: 26),
translators.
Overall, it seems that the various reports on the state of the discipline have
gradually moved from a general concern about the academic status, the institutional
and theoretical stability of comparative literature in the broader field of literary
studies, towards a discussion that focuses on the ethical and political assumptions
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that – implicitly or explicitly – determine the comparativist praxis. Such a shift marks
the acknowledgement that all comparatist inquiry raises specific ethical
responsibilities that transcend the question of status. Moreover, the comparativist
cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary practice is not value-free, but has the potential
to undermine, by its constant trade with difference, the unquestioned models
structuring dominant institutional and conceptual frames, namely the reabsorption
of the narrative in the normative and the subsequent dissimulation of the same
operation. After all, the vulnerable position of comparative literature particularly
raises the question of legitimation and of its apparent self-evident claim to pertinence
and truth. While this question still seems to be pending since the first reports, the
success of the comparativist model indicates the partial disengagement of the actual
practice from the classic modes of legitimation and containment.
Both in the case of comparative literature and in the case of translation, there
are two apparent models at play. One of those two is a static, centric model, building
on institutional affiliations and striving to consolidate a discursive perimeter. The
corresponding approach is based on the constitution of complete objects of the
discourse, as well as the articulation of the discipline as a clearly delimited territory to
be claimed. In this case, the eviction scenario functions as the bad object within a
narrative frame shaped by the core questions of status rather than by the reflection
upon knowledge itself. This in turn corresponds to a hierarchical translational
approach, which articulates various forms of domestication, labeling and
containment. Such an attitude amounts, after all, to a covert refusal of translation,
using difference and identity only as tools for self-confirmation and the actual
reinforcement of the status quo. The second approach is, on the contrary, based on
the corrosion of borders and on the establishment of a multitude of temporary “zones
of contact” (Venuti, 2000: 477) as open workshops with precarious stability. It is
actually less of a model, and more of a process corresponding to a horizontal
translational practice, a pragmatic manner of resisting disciplinary domestication by
opening language for minor, creative and insurgent uses. In this case, the eviction
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scenario works like an incentive for thinking an alternative way of assembling exilic
trajectories into vulnerable, autonomous spaces. It also functions as a subversive
alternative to the narrative of status quo and the setting up of border claims that
normally imply a control over discourse by an elite, and the normalizing of this claim
as consensus.
Bernheimer’s proposal to envisage translation as a possibly more adequate
paradigm for the comparativist enquiry is thus not only a statement limited to
comparative literature; more than that, it actually points towards a certain
understanding of translation itself beyond the confines of literary debates.
It is in conjunction with this approach that we can better understand
Lawrence’s Venuti’s critical examination of the “scandals of translation” (Venuti,
1998:1), as well as Ghiu’s manifesto, both trying to convey a broader sense of the
trade, both advocating a broader relevance of translation beyond the quite restricted
scenes of academic polemic.
Venuti argues that what constitutes a scandal indeed is the fact that, in a world
of heterogeneous and multiple linguistic and cultural situations, translation has not
yet gained exposure for a larger audience. The few specialists are rather interested
into technical questions of linguistic and aesthetical relevance, while translation is
dependent on other disciplines and practices for legitimation. Furthermore,
translation’s ancillary situation can also be read as an indicative of the various
mystifications that a non-translational use of translation generates, in order to
conceal, preserve and reinforce hierarchical discourses and authoritarian
arrangements. These arrangements are not purely linguistic, but part of a dynamic of
power imbedded in language and in its usage, aimed at concealing the struggles and
endless variations that make up the fabric of the social and of the language itself.
Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s perspective on the minor usages
of language, both Venuti and Ghiu endorse a threefold minor usage of translation.
The first is the deterritorialization of language, the release of the “minor variables”
(Venuti, 1998: 10) that exceed communication, subvert the major language and
expose it as historically and socially situated, while opening it towards new, creative
uses: a process of defamiliarization and demystification. The second is “the
connection of the individual to a political immediacy” (Deleuze&Guattari, 1986: 18)
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as an operation of ideological critique. Bogdan Ghiu writes that translation is a

political paradigm: a disclosed situated co-operation with the others, preventing
closure and resisting the folding back of translation into hegemonic discourse. The
third usage is translation as the “collective assemblage of enunciation”
(Deleuze&Guattari, 1986: 18), describing the experience of translation as a reading by
means of writing, a creative furthering of the encounter: building of a community
with the foreign through translation.
The operation of translation, writes Ghiu, is ethical as well as existential and

political (Ghiu, 2015: 28, 29). Ethical, because it is a call to resist the haste of false
translation that tries to assimilate, to convert the other. Existential, by virtue of the
exilic consciousness that it entails, simultaneously bringing about the recognition of
ourselves as strangers in the process of becoming other. Political in that it is an actual
effectuation of and a reflection upon the making of community. Translation can be
anticipatory without being politically prescriptive. The revolutionary potential of
translation means that it can project around it a “utopian community that is not yet
realized” (Venuti, 200: 485). Defamiliarization and the inscription of the foreign that
translation simultaneously operates, can create breaches into the current
conventional usage of language, releasing “domestic remainders” (Venuti, 2000: 485)
that act as diachronical openings within the synchrony. This way, translation opens
up the possibility to express and imagine different assemblages, to collectively “forge
the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Deleuze&Guattari,
1986: 17). To further paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, translation is the people’s
concern. (Deleuze&Guattari, 1986: 18).
We seem to move between the ethical impossibility of translation and the
(counter) political need for an incessant translation. The refusal to speak-for as an
ethical engagement presupposes the resistance to the attempts of collectively being
spoken for. The collective solidarity of translation is pragmatic and horizontal, an
actual enterprise of the speaking-with. Translational situations are self-organizing,
auto-poietic and micro-political. This means basically that they follow a dynamic of
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escape from mediation, control and framing, deserting the abstract entities outside of
the translational actual experience: a refuse of representation, transcendence and
closure.
We can so far already discern the lines of thought that are describing the
translational paradigm proposed by both Venuti and Ghiu, and anticipated by the
debates regarding comparative literature: the dismissal of a classical academic
disciplinary model in favor of an open, non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian,
pragmatic, horizontal and experimental model. Related to that, there is a clear
critique of the practice of accumulation which legitimizes disciplinary authority and
affiliation through enclosure and separation. The situation of fragmented, non-
dialogical and highly specialized fields of inquiry is a concern from this point of view,
as their pretence of neutrality is only concealment of the wider principle of top-to-
bottom organization and control already at work. Translation can serve as a paradigm
namely because it illustrates a form of autonomy that does not imply the gesture of
fencing-off, while serving as a pragmatic undoing of the ideological assumptions of
language, institutions, cultures, societies. Demystifying academic objectivity and
criticizing disciplinary enclosure, resisting claims of linguistic neutrality, asserting
the need for a socially relevant discursive practice, exposing political representation
as pretense and disempowering techniques, are all, therefore, implication of this
translational paradigm as proposed by Ghiu and anticipated by Saussy and
Berhneimer in the context of comparativist practice.
On the other hand, like Foucault argued, we always speak, translate and think
in an already given environment, in an already given language. While translation can
be regarded as a resistance against the given itself, how can we possibly articulate this
resistance using the grammar of containment and the vocabulary of enclosures? The
very critique of domination and of the discursive suppression of the other might very
well generate positions of domination. Isn’t this the true scandal of translation? The
fact that, at the same time that we are compelled to resist the false translations, we
also risk finding ourselves speaking the language of (our) dispossession?
On the other hand, minoritizing translation bears a high coefficient of
deterritorialization, calling for an intensive usage of language as opposed to the
symbolic, representative and extensive functions that formulate languages’ various
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reterritorialisations. The movement towards the extremes, towards the molecular

voiceless margins, is a gradual process of bringing language “slowly and progressively
to the desert” (Deleuze&Guattari, 1986: 26), an antirepresentationalist exercise.
With translation as a possible acceleration along this line of flight, the escaping
movement of language seems to signal towards silence, interruption, to a cry that no
longer signifies something, to abolition.
The scandal of translation acquires a new dimension, revealing a problematic
theoretical and practical positioning stemming from its own ethical and political
assumptions. Whereas even a minoritizing translational practice can seemingly run
the risk of reasserting dominance positions, collapsing this way the difference
between the language of critique and the reproduction of given authoritarian
structures, the antirepresentationalist dynamic connote the voiding of language in
favor of pure intensities that do not produce effects of meaning. Under these
circumstances, can translation still be a viable paradigm, or does it finally lead to the
same supposedly insurmountable paradoxes? In other words, can translation really
be the key to a different functioning of language, which would do away with despotic
signs, or is it just another mode of producing generalizing representations and
hierarchical structures? Does a minoritizing translation escape the coercion
embedded in all the uses of language only when resorting to hermetical silences, only
by ceasing to be a translation? Isn’t this translational pessimism an actual rejection of
society, testifying to the impossibility of speaking-with? Is speaking-with just a mask
obscuring the speaking-for, further concealing a generalized speaking-against (the
other, oneself)?
Bogdan Ghiu argues nevertheless that the “paradigm of the social extensive
translation” (Ghiu, 2015: 212, my translation), the translation-paradigm, is a radical
and contrarian model inasmuch as it is the positive, constructive continuation of
deconstruction. Moreover, translation, understood as a translinguistic, transcultural
and transmedial pragmatic is an open, non-secretive production of knowledge, a
putting together of creative concepts, a collective and public creation, that retains,
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repeats, and passes on precisely against the submissive operations of mimicking, and
as a resistance to the coercive pressure of the identical (Ghiu, 2015: 59). Ghiu
advocates all in all a translational practice that would not only produce aesthetic or
accurate translations, but a paradigm that would yield a whole translational society.
The scandal of translation, as well as the minoritizing, and the paradigmatic
extensive understanding of translation seem to illustrate on one hand the epistemic
deadlock of the current critical systems. On the other hand, they mark an attempt to
find a way out precisely by articulating a new model, equally remote from the
essentialist stances as well as from the exclusively aesthetical, textualist views.
In the opening pages of his essay Ghiu notes that the translation-concept that
he tries to put forth is, actually, a translation itself and only invites further
translation, in a theoretical context where philosophy and critique seem more and
more prone to revert to simplistic metaphysics, actually signaling a turning away
from thinking, from translation. His approach, as well as Venuti’s, is after all an
attempt to hinder closure, to propose creative concepts as working tools for a vivid,
socially relevant and rejuvenated critique, drawing it away from theoretical deadlocks
and the hermetical sealing of discourse for elite usages.
Bogdan Ghiu’s creation of a translation-concept is nothing less than the
putting forth of the translator’s tool-box for reading and re-writing along the dotted
and interrupted lines of permeation of the so-called French Theory. It is a work of
preservation and continuation as well as a commentary of the encounter itself.
French theory, despite its’ academic and public success in the ’60 and ’70, could be
considered as well a minor tradition: fragmented, subversive and
antirepresentationalist, putting concepts to strange uses and claiming ethical and
political grounding. A tradition that now survives more in its infiltrations and
heresies than into an improbable per se continuation.
When he proposes translation as a pragmatic and daily practice, a day-to-day
procedure of decolonization (Ghiu, 2015: 211), as a positive continuation of the
deconstructive project, Ghiu takes an old, unsettling question a bit further and in a
slightly different direction. Can you make revolution with a pen? Can you write, talk,
think away oppression without actually enacting it? becomes Can you translate away
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domination, can you fathom a usage of language that is neither servitude nor
enslavement?
Translation: an anarchist reading
So given the choice between incoherent, insular jargon and the clear
transmission of rational arguments, let us add another dimension to the
discussion. We hypothesize a third pole—the mysterious third, the factor that
effects change.
CrimethInc. Writers’ Bloc
The best way to proceed in order to formulate an answer would be precisely a

translational approach, taking a detour towards another fragmented, interrupted and
minor tradition of thought, namely anarchism. Anarchism’s seemingly forgotten
influences fueled many of the cultural alternatives and creative paradigms of
resistance that we are familiar with today. Peter Marshall spoke of a „river of
anarchy” (Marshall, 2008: 3) that infiltrated symbolism, Dadaism, and surrealism; it
contaminated counterculture, French poststructuralist theory, and inspired
insurgency and radical aesthetics throughout the 20 th century.
The historical development of anarchism has been a constant practice of
translation, proceeding from anarchism’s very basic political and ethical
assumptions: opposition to the state, religion, and class system implies the
contestation of borders and direct action to corrode and challenge them. Starting
from the early calls for a spreading of knowledge as means of fraternal emancipation
and also subversion – the nihilist going to the people – the anarchist movement has
grown with and by translation: on the one hand, the translation as popularization so
vital to the breaching of arbitrary social and national enclosures; on the other hand,
translation as infiltration, eroding hegemonic narratives from within, opening them
up to their inner anarchy, to the paroxysmal experience of their own residual,
irreducible, uncanny other.
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There is no explicit theoretical anarchist approach towards translation as such.

However, the anarchist thought has developed within actual translational situations,
as most of the anarchist writers were outcasts, exiles, or fugitives, always on the run,
always addressing foreign audiences: princes trying to speak to workers, thieves
trying to speak to literates, Russian and French geographers writing for Swiss
workers, deportees translating indigenous stories, etc. A translational critique,
related to the minoritizing paradigm exposed so far, can be nonetheless formulated in
a way that could help us sketch both the specific anarchist understanding of
translation and a possible answer to the antirepresentationalist ethical and practical
impasses proceeding from it.
In doing so, we will follow to a large extent Jesse Cohn’s exposition regarding
the relevance of anarchist critique in contemporary theoretical debates, presented in
his book Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation – Hermeneutics, Aesthetics,
Politics (2006), a convincing and well documented essay arguing that a re-translation
of anarchist ideas could offer a viable alternative to the exhaustion of dominant
critical models.
Known mostly for its social critique, for its preaching of insurgency or for its
so-called utopian imagining of the future stateless communities, anarchism has
always been involved in the literary and theoretical discussions of its time, whether
we think of classical la Belle Époque anarchism, or contemporary post-anarchism. It
should be of no surprise then that anarchism has developed with and out of its
extremely prolific literary production. Of course, we cannot speak of literary
anarchism as of one unitary or coherent body of work; however, we can speak of it in
the sense of a deleuzian minor literature, anarchistic in itself, with various and
sometimes conflicting expressions, styles, or engagements. Moreover, literary theory
or art critique have always been a major part of the “classical anarchists’” 23 work and
preoccupation. In a sense, anarchism is a literary phenomenon as much as it is an
actual social practice: the two are just different ways of engaging authority and, also,
23 When we refer to classical anarchism we generally mean those authors who are considered to have
laid down in a consistent manner the basic principles of anarchism: Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin,
Kropotkin, Malatesta. Without intending it to be a restrictive label, we also use this expression to
broadly indicate a time-period between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th, considered to have been the period of maximum vitalism for anarchism.
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different expressions of direct action and subversion, two of the basic anarchist
principles.
Invited to write an article on anarchism in The Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1910) Piotr Kropotkin gave a detailed account of anarchism’s social philosophy
principles, historical development and situation, defining it as an expression of a
broader social dynamic that historically opposed the hierarchical and hegemonic
organization of society, in favor of a model of voluntary associations of free, self-ruled
individuals. Kropotkin included, at the end of his article, a somewhat brief, yet
powerful mention of the profound ties that the development of libertarian ideas had
with the literary and intellectual movements of the time, noting that the anarchist
literature was driven by the same goal: “enfranchisement of man from the bonds of
the state as well as from those of capitalism” (Kropotkin, 1910).
Anarchism, as defined by Murray Bookchin, is a part of a “legacy of freedom”
(Bookchin, 1982: 167), a statement that somehow recalls the interrupted tradition
(Ghiu, 2015: 11) that Ghiu refered to. With multiple currents, anarchism is thus not a
fixed body of thought and practice, but
“(…) a movement in which a core ethic is rearticulated time and time

again in the historical idioms of particular people in specific struggles.”
(Bookchin, apud Jesse Cohn, 2006: 94).
As a practical way of putting things together - or, for that matter, of putting
things into pieces - anarchism stems from a basic belief that people can come
together and organize themselves freely, without the supervision of the State, or the
disciplinary narratives of religion and privilege, and outside of all structures of
domination and authority.
Other than that, anarchists understand very well the fact that there is an
“imaginary institution of society” (Castoriadis, 1987). Therefore, any thought of
emancipation must strive to expose these spooks (state, religion, class, nationality),
as Stirner would have probably called them, and liberate the imaginary. In other
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words, in order for people to find and experiment ways of being together outside the
strategies of control or submission to authority, it is necessary that they can at first
fathom them. This is not about fantasizing as a means of escape, but about being able
to (collectively) imagine and express the other and our being together, outside the
projections of fixed identities or socially assigned frames.
As Jesse Cohn noted, what at first might seem to be a theory of political
practice is, in fact, a “theory of meaning” (Cohn, 2006: 80), and a reflection on
language. The opposition of anarchists to the state needs to be understood, as Uri
Eisenzweig argues in Fictions de l’anarchisme (2001), as a particular stance of a
general anarchist mistrust in representation, be it political, aesthetic, economic or
linguistic. Anarchists question and resist the symbolic as well as the denotative
function of language, the speaking-for as well as the standing-for that shape our
common usage of language and, in the end, our understanding of things. Delegating
the power to act (politically) is coherent with a delegation of the power to speak and
to be heard in favor of an elite who alone claims the right to speak on behalf of the
others. Signs, symbols and narratives are not neutral signifiers that correspond to or
depict more or less accurately the reality, but they are order-words that constitute
and enforce a version of reality rather than merely representing it (Mona Baker,
2006: 5). Thus, representational hierarchical mediation is seen as a scamming
method aimed at falsifying and alienating language, the basis of social bonding. The
dispossession of one’s language is only a facet of the general scheme of economic and
political dispossession already at work. As pointed out by Santiago Colás in his essay,
What is wrong with representation:
“Consider just two of the social practices in which representation

functions centrally: literature and democratic politics. Both have
operated historically as practices of exclusion. If representation . . .
always presupposes a distance, then . . . literary representations and
representative democracy always seem to extend the distance under the
illusion of narrowing it.” (apud Cohn, 2006:11)
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The fight against the authority (of state) is the same as the fight against
(literary) representations, unquestioned (social) formulas or against capital, the
representation of wealth. However, the dilemma was exactly there, as any subversive
action, any resistance would eventually have to be formulated in the language of
masters and enact the same reality, leading to the same falsification, and the same
alienation of the structures of meaning from life itself.
Jules Vallès, one of the most influential anarchist writers of the 19 th century,
dreamt of inventing a new language, purged of the old scars of domination and
authority (Granier, 2003: 489), while Mécislas Goldberg, critic and poet, spoke about
the necessity for a recovery of words, away from their mutilated significations
(Granier, 2003: 490). A certain tension and a feeling of overall “linguistical
powerlessness” (Eisenzweig, 2001: 154, my translation) seems to mark the anarchist
discourse, leading to what Uri Eisenzweig called “the inherent epistemological
pessimism” of anarchism (Eisenzweig, 2001: 119, my translation).
Anarchism, event in its incipient formulations takes the form of a “crisis of
representation” that, as defined by Frederic Jameson in the introduction to the 1984
English translation of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge,
“(…) calls into question the relationship between our concepts and the
truths they are meant to denote, our images and the realities they are
supposed to depict, our institutions and the interests they are supposed
to serve.” (Frederic Jameson, apud Cohn, 2006: 11).
Political anarchism and aesthetic subversion seem to go hand in hand. The

symbolists in 19th century France were flirting with anarchism and calling for the
revolutionary undermining of language. The anarchist sympathies of the symbolist
poets even lead to a point where the two, symbolism and anarchism, became
somewhat interchangeable and were often confused (Eisenzweig, 2001: 180). On the
other hand, the literary debates around the realist novel and the realist narrative at
the same period were, as Uri Eisenzweig argues, a telling sign of the overall crisis: the
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opposition to all systems of representation stemming from a negative conception of

language. The mirror that the realist author pretended to lent to the world was
denounced as nothing but a disciplinary mirror, either falsifying it or, worse, framing
it as natural and inescapable. The mirror is a trap, a labeling technique, a prison, a
Bastille of the word. Mallarmé in turn, dreamt of a future literature that would not
strive to express the ineffable, but would be a process of emptying words of their
meaning, a nonrepresentative, nonfigurative art (Eisenzweig, 2001: 204) returning
the words to their hermetic, intransitive and pure state. There is an irreducible
opacity within all discourse, a disaster at the core of language that cannot be framed
into a narrative. Language is nothing but an artifice imposing a reified structure over
the unnamable. Releasing this unnamable by exposing language’s artifice is, in the
case of symbolists, “the expression of anarchist politics in the form of aesthetic
individualism” (Jesse Cohn, 2006: 126): refusing meaning and thus lucidly purging
by poetry the illusion of all representation. As Jesse Cohn, citing Julia Kristeva,
wrote,
‘‘One cannot ask that ‘art’ . . . emit a message which would be

considered ‘positive,’ since art is only ‘ethical’ in destroying the
language within which this ‘message’ could be carried, the language that
situates self in relation to society, the univocal enunciation of such a
message would itself represent a suppression of the ethical function as
we understand it.’’ (Jesse Cohn, 2006: 127)
In the end, the symbolist response to the crisis of representation was silence,
intransitivity, and an aesthetic practice that targeted the social and political function
of language. The ambiguous mentions that Mallarmé made to the bomb attacks of the
time, apparently inspired by the anarchist urge for a wordless propaganda by the
deed, seemed to indicate a fascination for the un-representable gesture, pure of
signification and folding back on itself hermetically: a terrible act that signifies, but
doesn’t say anything (to anyone) (Eisenzweig, 2001: 286). A poet, Mallarmé said,
should reproduce the method of the bomb within the text itself (Eisenzweig, 2001:
200).
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It is not our intent, thought, to make a thorough and extended presentation of

the links between modern vanguards in art and literature and a specific
antirepresentationalist vein of anarchism, as that would stray us away from the
subject at hand: translation. Our example was intended to be an illustrative analysis
of the impasses implied by in a radical antirepresentationalist paradigm, that
proceeds from an ethical injunction (never speak for the other!), only to find itself
entangled and locked in postures that defeat its very premises: isolation of meaning
from life, isolation of the aesthetic from the ethic, and the political alienation of
literature and art from the community, which in turn tend to maintain an
exclusionary hierarchical structure. It also makes translation not only problematic,
but impossible: isn’t translation a form of re-presentation? The implicit rejection of
translation signals in turn a failed deterritorialization, the collapsing of a
revolutionary line of flight into a black-hole that can surreptitiously turn a creative
practice of enfranchisement into a hermetic suicide note24. Or, as Jesse Cohn notes,
“The wish to escape from representation is a wish for an escape from all
relationships, which is to say, an escape from life, a self-annihilating
wish.” (Cohn, 2006: 195)
A return to a static, fixed and hermetic aesthetic is just another form of

reterritorialization: aesteticizing is nothing less than an etatization technique, as
Bogdan Ghiu warned in his translation manifesto (Ghiu, 2015: 115).
Georges Darien wrote in his essay about the birth of the anarchist novel,
published in 1891, Le roman anarchiste (Granier, 2001: 40), that literature at the
time was sterile because it was too “parliamentary” (Eisenzweig, 2001: 204, my
24 In The Deleuze Dictionary (2005) edited by Adrian Parr, a black-hole is defined as a possible
outcome for a failed line of flight, leading, during the process of subjectification, to self-annihilation.
Deterritorialization can have two outcomes: the complete obliteration of subjectivity or the re-
engagement of the deconstituted subject with new assemblages, forming new planes of becoming. “As
a potential outcome for both paths of transcendence and destruction, the lure of the black hole
indicates the subject’s attraction toward an absolute (lack) of signification. This expresses the absolute
impossibility of representation at the same time as it actively works to show how grand narrative
statements continually intertwine subjectivity and signification.” (The Deleuze Dictionary, 2005: 30)
131
translation): it was less showing than preaching and legislating. Darien’s commentary
can be read as bearing the same antirepresentationalist critique discussed so far,
however it introduces a nuance. Representation, as Caroline Granier argues, is to be
subverted only in its pretense of actually replacing reality, in its simulation of a
verifiable, objective discourse passing for reality itself. Anarchist writers are equally
weary of confusing language with reality and reality with discourse. Both, in their
view, are idealist distortions that either empty words of their meaning or, worse,
revert them to a mythological and magical use, as the critic Mecislas Golberg warned
in an article published in 1895 (Granier, 2003: 490). The anarchist critique is thus
more like a critique of the usage of language than of language itself. It is suspicion
aimed at representation as technique of widening the gap between signs, their
referents and their usage, rather than a rejection of representation and meaning as
such. One should never take the signs literally, should never confuse the ballot paper,
the banknote or the word with their actual designates, as one so often does.
When Kropotkin spoke of a revolutionary literature, he described it as “an
aesthetic of realist description to serve an idealist goal”, reuniting the sense of the
actual and the sense of the possible (Cohn, 2006: 167) in one expression. What
Bernard Lazare, an anarchist literary critic, subsequently called in his 1896 Manifesto
“social art”, equally distant from a naturalist reifying vision and from a symbolist
mystification, Proudhon called “critical idealism”: a realist literature with a critical
and lucid testimonial function, however “refusing to reify these experiences into the
supposedly eternal facts of human nature or the human condition” (Cohn, 2006:
170). Ursula K. Le Guin, a contemporary science-fiction anarchist writer, described
her writing as “strange realism” (Le Guin, 1986), a joining of actual description of
what people do and feel with speculative extrapolations turned into ambiguous
utopias, as the subtitle of one of her novels warned. The alienation of language, either
by an imposed usage, or by an aestheticized hermetism, sends directly to the question
of the social itself, to the way people relate to one another. Anarchism’s
antirepresentationalism needs to be therefore understood only in relation to the
principle of direct action: language has to be drawn out of its’ closures and
reappropriated, subjectivated, put together in new and voluntarily constituted
assemblages. The anarchist view of popular empowerment is far from being just
132
another theory of domination, where the people would act as the new masters.
Bakunin had already warned Marx, that the people is just another spook conveniently
concealing the same pretense of a self appointed elite to be their representative. In
fact, this would enact the same social scam, with yesterday’s revolutionaries taking
the place of priests, capitalists and politicians in the unharmed structures of
silencing, while pretending to speak for the others. On the contrary, the crisis of
representation is not only the crisis of a vacant centre that should just be occupied by
the right narrative. The centre does not need to be occupied, but scattered,
disseminated, put in motion and disseminated (Cohn, 2006: 72).
In the anarchist (counter) narrative, the real, the true, the positive are those
things capable of transformation, incomplete and fragmented, while the false, the
fictions, the abstract, comprise the realities that appear fixed, complete, incapable of
conversion (Cohn, 2006: 76), incapable of being translated, put into play,
experimented. For Bookchin, as for Deleuze, reality is not a fixed, but a changing
referent comprising “the order of emergent (virtual) possibilities” (Cohn, 2006: 78).
It is in this sense that we should understand Ursula K. Le Guin’s remark that “the
truth is a matter of imagination” (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986). Meaning, representation,
narratives are not oppressive as such, nor are they simple illusions, but ways to
(collectively) articulate, fathom, and shape our being together. Stories, words,
assemblages need to be put together, need to be anarchically circulated and taken
astray, modified incessantly and reassembled not only by a few scholars, but by
everybody. It is a practice of vernacularization, of direct action, bypassing the elite
cultural intermediaries and exclusions, resembling the call for popularization and for
“population” in Bogdan’s Ghiu translation manifesto (Ghiu, 2015, 205). Translation is
a river of anarchy.
Anarchist aesthetic and practice, on the other hand, does not strive to produce
actors, nor spectators, but translators. Translation, as a generalized epistemic and
ethical paradigm is, I argue, an actual anarchist practice: translational
133
reappropriation of the means of expression, a pedagogy of encounter driven by an

exilic consciousness.
The crisis of representation is the crisis of translation, or, better, it is the crisis
of the lack of translation. The crisis of representation is the scandal of
(non)translation.
David Graeber spoke of the anarchist internationalism as opposed to the
“globalist ideology” (Graeber, 2004: 103). The latter is a mere “identity machine”
(Graeber, 2004: 103) working with abstractly labeled parcels in a perspective of a
totalizing world. An anarchist model calls for a tearing down of borders and the
destruction of conceptual walls in order to open alternative spaces of “free play and
uncertainty” (CrimethInc. Writers’ Bloc, 2013), creating “temporary autonomous
zones” (Hakim Bey, 1985). Another form of resistance is defection or the “engaged
withdrawal” (Graeber, 60). This is quite similar to Ghiu’s calls for a “de-
translation”(Ghiu, 2015: 115, my translation) that would act as destabilizing
conceptual raids, bringing “the subterranean currents of resistance within the
language to the surface” (CrimethInc. Writers’ Bloc, 2013) and creating, through the
untranslatable and the unfamiliar “new points of departure” from the “enemy
territory” (CrimethInc. Writers’ Bloc, 2013). Translation as a defective reproduction,
and a defective representation.
We have tried to show so far that the translation-paradigm and the anarchist
aesthetic and practice are stemming from the same legacy of freedom, both
formulating their basic ethical and aesthetical assumptions in the context of the crisis
of representation, and both encountering the same practical and theoretical
difficulties. The translation minoritizing paradigm proposed by Bogdan Ghiu or
Lawrence Venuti exceeds the linguistic or aesthetical frameworks, calling into
question the actual ethical and political engagements that translation expresses and
endorses. Likewise, the minor anarchist literature and critique were, more than
anything else, reflections about the moral hypothesis, world-outlook as well as the
and the understanding of human relationships contained and enforced by the usage
of language. Both the translation paradigm and anarchism, understood as practices,
are forms of direct action, critiques of mediation and subversions of the dominant
134
major practice. Also, they express a horizontal, multiple, nomad and experimental
attitude, as opposed to hierarchical, elitist, totalizing, closed and authoritarian
systems. On the other hand, the antirepresentationalist deadlock, either converting
the ethical injunction into an insurmountable epistemic pessimism, or collapsing it
into hermetic, auto-destructive silence, finds a solution not into a global theoretical
breakthrough, but into a certain understanding of translation as practice. Translation
is a form of anarchist encounter, not of containment or as mimetic repetition; it is a
practice of releasing meaning, of putting-it overtly together for new (monstrous) uses,
opening it for associations and possibilities, across and against borders and
enclosures. Translation is an open usage of language, as there is no absolute points,
no fixed idiom, no origin, but only points of passage, points of transmission, only
translations. New usages of language, new distortions and estrangements are altering
languages, defamiliarizing words and calling for other new, different translations. To
translate is to de-aesthetize language, to write as a stranger, as a barbarian, as a
servant, if we are to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari’s illustration of Kafka’s minor,
arid writing and his fascination with workers, with servants, with the underclass
(Deleuze&Guattari, 1985: 26).
Translation works, like anarchism, as a core ethic to be articulated in different
historical idioms or situations; it is a concept-in(process-of)translation rather than a
definitive theory of meaning. The internal dynamism of translation is similar to that
described by Graeber when he proposes an anarchist non-vanguardist approach to
research, giving anthropology as example: an auto-ethnographical moment doubled
by utopian extrapolation. In other words, the operation of translation itself is
presented as part of the situation, is scrutinized, making the translation rather than a
finite product, an open workshop for everybody to see and to participate in.
Translation is the strange realism, the minor social art of anarchism, reuniting in
one operation the sense of the actual, the recognition of the same, with the sense of
the virtual, the apprehension of the different.
135
Anarchism as translation, assumes its own contingencies and contextual

dependencies, as well as the task of (self) decolonization as a chance and as an
ongoing ethical project (Bogdan Ghiu, 2015:211). Translation as anarchism
acknowledges its own liberating potential and the necessity of a political and situated
practice. They both are part of an interrupted and fragmentary tradition: a nomad,
changing and vulnerable legacy of freedom, creating temporary associations, rogue
usages, local encounters and the eventual precarious “pirate utopias” to come (Hakim
Bey, 1985): translation is still an unknown pathway (Ghiu, 2015: 228).
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Baker, Mona. Translation and Conflict. A Narrative Account. London and
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Bernheimer, Charles. “The Bernheimer Report”. Comparative Literature in
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138
Carmen DOMINTE
Faculty of Letters, Hyperion University

Bucharest, Romania
carmendominte@yahoo.com
TRAVEL WRITINGS AS MEANS OF INTERCULTURAL TRANSLATION
Abstract: 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 writings belong both to cultural studies and to
translation studies, allowing the association of the traveller’s functions with the
functions developed by the translator in the process of trans-positioning all the
elements from the foreign culture in his own. Thus, the act of cultural translation
becomes the act of constructing the self in a foreign culture. The aim of the article is
to analyze the manner in which travel writings develop their narrative strategies in
the act of intercultural translation.
Keywords: travel writing, cultural translation, contact zone, identity, otherness
Few Reflections upon Travel Writing
In the attempt of giving a suitable definition for the phrase travel writing, it is
necessary to give few reflections upon travel.
139
The concept of travel25, as part of the history of civilizations, includes all sorts of
people mobility and migration together with their intentions in the new topographies.
Not only each journey, pilgrimage, exploration but also any form of exodus,
emigration or dislocation of populations is considered an important event belonging
to the history of travel. Being voluntary or involuntary, travel was seen as a recurrent
displacement that usually follows the well known scheme home – abroad – home or
only home – abroad in the case of exile. The term travel26 also stands for the
negotiation between two different geographical spaces and cultures: one very familiar
and one that expects to be explored, understood, explained and, sometimes,
assimilated. At the same time, the reception of travel experiences is due to their
recording under various forms such as travel accounts, travel documents, maps,
letters, journals, illustrations, photographs, films, travel guides, etc. According to
Michel de Certeau, most travel narratives constitute “interdisciplinary laboratories”
where a vast range of fields are interconnected in order to cover many aspects of
sharing the experience of travel (Certeau 1991, 115).
As a literary genre, travel literature could be considered a literary hybrid made
of different other genres and sub-genres. Being placed between fiction and non-
fiction and belonging to autobiographic writings as well as to ethnographic writings,
it usually borrows from other literary species, specific features and specific strategies
trying to create its own. There are various forms of writing travel narratives because
of their uncertain literary status. Referring to actual places, people and events and
interspersing stories of dubious provenance, from fictional or mythical sources, most
of the travel writings function as mediators between fact and fiction. This type of
writings claims validity when referring to real places and events but the purpose is to
assimilate the same places and events to the writer’s highly personal view. That is
why travel literature could be seen as a space of discursive conflict generated by the
author’s need to report the world as it is, or as he sees it, and the intension to make
the world correspond to his preconception of it. In this respect, travel writing could
25
Travel, as a theme of scientific research, was approached from different perspectives among which travel
studies, imagology, cultural and postcolonial studies, history, geography, cartography, cultural anthropology,
sociology, political sciences, literature, and other related domains.
26 In the process of defining the concept of travel it is necessary to refer to its border status and to
relate it to other dichotomous concepts like identity/alterity, subjectivity/objectivity, representing the

other/representing the self, difference/sameness etc.
140
be considered a form of interference based on its subjectivity. The writer gives his
personal interpretation on a documented reportage or as Hayden White wrote, travel
literature is nothing but fiction of factual representation (Holland 2000, 14). Thus,
travel writing has an intermediary status between subjectivity and objectivity.
As some types of narratives, most of the travel writings rely on the authority of
the writer as witness whose function is to persuade the reader of the authenticity of
the facts that were reported. Writing from the eyewitness’ perspective becomes a
rhetorical strategy which takes the narrative closer to a self-conscious literary genre.
The author interferes into his own discourse self-consciously displaying his multiple
personas: the traveller/the observer, sometimes the participant, the reporter/the
writer. For example in Chatwin’s Naipaul, the writer is only an observer who prefers
to hide behind the characters he describes, but in Trouble Again by O’Hanlon, the
author becomes one of the characters. Each of the two cases27 is defined by the lack of
introspection and the need to present the self through motifs of caricature, investing
the narrative with an anti-biographical aspect. In this respect, the focus is not on the
author but on the places, the peoples and the events that are to be described in a
more subjective manner or not.
In order to present the specific “place of work” of a travel writer, James Clifford
introduces the term field, viewed as an ideal and concrete place of professional
activity, of controlled observation and experiment (Clifford 1992, 99). Dwelling with
such a place is always a work in progress meant to develop the personal,
communicative and even cultural competence. The traveller as the one who was
displaced from his native home and sent to a new place tries to appropriate and
transform the unknown into a home away from home. The cultural experiment that
the travel writer is facing when dealing with a new field, can be seen as a mediation
which is based on two main constituents: the native, as a cultural figure and himself,
as an intercultural figure (Boon 1990, ix). Writing about a new culture means
learning that culture, even more, adopting that culture, at least for a while. Thus the
field becomes a place bounded in space and time, functioning as a chronotope, as a
setting for organizing space and time in a whole form.
27
It could be said that Chatwin seems to be more self-effecting, while O’Hanlon more self-obsessed in their
writings.
141
According to James Clifford, the idea of culture as a set of unchanging and

coherent values, behaviours and attitudes has given way to the idea of culture as
negotiation, symbolic competition or performance (Clifford 1988, 23-24).
Each culture stands for a plurality of codes and languages, generating various
discursive practices as means of intercultural translation.
Travel Writing As an Act of Translation
In a strict literal definition, translation means to travel from one place to

another and going further, it may also stand for travelling from one discourse to
another, from text to another implying a dialectic involvement between the process of
recognition and the process of recuperation of difference. Translating supposes
mediation between at least two codes systems. In a usual process of translation, a text
that was formulated in one code equates with the source language is later
reformulated in another code that equates with the target language. There are certain
rules that make translation possible and they depend on the actual situation, on the
function and also on the purpose of the translation (Lefevere 1999, 75). These rules
belong to two intertwined grids: conceptual and textual and they function as a result
of the socializing process. In the case of travel writing, the author is able to find ways
of manipulating those grids in such a way that cultural communication 28 is made
possible and attractive for the reader.
Travel writing could be considered an act of cultural translation which
resembles the traditional process of mediation between two texts. In representing
other peoples’ cultures, the writers of travel accounts translate one cultural
field/zone/space into another. Similar to a literary transposition from a language into
another, cultural translations take place in an intermediary space where both cultures
meet, define or reject, understand or reprehend each other generating the space-in-
between (Duncan 1999, 2). This space of cultural translation is not entirely neutral
but influenced and determined by the author’s self. The process of cultural
28The cultural communication can be determined by these grids, which, in their interplay, may
influence the manner in which reality is constructed for the reader, not only of the translation itself,
but also of the original.
142
translation becomes a “domesticating method” in the attempt of reducing the foreign

culture to target the cultural values of the writer, bringing him back home, or a
“foreignizing method” applied in such a way that it would generate the pressure on
those cultural values that would make possible to register the cultural difference of
the foreign culture, sending the reader abroad (Venuti 1993, 210).
As hermeneutic activities, both translation and travel writing are involved in
similar processes of exploration and discovery. Translation, in general, could be
characterized by its performative nature. Being an act of cultural communication,
translation refers not only to the process of constructing the self in a foreign culture,
but also to developing certain issues of inclusion and exclusion, of adapting the
meaning to the context. Thus translation is seen as a process of negotiation that
supposes the texts to change their language and also their cultural frame of reference.
De-contextualisation and re-contextualisation are the two sides of the same double
process which is translation. It involves two steps: first it reaches out in order to
appropriate something new and then it develops the act of domesticating the foreign
elements. In a similar manner, travel writing 29 is an activity that supposes different
types of cross-cultural contact.
Most of the times, travel writing was associated with recasting the foreign for
the readers in a visual and textual form. Similarly, translation deals with transporting
the foreign from the source language and culture into the target language and culture,
adapting it for meeting the target audience and to correspond to the audience’s
capability of recognizing, understanding and assimilating the new. It is the writer’s
responsibility to make his writings very easily accessed. By analogy, the translator has
the same purpose. Both, the travel writer and the translator are figures of moving
between languages and cultures. Therefore, travel writing may share with
ethnography an interpretative view of foreign cultures while translation retracts the
act of interpretation somewhere further (Hulme 2002, 227-230).
The success of cultural communication for both situations depends on the
writer/translator as well as the reader for the fact that they agreed to play their
29
Right from the beginning, travel writing involves some form of translation. It is already known that several
early travel accounts attempted to render the language of the explorers as it was, emphasizing the undiscovered,
the unfamiliar and the new as it was found and revealed to the reader in an accurate form.
143
assigned parts in connection with the same texts. The important problem that may
appear when dealing with all types of translations and cross-cultural understanding
may be sum up in the question whether one culture is able to really understand
another culture on that’s culture’s own terms or not; or even more, whether the
writer’s/translator’s attempts of adapting the new, of making the new accessible and
understandable, recognisable and assimilated by the audience could define the
manner in which cultures will be able to understand each other, to inter-act with each
other or not.
Travel Writings as Means of Intercultural Translation
Generally speaking, translation is considered to be represented by a series of

operations of which the starting point and the end product are important
significations and functions within a given culture. In the case of travel writing, the
needed elements belonging to the process of intercultural communication are entirely
related to the whole cultural context as it may be seen in figure 1.
Cultural Source Receptor

Context Culture Travel Writings Culture
Figure 1
144
The cultural context includes the following components: the source culture
which is to be explored described and explained, the receptor culture which includes
the readers/the audience whose purpose is to understand and assimilate the new and
foreign culture and the travel writings which function as a mediator or a negotiator
between the two cultures, linking them on an intercultural level.
The communicative relationship developed in the process of textual/cultural
translation shows that the text/travel writing generated by the translator/travel
writer is both the end of the source culture and the beginning of the receptor culture.
In this respect, travel writings become a chain of intercultural communication
between these two cultures (Bassnett 1980, 45).
Considering the basic model of translation, in any act of communication that
takes place within a source language, any text is designed to fit the channel capacity
of the original receiver; but in the second language, the channel capacity is less than
that of the original30. It is the translator’s aim to make the new text fit the channel
capacity of the receivers for the translated text.
In the case of intercultural translation, the author of the travel writings has the
same purpose as the translator: to fit his text to the channel capacity of the readers,
involving them in the process of intercultural communication. The process of fitting
the travel writing to its receivers could be understood as a process of adaptation
which implies selection, adjusting and explanation of the source cultures. The writer
is raising the cultural information from an implicit to an explicit level, adding new
pieces of information all the time.
The travel writing may resemble an expanded translation which has to be
dynamic31 so that it can fit the channel capacity of the receptors to the same extent as
the source culture fit the channel capacity of the original receivers. In the process of
translation, the communicative relationship involves the translator both as a receiver
and an emitter that links the two separated channel capacities, that of the source
30
This may be true only if the languages belong to entirely different linguistic families or if the cultures are
different. If the languages belong to the same linguistic family or if the cultures share a similar context, the
channel capacity is only particularly reduced.
31
In the situation when a culture is perceived as dynamic, then the terminology of social structuring has to be
dynamic too. According to Lotman, the semiotic study of culture usually considers culture functioning as a
system of signs and every relation of the culture to the signs and to the signification comprises one of its basic
typological features (Lotman 1978, 230-232).
145
language and that of the receptor language. Transposed in an intercultural context,

the writer of travel accounts has the same task as the translator. He decodes and re-
encodes everything of the source culture that is accessible and selected by him, as it
can be seen below:
Text 1 – Translator – Text 2 – Receiver = Source Culture – Travel Writing – Receptor

Culture – Receiver
When taking into account this scheme, it is needless to say that there is no full
equivalence through translation. Considering Jakobson’s definition, the translation
proper represents an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language.
This type of inter-lingual translation is a semiotic transformation which constitutes
the replacement of the signs encoding a message of signs of another code, preserving
invariant information with respect to a given system of reference (Jakobson 1959,
233-239). Thus, travel writings are not expected to give full cultural equivalence of
cultural information taken from a source culture and transposed into a receptor
culture, but the writer’s interpretation and adaptation.
The model of the intercultural translation process illustrates the stages involved
(figure 2).
146
Source Culture Receptor Culture
Travel Cultural Translation
Culture Analysis Restructuring
Cultural Transfer
Figure 2
The moment of travel represents the starting point in the first stage of
elaborating the necessary material for the travel writing. It is a period of gathering the
information, of selecting the new, important, representing and most interesting
places to be described, people and their traditions and/or customs, events that belong
to a certain period of time or a particular area. Then, during the stage of cultural
transfer, the analyzed material is transferred in the mind of the author from the
source culture to the receptor culture. The last stage involves the act of restructuring
the transferred material in order to make the final form of the travel writing fully
acceptable in the receptor culture. While the stage of culture analysis implies specific
activities such as discovering and understanding, the stages of cultural transfer and
restructuring are based on the act of transcription32 of the codes in which a particular
piece of information is embedded, which, at the same time, constitutes its main
horizon of intelligibility as a cultural artefact.
32
This act of transposition from the source culture into the receptor culture could be considered an act of
interpretation and translation done in the purpose of grasping by a different community. That is why the
interpretation needs to be in close relation to both cultures, mediating between them and also negotiating the
space-in-between.
147
The intercultural translation could be considered as both a process and a

product. Discovering and understanding new cultures may imply an act of
interpretation made by the travel writer. Going even further, the act of translating the
foreign culture represents an activity based on the transferring the cultural
information through the codes in which the source culture was embedded. This
transposition of the original culture into the receptor one could be realised by the
travel writer in his/her travel narratives, generating different genres of re-
interpretation which depend on how the space between original and translation was
negotiated (Bruyn, 2012, 102) Every foreign culture becomes for the travel writer a
changing context of movement, encounter and interaction, during which the author
negotiates its status.
When translating from one culture into another, the travel writer changes
different positions according to the stages that belong to this process, as in figure 3.
Cultural Cultural Cultural Cultural Receptor

Source
Culture Culture
Traveller Writer Travel writing Cultural
Cultural
context 1 Context 2
Analysis R1S1 Transfer S1R2 Restructuring S2R3 Translation
Figure 3
The process of intercultural translation is based on the existence of the act of

cultural analysis which determines the act of cultural transfer which generates the act
of cultural restructuring which implies the act of cultural translation. When dealing
with a new culture, the traveller assumes the position of R 1 (receiver 1), who becomes
S1 (source 1) for the act of cultural transfer. For the act of cultural restructuring S1
(source 1) becomes R2 (receiver 2) who also assumes the function of S 2 (source 2) for
the act of cultural translation which finally become R3 (receiver 3) for the cultural
reception in a new and different cultural context. Thus, the travel writer is usually
involved in acts of analysis, transfer, restructuring and translation. The last receiver
is expected to respond in certain ways which are essential and hopefully similar to
those in which the original receiver R1 responded. In other words, the travel writer
148
projects his/her expectations not only on the target readers or audience but also on
peripheral receivers, which means that the author has to reproduce all the cultural
messages given by the source culture as travel narratives so that the last receivers
may have, more or less, the same cultural respond33 as he/she had in the first place.
Taking into account the previous diagram, translating could be considered a
process which consists in producing in the receptor culture the closest equivalent to
the cultural messages of the source culture first in meaning and secondly in identity.
The Discursive Construction of Travel Writings
In general, a discourse could be understood as a set of images, vocabularies and

material conditions used to express truth claims about the world, attaching the texts
and utterances to the social, political, cultural and economic forces that, in return,
determine their production, circulation and value (Lisle 2006, 13-14). The act of
writing gives meaning through prevailing discourses because it is meant to order
meaning on an otherwise ambiguous reality. Definitely, travel writings are no
exception. One of their purposes is to order the world into a seemingly
incontrovertible reality. From a political perspective, travel narratives tend to mask
those processes of discursive ordering and try to offer their observations as neutral
documentations of a stable and ordered reality. Using Michel Foucault’s method of
discourse analysis, when examining most of the travel narratives, it can be revealed
the manner in which power arranges certain topics, subjects and/or objects and
meanings in order to fit an incontrovertible reality, at the same time, excluding other
possible ways of being and knowing (Foucault 1984, 110-126). When assuming the
fact that discourses are about linguistic and textual matters this may lead to the
expectation that the analysis of travel writings would be limited to the formal,
aesthetic and stylistic questions which require the answer whether a particular text
was well written or not. In the act of cultural transfer, restructuring and translation, a
travel writing orders the foreign reality investing it with meaning so that it may be
recognized, understood, accepted and maybe assimilated by the receptors.
33When there is a time gap between the cultural context 1 and the cultural context 2, the travel writer
can only be a kind of proxy R1.
149
Besides the fact a discourses is never about only textual strategies, rhetoric and
language, they are also meant to determine important political links between
representations and their material effects34. Stating Foucault’s point of view, in any
society, the production of discourses is controlled, selected, organized and
redistributed by a certain number of procedures, whose role is to ward off its powers
and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its formidable reality
(Foucault 1984, 109). Considering the discursive field as infinite, everything may be
interpreted as being a discourse, covering the linguistic as well as the non-linguistic
areas.
The discursive approaches, including travel writings, have started from the
premise that cultural products reflect and also produce their social context. Any
cultural product is impossible to be received and understood in isolation from its
social and political environment.
In the attempt of revealing the discourses at work it may seem necessary to
track the continuity of statements and meanings which are considered both true and
real. When gathering the statements, most of the discourses become hegemonic 35. In
the case of travel writings, the discursive construction usually develops
simultaneously in two directions. One of these directions reveals the manner in which
these discourses are incomplete articulations of power that determine compelling
moments of resistance while the second direction shows that the discourses through
which desired visions are expressed become politically interesting and in doing so,
they may achieve hegemony, emphasising the fact that they are repeated over time in
such a way that surely they would acquire the authority of truth (Lisle 2006, 23).
Thus, it is accurate to say that travel writings could be characterized by this double
narrative strategy, which may be unfolded through a detailed examination of the
discourses involved in the construction of the narrative that shapes the same travel
writings.
34 In most cases, the receptors of a discourse could easily accept the discursive construction of
meaning according to the grid of power and knowledge but they are less willing to agree to the fact that
the same discourse can shape the material reality.
35 Foucault argues that discursive hegemony is able to continue because it was created is such a way
that it could assimilate and sometimes neutralize the forces of resistance that was encountered
(Foucault 1984, 127-136).
150
Based on its discursive feature, travel writing shapes and influences the way
receptors understand the world. The genre itself has changed in time but, as literary
representations of journeys across the world, travel writings, always, express the
political commitments that are scarcely visible beyond their status as a minor literary
genre.
The discourse developed by travel writings represents a combination of factual
statements and fictional descriptions which made these narratives popular with their
readers both of history, science and current affairs and fiction. The factual
statements, as representations of real life, made the travel writings accurate and
authoritative. At the same time, the fictional descriptions give to travel narrative a
descriptive, enlightening and entertaining character.
Like any other non-fictional narratives such those on history or politics, travel
writings are engaged in delivering space and time specific facts and events to
receptors in easy recognisable and intelligible ways. That is why they make use of
similar narrative strategies36 in order to give meaning of the
historical/geographical/cultural/political record when being translated from one
cultural context into another. At the same time, the narrative strategies that are
mainly used in fiction are also needed in order to romance facts into existence as
conditions of certifying the real. The narrative structure of the travel writings is
contained in the journey and vice-versa. The beginning, the middle and the end of the
travel accounts coincides with the pattern of the journey which is home – away –
home. Despite its indeterminate literary status, travel writing is governed by a
hierarchical discourse of literary genre, having the ability to write across literary
genres.
All travel writings were determined by a journey metaphor which expresses the
affliction of wanderlust. In most cases, this metaphor has a central position around
which the whole discourse develops. Moreover, the central point of the journey
36Historical writings use narrative strategies mainly to deliver and interpret historical facts, and not to
present a sequential order of these facts according to their chronology. That is why historical
narratives are shaped by four main literary tropes: metaphor, metonymy, irony and synecdoche, all of
them being able to narrate time and space specific events in a structure which could translate the
nature of the past as it was. Travel writings borrow these narrative strategies when it gives its
representations of life.
151
metaphor is based on the way people and cultures locate and identify themselves in
the reality they live.
Conclusion
From a literary perspective, travel writings as genre have changed in line with
important global shifts. When looking back, the eighteenth century travel accounts
usually categorised foreign plants, animals and peoples into ordered taxonomies,
which the Enlightenment confidence dissipated by the late nineteenth century (Pratt
1992, 26-32). Any type of representation of a foreign reality is never a simple literary
event. Reading about a foreign culture, interpreting and writing about it are political
acts that involve complex power relations between the writer and his/her readers
shaping the reality of the world they inhabit. The difficulty with the literary
formulation is generated by the fact that it reproduces a correspondence
understanding of the representation, because in the case of travel writings, texts
shape reality and reality shapes the texts. In other words, it is assumed that there is a
single incontrovertible reality awaiting documentation by travel writers and each
travel account would be judged for the manner it represents reality.
When translating a foreign culture the travel writer has to place himself/herself
in a specific area which is common for both the source and the receptor cultures. He
is generating the contact zone37. Taken from linguistics, the notion of contact zone
becomes the cultural space where people from different cultures create connections
and relationships, where meeting the other could be a way of discovering yourself.
Being a mediator between different cultures, the travel writer discovers, recognizes,
interprets and translates the foreign cultures, following the process of de-
contextualisation and re-contextualisation. In return, the reader or the audience has
to be placed in the same contact zone in order to de-code the discourse of the travel
writings.
37
Historically, contact zones have grown out of colonial domination and have been characterized by conditions
of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict. Lately, the Western society has turned into a huge contact
zone, where intercultural relations contribute to the internal life of all national cultures (Pratt 1992, 6).
152
Both the writer and the reader are involved in similar processes of discovering
the other but, at the same time, of discovering the self. While searching deeply in the
numerous layers of the self, the travel writer, as well as the reader, construct and
reconstruct his/her identity. Being in a continuous process of redefinition, the travel
writer and the reader locates himself/herself in complex relations to the culture of
origin and to the foreign cultures met during the journeys. Travel can also be
considered a metaphor of individual freedom and personal experience. Temporary
dislocation and absorption of what seemed a different identity usually is not related
to an alienating experience but to the freedom of mobility and choice.
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154
Adrian-George MATUS
UFR Histoire Contemporaine, Université Sorbonne Paris IV

Paris, France
E-mail : thematusadrian@yahoo.com
TRANSLATING COLLECTIVE NATIONAL FEARS THROUGH BEST-

SELLERS: MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ’S SOUMISSION AND TIMUR
VERNES’ ER IST WIEDER DA
Abstract: 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 tandem France-Germany throughout the 2010s. More
specifically, I will explain how the notion of collective anxiety is translated from a
cultural point of view in two best-seller books: Timur Vernes’ Er ist wieder da and
Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission.
The first part of this study will be devoted to asking to what extent we may use the
notion of collective anxiety. In the second part, we will deal with the French case of
Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel, where he explores the possibility of having an
Islamic president in the near future. Furthermore, we will deal with Timur Vernes’
novel, where he proposes a return of Adolf Hitler in mid-2000s Berlin. The final part
contains an attempt to understand the two forms of collective anxiety: the fear of the
past (Germany) and the fear of radical otherness (France). Lastly, we will explore the
reception of the two books in Germany and France.
Keywords: Fukuyama, Houellebecq, Soumission, collective anxieties,Timur Vernes
155
Introduction: Fukuyama à l’envers

Throughout the mid-1990s, Francis Fukuyama’s theory regarding the end of
conflicts and the victory of liberalism was highly acclaimed. His article The End of
History, published in the summer of 1989, stated without any hesitation: the conflict
between URSS and USA, between liberalism and communism and to a certain extent,
between liberty and totalitarianism, was won by the democratic faction (Fukuyama,
1989). The events that followed a few months later confirmed this initial hypothesis:
the Berlin Wall fell on the 9th of November 1989, USSR was dissolved in 1991, and,
apparently, American knowledge was shared in the whole world. Therefore, the book
where Fukuyama expanded his essay stirred enthusiasm. Published in 1992, during
the aftermath of the fall of Communism in Eastern and Central Europe, the
demonstration follows a Hegelian interpretation. The German philosopher considers,
in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that human history is determined by a pre-
established path, as evidenced by the concept of dialectics (Hegel, 1807). By starting
from these premises, Fukuyama states that democracy is the final stage of
development in human history. In this regard, over the next decades, the world will
witness the rise of capitalism and the emergence of democracy. In this optics, the
world will speak only one language and the cultural references will all be translatable:
“To Kant’s question, Is it possible to write a Universal History from a
cosmopolitan point of view? Our provisional answer is yes.” (Fukuyama
1992?,126)
Samuel Huntington engaged himself in this debate against Fukuyama by using
more cautious arguments. The American political scientist used a phrase previously
mentioned by Albert Camus, in the 1940s, during a radio emission that concerned the
Algerian issue38, to express the limits of the concept of the end of history. While
Huntington agrees that the ideological tensions ended, the cultural and religious
conflicts will develop in the future through a clash of civilizations. He proposed the
metaphor of tectonic plates in order to explain the existing tensions between
38
The radio broadcast is available on http://www.ina.fr/audio/PHD85011203 ,Le problème algerien, Debate
organised by Paul Guimard, with Ferhat Abbas, Raoul Borra, Kaddour Sator and Paul Emile Viard, on the 1st of
July 1946 (website accessed 15th of March 2016).
156
TRANSLATING COLLECTIVE NATIONAL FEARS THROUGH BEST-SELLERS: MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ’S
SOUMISSION AND TIMUR VERNES’ ER IST WIEDER DA
Islamism and secular Europe, between Hinduism and Islamism etc. These conflicts
are highly visible in contact-areas: Transylvania (between the Western-influenced
Catholic mentality and Byzantine Orthodox sphere of influence), Palestine, Ukraine,
Hong Kong or Sudan. He argues that these areas are cleft countries because they are
influenced by two different civilizations (Huntington, 1996).
The Fukuyama-Huntington debate is yet to end. Fukuyama’s theory was
strongly attacked starting from 9/11, not only by pragmatics such as Samuel
Huntington, but also by Alain Badiou, through the work The Rebirth of History:
Times of Riots and Uprisings (Badiou, 2012) or by The Guardian journalist Seamus
Milne (Milne, 2012). However, his ideas were found valid and partly demonstrated by
others, like John Mueller (Mueller, 2014), who consider that only nationalism
stopped the full development of Fukuyama’s ideas:
”Beginning with the countries of Eastern Europe, democracy continued its

progress after 1989. Moreover, capitalism increasingly came to be accepted.
(Mueller 36)
However, an opposite view of this topic belongs to Slavoj Žižek (Žižek, 2010).
For the Slovenian writer, the topic of end of history (as ideology) is understood from
a dystopian point of view, by pinpointing themes such as excessive technology,
pollution and dissolution of personal identity through the digital world. The debates
around these ideas are highly appealing and to a certain extent even fancy, therefore
many intellectuals engage with them. For instance, in a re-evaluation review
published by The Guardian, Eliane Glaser questions the possibility of reviving the
ideas presented in The End of History 25 years later (Glaser, 2014).
The topic of the end of history is recovered from a dystopian point of view in the
contemporary debates. The best argument to support this statement is the collection
of essays by Slavoj Žižek, as well as Alain Badiou’s work. While Samuel Huntington’s
theory rests in obscurity due to a highly specialized language, Fukuyama’s theories,
reinterpreted by Žižek and Badiou, are highly acclaimed. We consider these theories
to be better appealing to the public due to the fact that they appeal to collective
cultural anxieties. In other words, the cultural works sometimes make a strong
157
appeal to the affects, to the fears which are created through media and digital
discourse. Consequently, I will try to argue in this paper that the consumption of a
specific cultural product may reflect not only an existing intellectual debate, but it can
also emphasize a form of collective anxiety to which the book may offer an answer.
Methodology and concepts used
In order to make our point clear, we have to define the terms. Therefore, what
do we understand through the concept of collective anxieties? To what extent can we
use this term in order to understand it as a mirror of a specific society fear? From a
basic anthropological perspective, belonging to a group means sharing common
values. When these common values, shared by all the members of a community (a
group, a city, a nation) are threatened by an external (or even internal) member, the
collective anxiety is born. The threat may be real, as Clifford Geertz gives the example
of a lion which threats a group of people- generating mutations in representing the
lion, or imaginary- as aliens etc. In our case, when Republican secularism is
threatened by radical Islamic movements or when the multicultural contemporary
Germany may be menaced by the rise of the far right movements, the people panic
and try to search for compensative explanations (through fictions, through raising
awareness or through direct confrontations).
We will follow the premises of Jacques le Goff and the principles developed by
the Annales School. Historians like March Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby,
and Ernest Labrousse give credibility to fictional works or marginal opinion texts as
historical sources (Besnier 289-314). For instance, Jean Delumeau used fictional and
non-fictional sources in order to demonstrate how fear was present in Western
Europe starting from the 14th century (Delumeau, 1978). This method has similar
counterparts. In American universities, following Michel Foucault’s revolutionary
research (Foucault, 1975), a similar approach was developed by Stephen Greenblatt
through the school of New Historicism. By following the principles of New
Historicism, we will consider that the text (both fictional and non-fictional) can
reflect the con-text (Greenblatt, 1980), especially the existing mentalities.
158
Fear of the radical otherness: Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission
An artistic response that questions the validity of Fukuyama’s theory is Michel

Houellebecq’s latest novel, called Soumission. In this novel, the concept of clash of
civilization can be identified. The author proposed a what-if scenario in which the
France of 2022 would be governed by a Muslim president. In other words, he adjusts
Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations: the conflict is present not only in
cleft countries, but also in France. It is quite interesting to observe how Michel
Houellebecq uses the theme of Western decadence, previously explored in novels
such as Plateforme (2001) and Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994). While in the
previous books he questions the hedonist, post-Nietzschean society, but without
giving any possible alternative, in Soumission the answer is given aloud: the
Islamisation of the French atheist society. By default, such a theme would stir many
debates in a secular-declared society such as France. Moreover, the book was released
on the same day as the terrorist attacks of Charlie Hebdo: 7 January 2015 (Rosenthal
2015). The next day, the Prime-Minister Manuel Valls declared without any
hesitation the official position. During a TV interview, he said that France does not
reflect the position taken by Michel Houellebecq in the novel Soumission:
“La France, ce n’est pas la soumission, ce n’est pas Michel Houellebecq. Ce

n’est pas l’intolérance, la haine” (Tronche, 2015)
In this odd context, a cautious political discourse was necessary. Valls strongly
accused Houellebecq, associating this book with the manifestation of an intolerant
behavior. The writer gladly engaged in the debate: his controversial statements
regarding French society already made him l’enfant terrible of French culture.
However, while the official discourse accused Houellebecq’s argument that France
is an Islamophobic country, the book was highly popular with the public. After one
week, 250.000 books were sold and the publishing house and Flammarion had to
make several reprints. In Germany, the book was released on 16 th of January in
100.000 copies. After one month, the publishing house Dumont Buchverlag had to
159
make 5 successive reprints for the translation. 300.000 copies were sold from 15
January to 15 February (AFP, 2015). In Italy the book met similar success, with
200.000 books sold in one month. We may ask ourselves what determined this mass
interest in the novel Soumission. Besides a good marketing campaign and a historical
coincidence in publishing the book, what generated such an interest in reading the
book? Moreover, what mechanism does Michel Houellebecq use in order to question
hot topics such as French identity or multiculturalism?
1.1. Huysmans revisited
The action of the novel revolves around a Parisian academic, named François,
who has just defended his PhD at Université Sorbonne, on the author Joris-Karl
Huysmans. This option for this specific writer is not arbitrary, neither for the
character, nor for Houellebecq. Huysmans was a 19 th century cultural figure that
converted to Catholicism after exploring various religious movements. Through
books such as À rebours or La Cathedrale, he explains how Catholicism may be a
possible solution to the decadent movements that were present in the late 19th
century (fin du siècle).For the main character, the justification is stated from the
beginning phrase:
“pendant toutes les années de ma triste jeunesse, Huysmans demeura pour

moi un compagnon, un ami fidèle; jamais je n’éprouvai de doute, jamais je ne
fus tenté d’abandonner, ni de m’orienter vers un autre sujet“ (Houellebecq 1)
The structure ”ma triste jeunesse“ [my sad youth] is explained in the later pages.
Moreover, the main character explains how he became interested in Huysmans. He
had been in the past strongly deceived by the Western world and found a comfortable
place where he could hide from the world:
“ pour différentes raisons psychologiques que je n’ai ni la compétence ni le

désir d’analyser, je m’écartais sensiblement d’un tel schema. “ (Houellebecq 1)
160
From an extra-diegetic point of view, the author’s aim to use this cultural
reference is not accidental. Huysmans represents an interesting exception to the 19 th
century French literary society, being strongly involved with Catholicism towards the
end of his life after being a decadent. What is more, the references towards the
literary works of Huysmans are present also through the interest in description and
aestheticism, but also through overt references to similar episodes by Huysmans.
While the explicit references are easy to spot and even very carefully explained by the
author himself, these parallels may pass without being noticed. The most obvious
situation is the end of the novel, when the conversion to Islam is not clearly stated:
“Puis, d’une voix calme, je prononcerais la formule suivante, que j’aurais

phonétiquement apprise ; (…) Et puis ce serait fini ; je serais, dorénavant, un
musulman“ (Houellebecq 322)
The ambiguity regarding the conversion to Islam is present through the use of the
conditional form of the verbs (as ‘j’aurais, je serais). In other words, the reader does
not know whether the conversion of the character actually took place or if it is just a
hypothetical situation. The reference is to the end of the novel A Rebours, where a
similar ambiguous statement is used to describe a possibility of the conversion of
Huysmans’s alter-ego, des Esseintes:
“Seigneur prenez pitié du chrétien qui doute, de l’incrédule qui voudrait croire,
du forçat de la vie qui s’embarque seul, dans la nuit, sous un firmament que
n’éclairent plus les consolants fanaux du vieil espoir“. (Huysmans 1884)
1.2.
An Islamic France?
Besides the explicit paragraphs where the issue of Muslim identity in France is
questioned, the use of Huysmans’ reference may equally contribute to the depiction
of the conflict between civilizations. While Huntington does not necessarily consider
that the European civilization is dead, Houellebecq states, (through the characters’
161
intervention, as Dostoievski does), that Europe met a deep crisis of values, to which
Islam can seem a viable alternative:
“Dans un article destine à Oummah, ou il se posait la question de savoir si

l’Islam était appelé à dominer le monde, Rediger répondait finalement par
l’affirmative. C’est à peine s’il revenait sur le cas des civilisations occidentales,
tant elles lui paraissaient à l’évidence condamnées “ (Houellebecq 280)
We may affirm that this statement is not new in the context of European
discourse. Even the theme of Islamic conversion was previously touched upon in the
French culture. Following Nietzsche’s questioning of European values, Oswald
Spengler stated, in the aftermath of the First World War, that Western Europe is in
decline. Other intellectuals from the interwar period, like René Guenon, went even
further. For them, the alternatives may be found in Islam or Buddhism. Guenon
converted himself to Islam. Also, a biographical detail of Houellebecq’s life may give
us a better understanding of the author’s option: his mother, after being engaged with
many counterculture movements, converted herself to Islam. From a cultural point of
view, the issue of Islamic France was previously explored by Elena Chudinova as well
in the novel The Mosque of Notre Dame of Paris: 2048. The book was translated in
French in 2009, but it was not read intensively (Rosenthal, 2015, 78). However, in
this context, Houellebecq revisits this theme. He starts with the same critique of
Western society, but he also deconstructs the idea of Islam.
The character mentioned in the previous quote, Robert Rediger, has converted
to Islam in order to get the position of dean of Sorbonne University. In the novel
Soumission, we may notice several reasons for converting: opportunism (due to the
Socialist Islamic Party gaining power), existential crisis or simply, like François, to
escape from the daily routine, to search for a new spectacular form of existence. The
tension between the two main civilizations is strongly exposed not only through the
picturesque Parisian neighborhoods, but also by the mixed cultural references
(combining pop-art, European high-culture, and Muslim artworks).
We have seen to this point that the clash between Islamic and European
civilization is reflected in the novel Soumission. First of all, the mechanism functions
162
by referring to writers that belong to multiple ideologies, as Huysmans (belonging to

minor literature, to use the Deleuzian concept). Furthermore, it uses deliberately
eclectic images and references. However, the most shocking aspect that stirred
controversy was neither the re-interpretation of Huysmans’s legacy, nor questioning
the possibility of a mass conversion, but presenting the scenario of having a Muslim
president in 2022. Some of the critics even interpreted it as a near-future dystopia.
Marc Smeets considers this to be political science-fiction (Smeets 101). Regardless of
the edgy categorization, the particularity of this novel is that it makes references to
the existing political figures. The presidential elections gather fictional as well as real
characters such as Marine Le Pen, leader of Front National, Mohammed Ben Abbes
(a fictional character that represents a party called Fraternité Musulmane), and
François Hollande, representing Parti Socialiste. Finally, due to a lack of better
candidates, Mohammed Ben Abbes won the presidential election. The main reason
for being voted by the French is that he proposed a new form of ideology:
“un nouvel humanisme, présenter l’islam comme la forme achevée d’un

humanisme nouveau, réunificateur, et qui est d’ailleurs parfaitement sincere
lorsqu’il proclame son respect pour les trios religions du Livre” (Houellebecq
37)
We may spot briefly the irony behind the structure “nouvel humanisme”. In history,
similar references were used in order to design other reformist attempts, as the well-
known structure “communism with a human face”. Equally, Jean-Paul Sartre
discussed existentialism as a new form of humanism.
Rather than through the use of satiric language, Soumission shocks even more
because of another aspect. The third chapter includes one of the themes that
determined the high interest for this book: the fear of the radical Otherness. His
previous novels had already been somewhat controversial affirmations regarding the
Islamic society. In 2002, Michel Houellebecq was accused in court because of his
Islamophobic affirmations. Not just this, but the novel La Possibilité d’une île dealt
with the theme of religious sects (like Raelism). Therefore, the literary critics as well
163
as the readers were highly interested when it appeared. Throughout the novel, slowly
but surely, the new administration of Ben Abbes is replacing the old, unprofessional
bureaucracy. Despite what the reader would have expected, the speech of the newly-
elected president is not violent. It seems that the ideology is spreading on an empty
ground, as a conquering empire. Throughout the novel, there are always references to
the Roman Empire. The president identifies himself with the Emperor Augustus and
his aim is to remake this civilization:
“Mais sa grande référence, ca sauté aux yeux, c’est l’Empire romain- et la

construction européenne n’est pour lui qu’un moyen de réaliser cette ambition
millénaire.“ (Houellebecq 49)
With this quote, we can understand how Huntington’s theory regarding the
clash of civilization is reflected. Houellebecq’s novels were always critical of the idea
of triumphant liberalism (especially L’extension du domaine de la lute, which was
published in 1994). In Soumission, The Roman Empire represents a very subtle
metaphor for the civilization decadence. This idea was highly popularized in the
European conscience by Oswald Spengler. In Der Untgang des Abendlandes, Oswald
Spengler considers ancient Rome to have been not a culture (seen in a positive
perspective), but a civilization (seen in a negative perspective) (Spengler 1991).
Therefore, the destruction came from inside, because of its own weaknesses and
internal conflicts. In the early 1930s, many intellectuals used this pattern, starting
from Martin Heidegger, Lucian Blaga, and Miguel de Unamuno. Houellebecq gives a
slightly different understanding of this concept. Through this reference, he questions
the European Union common heritage, the rhetoric of Western tolerance and
multicultural politics:
“l’idéologie multiculturaliste est encore bien plus oppressante en Scandinavie

qu’en France, les militants identitaires sont nombreux et aguerris“
(Houellebecq 100)
To sum up, Soumission, a highly-aesthetic novel by Michel Houellebecq, reflects a
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collective anxiety of the French contemporary society: the fear of the radical
Otherness. This theme is present in the novel through three main points:
● drawing the parallel between Huyman’s Catholic conversion and François‘s
Islamic conversion .
● questioning European values and the triumph of liberalism (through the

metaphor of the Roman Empire)
● taking into consideration the possibility of having a Muslim president.
Fear of the past: Timur Vernes’ Er ist wieder da
On the other side of the Rhine River, another commercial book stirred
controversy starting from 2012. The bestseller Er ist wieder da [Look who’s back],
translated into English in 2014 questions the heritage of liberalism in German
society. While Michel Houellebecq previously wrote satirical novels, for Timur Vernes
this was his first published novel. In the past, Vernes only had a journalistic career
and he also used to be a ghostwriter. He has mixed origins, being the son of a
German mother and having as father a Jew of Hungarian origin. Much like
Soumission, the German novel is a first-person narrative. However, the option for
the character is more spectacular. The narration is done by Adolf Hitler, who wakes
up in contemporary Germany after a long sleep.
After the long process of de-nazification (both in the former East and West
Germany), National Socialist themes are seen as taboo (Thomas 2005). However,
Germany still has many supporters of the Third Reich, making the issue more
complicated. From a legal point of view, the German law forbids any manifestation of
sympathy towards National Socialism, through Strafgesetzbuch, S. 86, Verbreiten
von Propagandamitteln verfassungwidriger Organisationen [Dissemination of
Means of Propaganda of Unconstitutional Organizations], particularly art.4 :
“Propagandamittel, die nach ihrem Inhalt dazu bestimmt sind, Bestrebungen

einer ehemaligen nationalsozialischen Organisation fortzusetzen”
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(Strafgesetzbuch, S.86, art.4)
This law forbids any further propaganda of National Socialist symbols, through
books and other cultural products. However, the law does not refer to individual
symbols or to particular persons. Still, the reference to Hitler is seen as very trivial,
especially in a contemporary Germany that wants to promote multiculturalism. Even
though it deals with a taboo theme such as Hitler’s legacy, Vernes’ book was highly
acclaimed by the public. During the first weeks of 2013, the book was the first
fictional bestseller in Germany, followed by Paul Coelho’s Manuscript Found in
Accra. (Publishers Weekly). There are estimations that 2 million copies have been
sold until now in Germany. Moreover, about 300.000 audiobooks were put into
market. Finally, a movie was set after the original novel. As well as Soumission’s
situation, we may ask ourselves: what determined this high interest in reading the
novel? What are the social issues that this novel addresses?
Conventionalism in form, originality in theme approach
Like in the novel Soumission, the narration is done by a first-person character.

This option allows for a more personal, introspective perspective for the reader. The
first phrase already insists on the concept of people: “Das Volk hat mich wohl am
moisten uberrascht.” (Vernes 1). The discourse of the fictionalized Hitler develops
around trying to understand a new Germany, where he suddenly wakes up. The
character tries to understand what is going on, why the habitants of Berlin call him a
loser, and how can he lead again the people, das Volk. It is interesting to spot
Vernes’s ironical approach regarding the initial popular perception of this strange
character. Until the end of the novel, no one actually believes that he is Hitler.
Starting from the newspaper vendor to his secretary, Mrs. Sawatzki, all the characters
believe that he is just playing a role, through the so-called method-acting:
“Begreifend leuchtete ihr Gesicht auf, dann war sie mit einem Satz auf den
Beinen: Ick hab det ja jewusst. Jenau det isset doch! Messed Ekting! Sol lick et
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jleich ma’machen?” (Vernes 126)
Initially presented as a game, this method acting will engage more and more people.
By using a rhetoric that accuses liberalism in Germany, the fictional character Hitler
will receive strong support from the people. Due to the fact that he is constructing
himself an image through TV, Youtube and alternative newspapers, we deal with a
process of simulation. The people cannot and do not have the power to understand
whether he is the real Hitler or just a fake. In Jean Baudrillard’s terms, we may
understand through this character a form of simulacrum:
“when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full
meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality”
(Baudrillard 6)
The reader is faced with an interesting dialectic. On the one hand, the
fictionalized character of Hitler always speculates on the nostalgia for the past, while
at the same time, the fear of History is always evident. This is one of the great aims of
Vernes’s novel: to rewrite the Great Narratives. We may assert that questioning
historical reality is a theme that is present in other European literatures. Revisiting
national stories is one essential aspect of postmodernism, as Jean-François Lyotard
stated in La Condition Postmoderne (Lyotard 1979). Briefly, we may mention literary
works such as Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis or Julian
Barnes’ England, England that question the truth of traditional stories. Vernes uses
the same principles, but only to a certain point. Even though he revisits a delicate
subject, he is not questioning the notion of Truth itself, as Houellebecq does. In other
words, his character is based on Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum, but the
subsequent action is more a counterfactual history than a re-writing of History on
other epistemological fundaments.
From a social point of view, the initial political situation depicted by Vernes is
very similar to that presented by Houellebecq: the fail of integration, the rise of
radical movements, and the fragmentation of political parties. However, while Michel
167
Houellebecq tries to understand the crisis from a larger cultural perspective, Vernes
is not questioning the philosophical or cultural foundations of Germany. Instead, he
insists on many daily life aspects, pop-art references and German civilization
insights. Hitler is always criticizing the liberal heritage and the multicultural politics,
as seen in the following fragment:
“Den Deutsche der Gegenwart trennt seinen Abfall grundlicher als seine
Rassen mit einen eizigen Ausnahme: auf dem Felde des Humors.” (Vernes
160)
While Michel Houellebecq varies many styles and registers, Vernes uses only two
main registers: the language used by Hitler (the German which was used during the
Third Reich) and contemporary urban German (as in the first cited fragment). While
the novel is very original in its choice of theme, the style is not as innovative as the
complex phrasing and mixed referencing of the French author’s style. Vernes rather
uses popular forms of irony.
Fear of the past
While the satire towards Hitler’s regime was present from the 1940s (through
the movie The Dictator by Charlie Chaplin), in the German space there were few
works that used this form of pastiche (Donadio 2015). Up to this day, creating an
ironic interpretation of Hitler was not possible in the cultural public sphere, as
Vernes himself declared. However, across the Ocean, various forms of art used to
satirize Hitler’s legacy, contributing to creating wrong stereotypes about Germany,
through pop-culture (Oltermann 2014). We consider this lack to be determined not
only by certain legal restrictions, but also by a community taboo. Moreover, when
representations about Hitler in contemporary Germany actually occur, there are two
main directions: the funny Hitler and the monster Hitler (Vernes 2014). Certainly,
Vernes had to take into consideration how he could re-position his own standing
without being punished by the German law. We consider that this would be a certain
distance from Houellebecq’s Soumission, Julian Barnes’ England, England or
168
Saramago’s History of the Siege of Lisbon: through their postmodern rewriting, these
writers engaged in open debates, but they were not risking any juridical pursuit. As a
result, certain cautiousness was needed, but at the same time, Vernes wanted to
challenge the reader. Therefore, what he proposed in Er ist wieder da a realistic
Hitler is quite new in the context of German pop-culture.
During an interview with the Irish National Public Service Media, he declared
that his aim was not to create only a satire about Hitler, but to show the possible
clash between the past and contemporary society:
“he is not that funny as the clash of the two worlds. This Hitler is a bit helpless
at the beginning, but he gains strengths and he shows he’s able to able to
analyze his surrounding (…) and he’s able to use the abilities we’ve forgotten
about” (Vernes 2014)
In other words, Vernes’s questions the supremacy of liberalism, as outlined by

Fukuyama, by proposing an ideological clash, which is not stated by Huntington.
While Samuel Huntington considers that the possible conflicts are determined by
different civilization patterns, throughout his novel, Vernes proposes the hypothesis
of a historical clash. His point is not necessarily to prove that a new form of Nazism
may emerge. The novel is shocking due to the premise that a charismatic leader such
as Hitler could win the elections in Germany. One may spot that Houellebecq has the
same starting point: a tired society that needs a Messianic leader. However, Vernes’s
critique equally draws on media, on simulacrum-making, and on Otherness
discrimination (the case of Turks in the novel). Due to the controversial theme, the
opinions in the media were quite different. For instance, in Süddeutsche Zeitung,
Cornelia Fiedler considered that the commercial boost is due to the main character-
Adolf Hitler (Fidler, 2013). Also, her opinion is that the satire would not be well
received by the public . Marc Reichwein from Die Welt had a pertinent review, but in
the end he questioned whether the book has actually any humor for a German public
(Reichwein 2013). On the other hand, the cultural journalists from the United States
and the Great Britain proved to be more relaxed on this topic. To sum up, the fact
169
that the book was highly consumed in Germany shows that the fear of the Hitler’s
heritage is still present (why?). While the German cultural journalists accused it (not
always in the open), the book was highly purchased. Even though it was later
translated in 42 languages, Er ist Wieder Da did not meet the same success in other
cultures, even though it was better promoted through cultural media (Donadio 2015).
Conclusions. Limitations. Further research
To sum up, translating the collective anxieties may be a secret ingredient for
the writers in order to have a successful book. We have argued, by using the New
Historicism and Imagery Studies methodology, that the interests from the large
public for several novels may reflect some specific fears. We wanted to understand
why these novels were highly read in the European Union tandem- France-Germany.
We were also interested, following Emily Apter and Mona Baker’s reflections, in
understanding to what extent these theories are untranslatable. Therefore, we started
from the accurate analysis by Samuel Huntington in order to demonstrate that these
two novels reflect a clash between two civilizations. We have argued in the second
part that Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission reflected the fear of radical
otherness. This idea is constructed through three main points: drawing the parallel
with the Catholic conversion of Huysmans, questioning European values through the
metaphor of the Roman Empire and proposing, for the commercial sake, the
hypothesis of having a Muslim president. While Michel Houellebecq used a highly-
sophisticated language and many intercultural references, Timur Vernes questioned
the legacy of Hitler by using a simple vocabulary. Even though from an aesthetic
point of view Er ist wieder da is not as successful as Soumission, the irony is based
on other fundaments. We have seen that Hitler’s character is built on the model of
simulacrum and that this approach is not singular in the postmodern tradition.
However, while the other novels deal with more delicate historical subjects, Vernes
risked more due to the law concerning the Third Reich heritage promotion:
Strafgesetzbuch, S. 86.
One of the limits of this research is the fact that we did not have access to the
170
full critical reception of these novels in all countries. Moreover, we do not have a full
understanding of the French and German mentality. Finally, there were few critical
works that deal with these novels, since they were published only a few years ago.
In the future, it would be interesting to see how these novels were received in
the Arab countries (for Soumission) and in Israel (for Er ist Wieder Da). Also, it
would be useful to consult psychological and anthropological works that deal the
main features of German and French mentality, in order to better argue the existing
collective anxieties. It would be equally good to have literary critique works that deal
with the writings that reflect the collective anxieties, especially in the context of the
refugee crisis and the Syrian war.
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Ioana UNK
Babeș-Bolyai University
E-mail: ioana_unk@yahoo.com
TRANSLATION AND PERSONALITY. MULTIFACES OF PERSONALITY IN

TRANSLATION
Abstract: 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
translator’s personality changes with the language switch. Translation thus becomes a
double metamorphosis, a linguistic one, from one language to another and a
psychological one, from one personality to another, and the translator, besides
becoming a rewriter of the original text, is also a personality builder, internalizing
different worldviews, specific to each language.
Key words: translation, bilingualism, personality, Cultural Frame Switching
Of bilinguals and translators. Accounts and psychological facts
The issue of the translator’s identity is, in fact, an issue of the bilingual and
multilingual personality, since the translator possesses expert skills in both the mother
tongue, and the second language. Thus, a first step in understanding the translator’s
mental processes and cognitive functioning would imply defining and explaining the
biculturalism and multiculturalism phenomenon.
174
TRANSLATION AND PERSONALITY. MULTIFACES OF PERSONALITY IN TRANSLATION
Parting with the rather simplistic definition given to bilingualism by Merriam-

Webster’s online thesaurus, Richard Clément (2015) proposes a two-level definition:
“bilingualism as a collective characteristic defining nations and bilingualism as a
person’s competence in one or more languages” (1), also noting that the key to
understanding the concept lies in the interaction between individuals and contexts, and,
as such, between man and culture. Speaking two languages alone does not make one a
bilingual, if those two languages do not provide access to two different cultural levels.
“Bilingualism is, therefore, an intercultural communication (IC) phenomenon …”

(Clément 2015, 2).
So is a translator’s job: She communicates interculturally, but not only for the
sake of translating raw information, of expressing facts, but in order to recreate a world
that is based on the author’s perspective and that also needs to be adjusted to the target
language that designs it. It is an accommodative experience between two cultures, two
visions of the world, two perspectives on reality, resulting not in a unification, but in a
more or less amiable co-existence of cultural differences:
“I think of myself not as a uniﬁed cultural being but as a communion of different

cultural beings. Due to the fact that I have spent time in different cultural
environments, I have developed several cultural identities that diverge and
converge according to the need of the moment.” (Sparrow 190, quoted in
Chen2008,803-804).
The above citation speaks of an integration strategy and process, by which a

person successfully blends elements of the culture of origin with elements of the
receiving culture. The melange is not totally synchronous on a subjective level, as the
author mentions several cultural identities. Studies show that this does not necessarily
mean a personality conflict, if the person manages not to internalize the intersection
point between the two cultures (Benet-Martínez and Haritatos 2005; Padilla 1994;
Phinney and Devich-Navarro 1997, quoted in Chen 2008, 805). The results of such
studies have formed the stem of the Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) theories, that
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explain bilingualism – biculturalism as a wilful acceptance of their two identities, as

compatible and not in opposition. This view is far more positive than the first self-
splitting theories on bilingualism – biculturalism, that resulted later in the Cultural
Frame Switching paradigm, but it still acknowledges the presences of a doubling
phenomenon: double identities, double personalities.
Closely connected to the Cultural Frame Switching is the contradictory, inner-
confusing perspective that Aneta Pavlenko (2006) presents as a daily reality of
bilinguals or multilinguals. Switching from one language to another also implies
switching from one Weltanschauung to another, from one understanding of the outer
reality to a different one, and changing the behavioural repertoire, because entering the
new world of a second or third spoken language requires an absolute change of the lens
through which reality is perceived. This pronounced confusion of identity has been
equated by some writers with a pathologic manifestation of schizophrenia or a similar
kind of schizophreniform disorder.
What is common to both bilinguals and monolinguals interacting with them, is
the realization of the presence of at least two conflicting personalities, each
corresponding to a language and to its specific reality. Adler’s warning that
“bilingualism can lead to split personality and, worst, to schizophrenia” (Pavlenko
2006,3) seems to carry some truth.
The French-English bilingual writer Julian Green captured beautifully this
struggle of the two personalities:
“I was writing another book, a book so different in tone from the French that a
whole aspect of the subject must of necessity be altered. It was as if, writing in
English, I had become another person. I went on. New trains of thought were
started in my mind, new associations of ideas were formed. There was so little
resemblance between what I wrote in English and what I had already written in
French that it might almost be doubted that the same person was the author of
these two pieces of work.” (Green 62, quoted in Pavlenko 2006, 4).
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The rendering of a similar experience is to be found in Tzvetan Todorov’s essay

Bilingualism, Dialogism and Schizophrenia, with a sensible description of his French-
Bulgarian experience:
“I had changed my imagined audience. And at that moment I realized that the
Bulgarian intellectuals to whom my discourse was addressed could not
understand the meaning I intended. The condemnation of attachment to national
values changes significance according to whether you live in a small country
(your own) places within the sphere of influence of a larger one or whether you
live abroad, in a different country, where you are (or think you are) sheltered
from any threat by a more powerful neighbour. Paris is certainly a place that
favours the euphoric renunciation of nationalist values: Sofia much less so … [the
necessary modification] required that I change an affirmation into its direct
opposite. I understood the position of the Bulgarian intellectuals, and had I been
in their situation, mine probably would have been the same.” (Todorov 210,
quoted in Pavlekno 2006,4).
Claude Esteban stresses the co-existence of two mental universes, along with the
two languages:
“… having been divided between French and Spanish since early childhood, I
found it difficult for many years to overcome a strange laceration, a gap not
merely between two languages but also between the mental universes carried by
them; I could never make them coincide within myself.” (Esteban 26; translated
by Beaujour 47, quoted in Pavlenko 2006,5).
The empirical works of psychoanalysis, psychology and linguistic anthropology

analysed by Pavlenko (2006) confirm the intuitive point of view and the accounts
presented above, i.e. that different languages may create different worlds for their
speakers and that these worlds are sometimes irreconcilable, thus leading to the birth of
different selves. In their turn, these selves impact differently the bilingual’s behaviour
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and view of the world, creating sometimes mutually excluding situations and conflicts.
(Pavlenko 2006, 27)
The Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri(2015) also speaks of experiencing a
linguistic exile and of the inner schism brought along by speaking two different
languages:
“In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is
foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is
considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a
secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An
absence that creates a distance within you.” (30).
The writer describes her feelings while learning Italian and writing a novel in
English in an article for The New Yorker:
“In this period I feel like a divided person. […]

I think of two-faced Janus. Two faces that look at the past and the future at once.
The ancient god of the threshold, of beginnings and endings. He represents a
moment of transition. He watches over gates, over doors, a god who is only
Roman, who protects the city. A remarkable image that I am about to meet
everywhere.” (34).
“By writing in Italian, I think I am escaping both my failures with regard to
English and my success. Italian offers me a very different literary path. As a
writer I can demolish myself, I can reconstruct myself. I can join words together
and work on sentences without ever being considered an expert. I’m bound to fail
when I write in Italian, but, unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn’t
torment or grieve me.” (35).
Learning a new language – Italian – and writing her first story in Italian, Jhumpa
Lahiri (2015) goes through a partial metamorphosis, she changes herself, by doubling
her personality:
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“It’s not possible to become another writer, but it might be possible to become
two.” (36).
Could this inner split, this contest between two personalities be inherent to the
translator, as well, who has to retrace a writer’s literary steps and develop a new
personality that best expressed the world of the translation language? The intuitive
answer is yes, but the scientific one will have to be given by psychologists.
Making a summary of the positive and negative effects of bilingualism on the
cognitive, education and personality development, Al-Amri (2013) indicates a
detrimental effect of bilingualism on personality, manifested as conflict, tension and
emotional instability, citing Diebold’s (1968) and Appel and Muysken’s (1987) studies
on alienated personalities as an effect of bilingual confusion(3).
An interesting psychological experiment designed by Nodoushan & Laborda
(2014) aimed at testing the hypothesis of the dual inner self of a group of Iranian
Americans, who had spent the first half of their lives in Iran and the other half in the US.
The Self Concept Scale – in English and Persian – was used to examine the participants’
self-concept in both languages. The results came to support the hypothesis: A
discrepancy was observed between the real self and the ideal self in the Persian version
of the questionnaire, as opposed to no discrepancy between the two self-concepts in the
English version. The conclusion of the study was rather undoubtful:
“… the bilingual possesses two different guises of selves which are language
specific and are used in accordance to the language the bilingual speaks at any
given point in time.” (Nodoushan and Laborda 2014, 114).
The results of the psychological research quoted above finds more support if we
consider the specific features of any language. Following the evolutionist line of
research, Steven Pinker (1994)identifies six traits of the English languagethat make it so
different from any other language: 1) the agreement maker, reflected in the third person
singular -s, as in He thinks. 2) the free word order, allowing prepositions to play a
crucial role in the meaning of each sentence or phrase. 3) the ergative character, i.e. the
similarity between the subjects of intransitive verbs and the objects of transitive verbs.
4) English is a “topic-prominent” language. 5) English is a subject-verb-object language.
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6) English is a classifier language, i.e. it makes use of many noun classifiers. Pinker
humorous argument that, based on these specific features of the English language, and
of any other language taken for comparison, a Martian might wonder why the
inhabitants of Earth speak thousands of “mutually unintelligible dialects” (241) carries
some truth in it and justifies the further question about the need of developing different
personalities in order to comfortably communicate in one language or another.
The translation, as a form of cultural communication becomes a process of self-
translation, in which the translator builds herself a new personality that can encompass
the specific traits of the target language, as well as the cultural values carried by every
world-forging language.
Double the language, double the personality? The Cultural Frame Switching
and psychological studies
One of the most pertinent psychological paradigms used to explain the cognitive
and behavioural changes that occur in a person when switching from one language to
another is the Cultural Frame Switching that explains the often noticed phenomenon of
the bilinguals manifesting double personalities, as an expression of their biculturality,
which prompts them to change their attitudes and representations when facing stimuli
belonging to a different culture. In other words, when they speak a different language
that acts as a priming mechanism for a different culture, bilinguals manifest a different
personality. (Ramírez-Esparza 2006, 100).
Earlier studies based on this paradigm examined personality differences in
French-English bilinguals, by measuring the responses to the Thematic Apperception
Test (Ervin, 1964) and attributed the differences to the cultural differences (lesser
importance of social roles in the American culture, more verbal language aggression in
the French peer communication, more often presence of the themes of autonomy in the
French culture, etc.). (Ramírez-Esparza 2006, 101-102).
Another study using the California Psychological Inventory (Hull, 1996) with
Spanish-English bilingual subjects brought more evidence in support of the Cultural
Frame Switching Paradigm. Again, language imprinted the participants’ responses with
features specific to the culture associated with each language: The Spanish culture, as a
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collectivist culture values interrelational harmony, peace and gregarious tendencies and
thus determined the participants to obtain higher scores on “good impression”, while
the individualistic, achievement-prone American culture bought along higher scores in
“intellectual efficiency”, when the responses were to be given in English (Ramírez-
Esparza 2006, 102).
The study conducted by Ramírez-Esparza et al. (2006) aimed at testing the
Cultural Frame Switching hypothesis in the field of personality differences, with
English-Spanish bilinguals. The experiment was a within-subjects design, with three
samples of participants. What is to be noted about this study is the fact that the
psychologists chose to include in their study only bilinguals who reached a very high
standard of language proficiency, both in English and Spanish. This criterion makes it
possible to generalize the results to any group of professional translators, whose
extremely high level of language proficiency is a common prerequisite.
In choosing the personality measurement tool, the authors explained their
preference for the Big-Five paradigm, namely the Big Five Inventory. The Big Five
framework is a bipolar scale, with five personality traits, each placed on a progressive
continuum: extraversion, agreeableness, consciousness, neuroticism and openness. This
personality test was translated into Spanish, and the participants were asked to fill out
the Big Five Inventory in both languages. The results were consistent with the
predictions of the Cultural Frame Switching:
“bilinguals were more extraverted, agreeable, and conscientious in English than

in Spanish and these differences were consistent with the personality displayed in
each culture.” (Ramírez-Esparza 2006,115).
These results might seem to contradict the very definition of personality, its
persistence across time and situations, but the authors explain that, from a
psychological perspective, this tendency affects the whole group, therefore the
individual change has to be interpreted within this context:
“… individuals tend to retain their rank ordering within a group but the group as
a whole shifts. Thus, an extrovert does not suddenly become an introvert as she
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switches languages; instead a bilingual becomes more extraverted when she

speaks English rather that Spanish but retains her rank ordering within each of
the groups.” (Ramírez-Esparza 2006,115)
As people who have internalized two cultures, bilinguals tend to change their
view of the world, their interpretations, depending on the language they use to express
themselves (Ramírez-Esparza 2006, 118).
As expert-bilingual, the literary translator engages in a similar experience; the
translation process has a double creative value: It recreates the fictional work of the
author and it gives birth to a new personality that internalizes the set of values specific
to the target language. Both the literary work and the translator are subjected to a
transformative process: a linguistic and a psychological one. This process allows the
translator to play two roles, both bearing an immense creative value: the role of the
rewriter of the original text and the role of a new personality builder.
Linguistic determinism
The linguistic determinism theory is one of the first psychological explanations

given to the phenomenon of bilingualism. The linguistic determinism hypothesis (also
known as the Whorfian hypothesis, after its author, the psycholinguist Benjamin Lee
Whorf) states that the structural differences between two languages will be reflected in
the way the native speakers of the two languages perceive and understand reality. So,
language has a causal effect on thought. The language we speak determines our world
view and filters the relation between world and our thinking.
The examples given to support this hypothesis are too well-known: Different
languages have a different understanding of basic colours and, while we can count 11
such colours in English (black, white, red, blue, green, yellow, brown, purple, pink,
orange and gray), the Dani people of Papua New Guinea only count two colours (black
and white or light and dark). (Gerrig and Zimbardo 2002,265). The contrast between
the two perspectives on colour is rather abrupt, since a world perspective using eleven
basic colours to describe the outer reality differs significantly from the one that views
things in black and white.
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Another classic and yet powerful example is the one contrasting the English
language that has a single word for snow and the Eskimo that has more than twenty
words expressing different forms and types of snow. (Wortman and Loftus 1988, 198).
More recent psychological research has reduced the influence that language
exerts on thought and has pleaded for a more balanced relation between language and
thought, but this controversy was strong enough to incite further interest in the matter.
It was the first psychological explanation given to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous quote
on language “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” and it reflected a
general interest in the everlasting relation between language and thought, that resulted
in later psychological hypotheses which were successfully tested.
Language as an instinct
In his renowned bestseller The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker (1994) brings
evidence to the fact that language can be construed as an instinct, as a “biological
makeup of our brains” (4), and not as a cultural creation that can be taught and learned
in the absence of an innate, pre-birth, prewired mechanism. As an instinct or innate skill
that pervades thought, language helps speakers interpret and construct reality in a
manner that is specific to each language spoken, so speaking more languages can easily
lead to constructing different and unique ways of expressing oneself.
The evolutionary perspective gives us the first evidence: The history of mankind
has no record of a mute tribe or population; the universality of language inherent to the
human species justifies the formulation of the language instinct hypothesis, and not of
that of language as a cultural artefact. As Pinker (1994) puts it:
“There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age
language.”(14).
The crucial argument favouring the language instinct hypothesis comes from the
field of Developmental Psychology and concerns the acquisition of language by children.
Pinker (1994) is of the opinion that each generation of children reinvents language, and
this process is prompted by a volatile instinct they cannot control and which acts only
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for a certain period of time. The critical window for successfully acquiring a language
closes during childhood. (34).
As an instinct, language has to have an identifiable place in the brain, but besides
the two famous areas associated with language production and language acquisition
(Broca and Wernicke), the neurologists and neuro-psychologists still work on
identifying a language organ or specific language genes.
Pinker’s (1994) verdict is blunt and merciless:
“You don’t need to have left the Stone Age; you don’t need to be middle class; you
don’t need to do well in school; you don’t even need to be old enough for school.
Your parents need not bathe you in language or even command a language. You
don’t need the intellectual wherewithal to function in society, the skills to keep
house and home together, or a particularly firm grip on reality. Indeed, you can
possess all these advantages and still not be a competent language user, if you
lack just the right genes or just the right bits of brain.” (43).
Later research performed by psychologists and neurobiologists comes to

contradict the classical theory of the roles played by the two brain areas (Broca and
Wernicke) associated with language – Broca’s motor area produces spoken and written
language and Wernicke’s sensory area allows the language comprehension. New brain
scans and mapping, such as those performed by neurologist Lisa Eliot associate
Wernicke’s area with semantics and Broca’s area with syntax. Furthermore, a new
language site has been discovered, namely the perisylvian cortex, a wedge in the central
hemisphere, close to the Sylvian fissure, that appears to be in charge with the language
abilities of most of humanity. (Taylor 2010, 5).
It was the same neurological brain-scanning and brain-mapping devices and
procedures that allowed us to gain knowledge on how the brain changes under the
influence of a second language, i.e. how creativity is enriched and intelligence is
stimulated. The famous Stroop Colour and Word Attention Test brought proof of better
motor and cognitive abilities of bilinguals, as compared to the monolinguals, and the
more invasive EEG (electroencephalogram), PET (positron emission tomography), fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging) and NIRS (near infrared spectroscopy)
184
showed different interactions of the brain with language in case of bilinguals. (Taylor
2010, 4).
An interesting experiment is cited, i.e. the one performed by dr. Franco Abro of
University of Trieste, who, using functional magnetic resonance imaging on an Italian-
English translator, found that speaking English (the second language) involved the right
side of the brain, while Italian (the mother tongue) activated the left side of the brain.
The proposed explanation was a more facile shift from one language to another, from
the English in the right side of the brain, to the Italian in the left side of the
brain.(Taylor 2010, 5).
Along with this line of bilingualism research, Antonio Damasio, professor of
psychology and neurology at the University of Southern California speaks of two
“convergence zones”, two separate zones, each of them controlling the functionality of
the bilingual’s mother tongue and second language.(Taylor 2010, 4-5).
In her recent article on Bilingualism and Cognition, Virginia Valian (2015)
reviewed an impressive number of articles documenting the differences between the
bilinguals’ and the monolinguals’ brains: Abutalebi 2008; Abutalebi and Green 2007,
2008; Barrett, Ashley, Strait, and Kraus 2013; Chang 2014; Li, Legault, and Litcofsky
2014, etc.Changes of the neural networks and in the brain’s neuroanatomy occur also in
case of adults acquiring a second language (Valian 2015, 5). Interesting in the light of
this article is the inhibition hypothesis that proposes an underlying mechanism –
inhibition – to manage the use of two languages, namely the switch from one language
to another, which requires inhibiting the language not used (Valian2015, 19).
For the translator, this switch from one language to another is instantaneous and
routinized, so the inhibition process is even stronger and it must manifest itself on the
personality level, as well.
There is no doubt that the translator is a skilled bilingual juggling with two or
more languages, mastering skilfully the brain shift from one area to another. But the
process is more complex than that: “The two languages in one individual, through
synergy, create a force where the result becomes more than the sum of the parts, in
effect opening up «forms of added values which go beyond the languages themselves».”
(Heilmann, pers. comm., quoted in Taylor 2010, 6).
185
It is precisely these forces that may correspond to the two personalities the
translator invokes when shifting from one language to another. The shift is at the same
time a shift from one personality to the other one, and from one culture to the different
culture embedded in the second personality.
Tasks of phonological competition, recorded with the fMRI procedure also
revealed differences between the brains of the two categories, in the sense of
recruitment of different resources to manage this competition: different cortical sources,
recruitment of the anterior cingulate and left superior frontal gyrus in monolinguals,
proving less automatic competition mechanisms in their case, while the recruitment of
fewer cortical resources in bilinguals indicated more automatization of the process, due
to the reduction of activation in other task-irrelevant areas. (Marian et al. 2014, 114).
Psychology teaches us that part of our behaviour can be explained by instincts,
defined as “programmed tendencies that are essential to a species’ behaviour.” (Gerrig
and Zimbardo 2002, 367). If we accept Pinker’s (1994) train of thought and envision
language as an instinct, we have to ask ourselves what form of expression do the
translator’s language instincts take, the same instincts that allow her to use
automatically both the source language and the target language. We know that
personality is understood as a rather stable behaviour pattern that allows us a certain
consistency across different situations and over time. So how does one use different
languages with increased proficiency,if one has only one personality that is confined
within the limits of a single language? One cannot. The translator cannot. In order to
accomplish this, she develops a new personality that gives her consistency in the realm
of the target language.
Pinker’s mentalese and the spoken language
The long-lasting controversy of the one-sided dependency between language and

thought (Is language dependent on thought or is thought shaped by language?) clarified
the bilateral non-equivalency between the two processes: Thought does not equal
language and language does not equal thought.
186
Pinker’s (1994) arguments to support this statement come from everyone’s day-
to-day experience: The unpleasant surprise one has when realising one has written
down something else than what they meant to express. The difference is nothing more
than the discrepancy between the graphical mental system made up of symbols and not
words, we use for thinking, so beautifully called by Pinker mentalese or the Language of
Thought, and the more perceivable outcome of the spoken language, be it English or
Romanian or any other complex utterance that we conventionally call language (1994,
72).
The differences between the two systems are not only of a structural manner, but
also lie in the different degrees of complexity of the two: Mentalese is more complex,
richer in concepts than the spoken language, as several concepts can be expressed by a
single word, but, at the same time, it is simpler in other ways, in the sense that it
eliminates such conversational non-vital concepts (“a” or “the”), allowing a better flow
of thought. “Knowing a language is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of
words and vice versa.” (Pinker 1994, 72-73).
Using the Pinker argument of the universal mentalese, we can assert that
speaking more languages allows more personalities to come to life and to express
themselves. Bilinguals don’t have to force their mentalese into the narrower paths of a
certain spoken language, but can make use of their double-language skills to utter the
richer mentalese flow, enjoying the different semantic and syntactic constructions of
each language.
A similar experience occurs during the translation process, when the translator -
an expert bilingual - has to rewrite the author’s mentalese, to translate it into a spoken
language accessible to the readers, and, in doing so, she has to double her personality, to
use the one able to express a reality that is not her, that stems from a richer source – the
mentalese – and that can fully contain the language of thought. Translation becomes a
vehicle of language change, coding and decoding two languages (the mentalese and the
spoken language) that may seem compatible at first, but that are different in structure
and complexity.
Translation as acculturation
187
A cross-cultural perspective on translation, equating the translation process with

various acculturation strategies, allows us to compare the translator to an immigrant in
search of a new identity in the land of his new adoptive country – the target language – ,
or in search of a way to reconcile the inherited culture and traditions – the mother
tongue, in this case – with the newly assumed language – the target language. The
struggle of combining two different cultures and world views usually results in diverse
acculturation strategies, out of which the integration – the most adaptive strategy
psychologically and socio-culturally – best encompasses the technique employed by the
literary translator.
As a dynamic process, the acculturation is an expression of the individual or
group cultural and psychological change that a person or group engages in, when
coming into contact with a new culture. On an individual level, the concept of
“psychological acculturation” expresses “changes in an individual who is a participant in
a culture-contact situation, being influenced both directly by the external (usually
dominant) culture and by the changing culture (usually non-dominant) of which the
individual is a member” (Berry 2007, 70).The result is a psychological change, followed
by the need to find the right acculturation strategy with the personal fingerprint,
climaxing into a form of melange between the two cultures.
The one acculturation strategy that is considered by psychologists the most
adaptive and is seen often as the best cultural compromise is the integration, a strategy
that involves keeping one’s interest in the original culture, while still interacting with the
new culture. The cultural integrity is maintained, since experiencing one culture does
not require annihilating the other one and the desire to keep both cultures in one’s life is
present. This is the reason why integration has been equated with multiculturalism, as
acceptance of both the cultural diversity of ethnocultural groups and of the dominant
culture (Berry 2007, 72-73)
The strategy of integration can be regarded as very similar to the translation
process; the translator plays the role of an integrator of the writer’s values into the
translation of his own text, while trying to maintain the translator’s original cultural
values. The integration might be successful, but this acculturation process would still be
an expression of two sets of values, the original ones, of the translator, corresponding to
188
the values of the dominant culture, and the values of the changing, non-dominant values
of the text creator.
Following this line of thought, we may add that the translator acculturates by
using a multicultural integration strategy that allows her to express her two
personalities, one for the original culture, one for the changing culture. Multiculturalism
thus becomes a voice of two personalities that learn to coexist, but do not identify one
with the other and do not annihilate one another, as in the case of assimilation, another
acculturation strategy that requires losing one voice, one personality, in favour of the
other.
The Translation as Cultural Translation
In today’s social-cultural climate, bilingualism is no longer an exception, an

extravaganza, but a necessity that can be equalled to a phenomenon of biculturality. Its
form of manifestation – the cultural translation –requires more than a linguistic
translation, from one language into another, but also a translation of a set of norms and
values, of a whole interpretation of the world, specific to a language, into the world view
of another language. The translation bears in this case a huge cultural significance.
Ulvydiene (2013) speaks of “cultural untranslatability” (1891), a term she uses to
define the cultural differences that may cause translation difficulties in case of languages
corresponding to opposite cultures and cites Carfort’s (1965) distinction between
“linguistic” and “cultural” untranslatability (1891).
But “translation is more productive than reproductive.” (Pym 2004, 18). This
makes the translator more than a text mediator; she becomes the mediator of a text, of a
era, of a culture, of a language. This idea instantly changes the focus from the study of
translations, to the study of translators, as human agents that build bridges between
different cultures, and to the “translation culture” (Pym 2004, 18), from the German
term Translationskultur, introduced by Erich Prunc (1997). This more generous term
encompasses elements referring both to the translator and to translation studies and
can be understood as a “translation regime”, “a set of implicit or explicit principles,
norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations
converge.” (Pym 2004, 19).
189
Then how does the translator reconcile her job of performing culturaltranslation
with the cultural untranslatability of the cultural differences? The solution to this
problem lies in the translator’s skill to develop a new self, a new personality, by
internalizing the cultural elements of the target language and by allowing this second
personality to recreate the fictional work in another language. The successful
accomplishment of this task depends largely on the flexibility of her instincts – the
language instincts in this case – and on the stability of her personalities – one for the
source language, one for the target language.
This article should be construed as a meditation on the value of the double in
translation: double languages, double instincts, double personalities, double
metamorphosis of the source text: a linguistic and a psychological one. The proposed
arguments are scientific, drawn from the psychological and psycholinguistic research of
the last years, but the hypothesis formulated based on these arguments still has to be
proven and inferred by psychologists, with the use of proper measurement tools, in well-
thought experimental designs. The idea of the double appears once again: a double
cooperation, that between the translator who submits a hypothesis and leaves it to the
psychologist to test its validity.
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Alina BOTTEZ
Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest

Bucharest, Romania
E-mail: alinabottez@gmail.com
SHAKESPEARE’S UNTRANSLATABLE ENGLISHNESS TRANSLATED INTO

OPERA
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: Shakespeare, translations, opera libretto, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Hamlet
During the four hundred years that have passed since his death, commemorated
this year (1616-2016), William Shakespeare’s work has been translated into almost all
the languages of the world. Romanian translations appeared around 1850, and a
number of scholars like Mădălina Nicolaescu, George Volceanov, Ana-Karina Schneider,
and Oana-Alis Zaharia have studied these renditions in depth. Such translations, just as
their other European counterparts, are not so much transpositions from one language
into another as retellings or adaptations. In any literature there are authors, works,
fragments, sayings or words that are untranslatable. Each nation alternately complains
and boasts about it. Such “obstacles” are often seen as marks of the linguistic
uniqueness.
193
Thus, according to the geographical area, moment in time, type of religion and
civilisation and, most of all, the strict conventions of what is or is not acceptable as
decorous on stage in a certain age, each culture has made Shakespeare its own. Until
well into the twentieth century – when a new sense of respect for an author’s style and
for the individuality, authenticity, and integrity of each work was born, as well as a new
ethics of translation – each nation cut, added, turned into prose, paraphrased,
simplified, bowdlerised, censured, purged or downright altered Shakespeare’s plays,
adding a drop of its own local colour or bias, of its approval or reproof to the versions
that it offered to the audience. Discussing a rewriting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream from 1692, Constant Lambert describes it as “a seventeenth-century
hotch-potch” (Lambert 20) and Edward J. Dent remarks that the author “must have
shared Pepys’s contempt for the play, for he (…) made verbal alterations in
Shakespeare’s own text which destroy all his poetry and reduce his language to the level
of very common speech” (Dent 16). In modern times, the urge to adapt and appropriate
the Bard’s texts has become so overwhelming that Rustom Bharucha contends that its
decontextualisation and reductionism may have come to violate the “ethics of
representation” (Bharucha 4).
Oddly enough, there have been no notable complaints about Shakespeare’s
untranslatability, for it is not the words he uses that find no counterpart in other
languages, but the ineffable spirit and atmosphere that he wove into his works, as well
as his peerless art of combining those common words, of expressing ideas. This is what
often makes us unable to recognise one of his very famous sonnets when translated into
a different language.
The advent of opera as a genre preceded Shakespeare’s death by very little. The
first surviving work considered to be an opera was Jacopo Peri’s Euridice in 1600 (Peri’s
earlier Dafne being lost). Initially inspired by Greek myths, opera started as a form of
remediation, as Bolter and Grusin have recently identified it - a process through which
new media achieve their cultural significance by paying homage to, rivalling, and
refashioning earlier media – in this case theatre and literature. This process was forged
by the cultural context in which the opera was written, the conventions of the lyrical
theatre in each age, social and political factors, trends and fashions, as well as the tastes
and expectations of the public. Therefore, in order to understand the adaptation of the
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SHAKESPEARE’S UNTRANSLATABLE ENGLISHNESS TRANSLATED INTO OPERA
veteran Elizabethan drama into opera, the researcher must delve into the history of
mentalities, since cultural and historical barriers render not only language, but also
mentalities untranslatable.
Likewise, this realm provides another kind of “translation” – that of the spoken
text into its sung version. Opera has the possibility of increasing dramatic tension and
the ability of outlining characters through the means germane to music: tonal structure,
rhythm, timbre, vocal virtuosity, agogics, dynamics, balance between the types of voices,
the right proportion and distribution of arias, ensembles, choruses, ballets and
orchestral interventions, as well as many other elements.
Libretti may be original, that is, written on purpose for certain operas, but most
of them are based on historical events or on literary works – novels, short stories and,
most of all, theatre plays. In this case, the passage from one genre to the other entails a
dramatic metamorphosis resulting in the alteration of the plot, the reduction of the
number of characters, or the contraction of several characters into one, and the need to
shrink the text, an imposition that derives logically from the fact that in music each
syllable may be stretched over several notes and that there are many repetitions as well
as rests and orchestral interludes, but also from a phenomenon explained by Eleonora
Enăchescu: “a sung text widens the perception of the temporal dimension considerably”
(Enăchescu 16). Thus, situation, state of mind, feeling and conflict are “translated”
according to the conventions of opera and all the factors that are paramount in the play
become subordinated to music and its pace in the corresponding opera: “Everything
that contributes to the making of the performance relinquishes its own rhythm in favour
of the rhythm in the score” (Ionescu Arbore 47) [my translation]. But proper translation
is also a central issue in this process of adaptation, as the language of the original
literary source (in the case of Shakespeare’s plays – English) is replaced with the new
linguistic richness specific to the language of the libretto.
The present article will illustrate the various ways in which opera can translate
Shakespeare’s untranslatable Englishness first by making a detailed analysis of how the
typically English language humour of The Merry Wives of Windsor is adapted in
Salieri’s Falstaff (as an example), and then by making several more cursory references
to various operas that reinterpret the realities of Elizabethan England according to their
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own cultural stamp39. Antonio Salieri wrote his Falstaff o Le Tre burle (Or the 3 Tricks),
with a libretto signed by Carlo Prospero Defranceschi, in 1799 at the Kärntnertortheater
in Vienna, where the author was appointed composer and Kapellmeister of Italian opera
at the Court of Habsburg Emperor Joseph II40. Salieri had collaborated with the greatest
librettists of the day including Beaumarchais, Goldoni, da Ponte, and Casti. Therefore,
his flair induced him to preserve a priceless quality of Shakespeare’s text in a highly
original way, which none of the other adapters have done. The Merry Wives of Windsor,
the play on which the libretto is based, sparkles with the enormous fun of, in Mrs
Quickly’s words, “abusing… God’s patience and the King’s English” (I, 4, 4-5) H. J.
Oliver, the editor of the 1971 Arden edition, writes of “one of the most astonishing
galleries of perpetrators of verbal fun that even Shakespeare put in a play”. Sir Hugh
Evans, a parson, speaks with specific Welsh mistakes, converting the b’s into p’s, the d’s
into t’s, and the v’s into f’s. Nevertheless, he confidently corrects the others. When
Slender asserts, regarding his marriage to Ann Page, “I am dissolved, and dissolutely” (I,
1, 262), Sir Hugh remarks the right word is “resolutely”, but does not attempt to correct
“dissolved” (resolved).
Dr Caius, the physician, benefits from all the malicious irony aimed at
Frenchmen by the English. Thus he pompously declares: “If dere be one or two, I shall
make a de turd” (III, 3, 251) instead of the third. Ineluctably, Sir Hugh is sent to meet Dr
Caius for their duel in Frogmore (“Frog” being a disparaging term for Frenchman). Mine
Host of the Garter, when confronting Gallia and Gaul, satirises them both by saying that
the physician offers him “the potions and the motions” (III, 1, 105), while the priest
provides “the proverbs and the no-verbs” (III, 1, 107), thus reducing them both to non-
efficiency, ignorance, and quackery. Shallow, Justice of the Peace, is as profound as his
name indicates. He teaches Latin to William Page (IV 1, 45) and sententiously declines
hig – hag – hog and, in the accusative, hung – hang – hog (IV 1, 50.)
A delightful addition to this panoply is Mrs. Quickly. During this same lesson, she
is horrified to hear the declination horum – harum – horum (IV 1, 64), as she takes
whoring to be a thoroughly indecorous word, and who declares that “hang hog” is Latin
39Each of these examples can make the object of a detailed analysis in a study of ampler dimensions.
40An emperor that was truly receptive to opera: the premiere of Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto thrilled
him to such a degree that he asked for a second performance in his private apartments that very same
night.
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for bacon. When commending Mrs Ford to Falstaff, she describes her as a “fartuous”
civil modest wife, as close as she can get to “virtuous” (II, 2, 101.) An irresistible
finishing touch is conveyed by her indignant “I detest” (I, 4, 156), intended to mean “I
protest”. Another character with a fatidic name, Simple, declares to Falstaff, when
talking about his secrets with Mrs Quickly, “I may not conceal them” (IV, 5, 45),
meaning he cannot reveal them, to which Mine Host rashly replies “Conceal them or
thou diest” (IV, 5, 46.)
This raving verbal delirium, which must have inspired Sheridan’s endearing
character Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals, is surprisingly echoed in Salieri’s opera in the
scene of the embassy to Falstaff. Instead of the inexistent Mrs Quickly, it is carried out
by the prima-donna, Alice Ford, as a good opportunity for her to be present on stage and
sing an aria. Thus, the delivery of the message is still carried out and the status of
servant of the messenger is preserved. Unexpectedly, Mrs Ford comes to Falstaff’s room
disguised as a German virgin (and, to prevent recognition, she should be properly
“imbacuccata” – muffled and wrapped up) and converses with him in Germ-Italian. In
light of the fact that eighteenth century Vienna was, linguistically at least, the most
cosmopolitan city in Europe, and that Salieri’s audience was perfectly able to enjoy all
the subtlety of this scena tedesca, this audacity becomes highly interesting. In the
dialogue, Falstaff makes mistakes in German, since it is a foreign language to him, but
he also massacres Italian (conventionally used for English) in order to make the German
girl better understand:
Falstaff: Mein Jungfer, Mein Jungfer,

Ich sag in Confidenz: Ich sag in Confidenz:
Von Deutsch nix haben viel Intelligenz: Von Deutsch nix haben viel Intelligenz:
Vor das ich dir pregieren Vor das ich dir asken
Nostra lingua du will mit mich parlieren. Our language du will mit mich
speaken41.
41 All translations from Defranceschi’s libretto are mine.
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German mostly lends its word order and affixes to Falstaff, while Italian gives
the lexical and semantic core of the text (confidenza, intelligenza, pregare, nostra
lingua, parlare). The reference to the English language (conveyed through Italian in the
opera) is cleverly and dexterously avoided by the neutral term “nostra lingua”. In turn,
the disguised Mrs Ford feigns to speak very poor Italian, yet she also makes mistakes in
German, as it is not in fact her mother tongue42.
Mrs Ford: Ma io far molti Böcke... But I to make many Böcke...

Voler dir... molti falli. Mean say... many mistakes.
The result seethes with humour:
Falstaff: Ebben: che preme? Well: what if you do?

Anch’io far Böcke: I make Böcke too:
ne faremo insieme. we’ll make some together.
Falstaff’s lascivious inclination urges him to make a pun between making

language mistakes and making moral mistakes together (as he will ask her if she too
likes his figure and would like to “converse” with him). This is deftly supported by the
vocabulary chosen by Defranceschi. For instance, he could have chosen the noun sbaglio
for mistake, but instead he chose fallo, which also means phallus (in which
interpretation the German maid would say “I do many phalluses”). Likewise, Falstaff’s
question could easily have been “che importa?” but it is “che preme?”, a verb that means
‘to press’.
The insinuating vein continues throughout the scene:
Mrs. Ford: Bitt’ um Vergebung! Ich noch nicht Frau: ich Jungfer.
Falstaff: Oh, gratulieren! E was wollen von mir, schöne Jungfretta?
(Mrs. Ford: I beg your pardon! I am not yet a woman: I am a virgin
42There is, of course, no valid reason why Mrs Ford, a bourgeois housewife of Windsor, should speak
German. The veracity of the character is momentarily suspended for the sake of the Viennese audience,
who can thus enjoy a scene that is half in their own language.
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Falstaff: Oh, to congratulate! E what you want from me, beautiful

virginetta?)
In Italian, fretta means haste, which makes this diminutive-sounding compound

mean “young haste”, or maybe her haste to lose her virginity and his to take it.
Mrs Ford: Io dir, Signor, che lei – Bitt’ um Vergebung! – ma star ben grosso
Spitzbub.
(Mrs Ford: I to say, Sir, that you – Bitt’ um Vergebung! – but to be really big
Spitzbub.)
Spitzbube in German means rogue, but is formed of the noun Bube (boy) and the
adjective spitz, which means pointed and therefore is very akin to Shakespeare’s bawdy
spirit.
Mrs Ford: Sie sind ein loser Mann!

Sie haben, kleiner Schelm, zugleich zwei Herzen
So – mir nichts dir nichts – weggefischt. (...)
A due Madame aver geschnipft il core.
(You are a dissolute man!
You have, little knave, two hearts
Just like that – in the twinkle of an eye – caught at once. (...)
To two Ladies to have pinched the heart.)
Here, an additional humorous effect is lent by the fact that Mrs Ford plays her
part well and uses the language register of a fishwife (wegfischen = to
steal/pinch/snatch, schnipfen = regionalism for to pinch).
When he hears he is invited to Mrs Ford’s place at 11 o’clock, Falstaff exclaims:
Schon recht: a lei tu dir, Schon recht: to her you to say,

Ch’io gewiss nit mankir, That I gewiss (?) not failen,
La Madama a veder gewiss venir. The Lady to see gewiss to come.
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Even the punctuation is amusing, since here the commas mark the direct object
clauses, which in Italian is not done, but is compulsory in German. When she must
speak about Mrs Slender’s feelings for the knight, the disguised Mrs Ford says:
Ma pur per lei, mein Herr, As for her, mein Herr,

Aver gross infezione. To have gross infection.
Blaming it on her poor mastery of “nostra lingua”, she uses the word infezione
instead of affezione, thus equating Falstaff with an infectious disease. Moreover, Mrs
Quickly could easily be imagined to say that Meg has great infection for the knight, and
the crippling of the word is hardly accidental, being genuinely akin to Shakespeare’s
deliberate language distortion.
The librettist is even more humorous in sometimes spelling nouns with capitals
in Falstaff’s cues and with small letters in the “German” girl’s, as if out of respect for the
other’s language or as further proof of confusion. And the dialogue goes on – “Ich bissel
Deutsch, du bissel nostra lingua, / A bissel Pantomime, / A bissel Discretion...
assicurieren / So très bien miteinander explichieren.” And lo, Falstaff even feels the
need to add the Wienerisch dialect (a bissel instead of ein bisschen = a little) to the
delight of the Viennese audience and a third language, French (très bien), as if in
memory of Dr Caius, who was eliminated from the libretto.
If the stage director is faithful to Shakespeare, he can stretch the language
humour even further and evoke the mockery against the Welsh Parson Evans, who
mispronounces English sounds. Thus, Michael Hampe, in his production for the
Schwetzinger Festspiele in 1995, has Mrs Ford pronounce “f” instead of “v” after the
German fashion (fostra instead of vostra) and “gv” instead of “gu” (lingva instead of
lingua). Likewise, she pronounces Schlender instead of Slender which, of course,
enhances the effect of the whole charade. The way she speaks is a far surer way of
rendering her unrecognisable to Sir John than her German folk costume. Her disguise
thus becomes not only visual, but also auditory.
Her aria in G major, in which she complains about men’s insincerity and luring
strategies, is extremely simplistic musically and vocally. Its only point of interest is that
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more than half of it is in German only, after which there is a short transition in Germ-
Italian to her cues aside, which are obviously in Italian. Salieri rightly comments that
this aria “could only be liked enormously, recited and sung as it was. The music is well
suited to such a joke” (Salieri 6).
Thus, the time and place for which the opera was composed, as well as all the
social realities they implied, led to this unique translation of the Shakespearean
language humour. As Rice aptly remarks,
The ‘scena tedesca’... partakes of a tradition of multilingualism and comic

attempts to speak foreign languages that goes back to Goldoni... Having
translated at least three German libretti into Italian, Defranceschi knew enough
German to cobble together the ‘scena tedesca’. Salieri, for his part, sprinkled his
German with Italian and French: he was used to communicating in the manner
proposed by Falstaff to Mistress Ford (Rice 579).
The libretto of Charles Gounod’s masterpiece Roméo et Juliette (1867), signed by

Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, follows Shakespeare’s play quite faithfully. The
confusing religious configuration of Elizabethan England is common knowledge and
Stephen Greenblatt depicts a vivid image of Shakespeare’s ambiguous denomination in
Will in the World. However, in the staunchly Catholic nineteenth century France, what
is added is precisely the religious dimension that the Bard’s play lacks. If the Bard’s
notorious dislike of men of the cloth renders Friar Laurence morally ambiguous at best,
in Gounod’s opera the monk becomes a luminous character, rising above the
omnipresent suspicion of self-serving opportunism that hovers over him in the play.
Since the protagonists’ marriage is quintessential, it takes place on stage in the
opera, in front of the audience, while in the play, the ceremony is only reported. All the
vile innuendo that Shakespeare casts onto the monk is gone, and he performs the
service with piety and self-abasement:
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FRIAR LAURENCE
O God who madest man in Thine own image43
And of his flesh and blood
Created woman, and, joining her
To man in wedlock,
From Zion’s summit consecrated
Their inseparable union!
Look with a favourable eye upon
Thy miserable creature
Who prostrates himself before Thee!
The whole scene is a prayer to God, and the bride and groom are prostrated:
ROMEO AND JULIET

Lord, we promise to obey Thy law. (…)
Lord, be Thou my support, be Thou my hope! (…)
Lord, from darkest sin it is Thou who dost protect us! (…)
Lord, deign to look down upon our love! (…)
O happiness unalloyed! O immense joy!
Heaven itself has received our/their loving vows!

God of goodness! God of mercy!
Be Thou blessed by two happy hearts!
The implicit submission of women sententiously pronounced by Friar Laurence

in the play is reinterpreted here in the spirit of nineteenth century France, where women
had already started to get emancipated and become empowered:
Ordain that the yoke of Thy handmaiden

May be a yoke of love and peace!
43 Translated by Joseph Allen, 1969. Web. <http://www.murashev.com/opera/Rom%C3%A9o_et_

Juliette_libretto_French_English>. All quotations from the libretto will be given in this translation.
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In the lay atmosphere of the play, marked by the mercantile society of

Elizabethan England, Juliet uses an economical metaphor when she thinks Romeo is
dead, calling her heart “this poor bankrupt” (III, 2, 57). In the libretto, this pecuniary
image is given an entirely new valence in terms of moral worth: “Let virtue be her
wealth” – Friar Laurence prays. Far from Shakespeare’s mundane monk, who is ready to
suspect carnal sin, but is a stranger to true love, his equivalent in the opera perceives
precisely this latter dimension of the lovers’ attachment and, wishing them to beget
children and grandchildren, prays that, “united in the life eternal”, they should “come at
last to the Kingdom of Heaven”. Too much in love to be able to live without each other,
Romeo and Juliet still commit suicide. But, in an exquisite duet, they die singing “Lord,
Lord, forgive us!” – imploring God’s absolution for their capital sin, which lends the
opera a Christian dimension entirely absent from Shakespeare’s play.
Hamlet (1868) by Ambroise Thomas is a clear instance of the syntagm that has
become a truism by now: traduttore – traditore. Loosely based upon Alexandre Dumas
père’s translation, Thomas’s opera is constrained by the conventions of grand opéra
and of the tradition of classical theatre in France. It therefore preserves the five acts, but
the rest is altered almost beyond all recognition, triggering either anger or laughter in
Shakespeare lovers. The cast is decimated and, since the opera is French, Hamlet is far
more preoccupied with love than with the Ghost’s request! Again due to the country of
origin, the Ghost is Catholicised, and his line “Un divin pouvoir m’arrache aux feux d’en
bas” clearly indicates Hell, not Purgatory, and Hamlet addresses him “Spectre infernal!”
Even if love throbs stereotypically on the French stage, nineteenth century
prudishness bans bawdiness, librettists shrink from it and directors shirk it. Violent
death on stage is also an absolute taboo, which is why Polonius does not die. Mad
scenes, on the other hand, were the rage, even if especially in Italian opera, but the latter
exerted great influence on opera in the whole of Europe. Ophelia’s insanity, therefore, is
reinterpreted in light of these conventions. She loses her wits solely because she no
longer has the prince’s love (since her father is alive) and only speaks to the Chorus. All
the bawdy allusions are purged from this decorous scene. This bowdlerised and cleansed
image of a happy married couple, as she sees herself wedded to Hamlet, is followed by
the repetition of the “Doubt that the stars are fire” couplet and by Ophelia’s drowning
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(offstage, naturally). Unrequited love resulting in madness and death are solid operatic
conventions. Yet, this scene is a musical masterpiece.
The aversion to violent death on stage was so great, and the crave for happy
endings too, that the initial conclusion of the libretto took over that of Dumas’s 1840
translation, in which Hamlet lives and is announced to be the future King of Denmark
(in the presence of the Ghost). Nevertheless, an outraged English response to the opera
made Thomas write an alternative ending, in which the Ghost is absent. Distraught at
seeing Ophelia’s lifeless body, Hamlet kills Claudius and then kills himself. English
icons, therefore, sometimes refuse to allow themselves to be translated badly.
Bawdiness was also frowned upon on the nineteenth century Italian stage. That is
why Arrigo Boito, who wrote the libretti to both Verdi’s Otello (1887) and to his Falstaff
(1893), eliminated all the coarse, obscene comments made by Iago when obsessing over
the sexual encounters between the Venetian blonde and the thick-lipped Moor, as well
as Sir John’s inappropriate cues.
The same imposition coupled with the donna angelicata female ideal that Verdi
and Boito held dear, but that Shakespeare lacked completely, transforms Desdemona’s
character quite radically. In the play she is constantly under suspicion for her unnatural
choice of husband and is an ambivalent character, seen as deceivingly innocent and
submissive, but actually rebellious and manipulating – a carnivorous man-eater, an
emasculating vampire. In the opera, she is exactly as candid as she seems, blameless and
morally lily-white.
In Falstaff, an insightful modification is that Alice – a merry, bright, and broad-
minded woman – cannot be, as in Shakespeare, short-sighted enough to misconstrue
the affection of her own daughter. Thus, Ford is the only one who supports a suitor who
is not welcomed by Nannetta. Her mother furthers her interests and helps her get
married to her true love. The daughter is also chosen to impersonate the Fairy Queen,
rather than Mrs Quickly in the play, a much more plausible choice given her youth,
grace, and elf-like slimness. But not only improper Elizabethan sexual liberties and
views on women are “translated” in these libretti. Boito was not merely a librettist, but
also a major Italian poet and composer. In his literary creation, Boito was especially
accomplished in the long allegorical poem Re Orso, strongly influenced by Nordic
romanticism, Baudelaire and Victor Hugo. It introduces a character that was to remain
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central to his writing – the Eternal Worm, the ultimate inescapable principle of
destruction.
Obsessed by a sense of the dualism inherent through nature and above all in the
human condition, he sees good and evil, weakness and strength, creation and
destruction as interdependent forces, and a man’s life as ‘an eternal wavering
between heaven and hell.’
(Mandeville, 16)
Accordingly, his opera masterpiece, Mephistophele, draws upon Goethe’s Faust,

another demonic figure characterised by a schizoid split. Likewise, no view could have
been more appropriate for the adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello and the fashioning of
one facet of the Eternal Worm, Iago, whose monologue, Credo (Act II), was written by
Boito himself. With no word taken from Shakespeare, nothing could be more
Shakespearean – a nihilistic fiend, two-faced, atheistic and iconoclastic:
Credo in un Dio crudel I believe in a cruel God

che m’ha creato simile a sè, who created me in his image
e che nell’ira io nomo. and whom in fury I name.
Dalla viltà d’un germe From the very vileness of a germ
o d’u atòmo vile son nato. or an atom, vile was I born.
Son scellerato perchè son uomo, I am a wretch because I am a man,
e sento il fango originario in me. And I feel within me the primaeval
slime.
Sì! Quest’è la mia fè! Yes! This is my creed!
Credo con fermo cuor, I believe with a heart as steadfast
siccome crede la vedovella al tempio, as that of the widow in church
che il mal ch’io penso that the evil I think
che da me procede and that which I perform
per mio destino adempio. I think and do by destiny’s decree.
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Credo che il giusto è un istrion beffardo I believe the just man to be a

mocking actor
e nel viso e nel cuor; in face and heart;
che tutto è in lui bugiardo, that all his being is a lie,
lagrima, bacio, sguardo, tear, kiss, glance,
sacrifizio ed onor. Sacrifice and honour.
E credo l’uom gioco d’iniqua sorte And I believe man the sport of evil fate
dal germe della culla from the germ of the cradle
al verme dell’avel. To the worm of the grave.
Vien dopo tanta irrision la Morte. After all this mockery then comes
Death.
E pio ?... e poi? And then?... and then?
La Morte è il Nulla, Death is nothingness,
è vecchia fola il Ciel. Heaven an old wives’tale.44
Shakespeare inspired an impressive number of composers, but very few of them

were British. This is also due to the fact that Britain has not given many composers in
general, since it did not develop its own national school of music. Henry Purcell wrote
his brilliant semi-opera The Fairy Queen in 1692, whose music was performed
alternating with scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream according to the definition
of the species. But a modern masterpiece by an Englishman was to see the light of day
only almost three centuries later, this time a full-fledged opera based on the same play.
Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set to a libretto adapted from
William Shakespeare by the composer and Peter Pears. It was premiered on 11 June
1960 at the Aldeburgh Festival, conducted by the composer. Britten was in awe of
baroque music in general and of Purcell in particular, many of whose scores he
rearranged and re-orchestrated for modern performance, including The Fairy Queen.
Britten’s immense advantage was that he could work with Shakespeare’s original
text in the original language and in the country that had also begotten the play.
44 DECCA translation by Avril Bardoni, 1991.
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However, he too made it his. To render it even more English, he eliminated Athens
completely and the whole opera takes place in the forest. But Britten and Pears do not
only render the local colour more vivid. They also make underlying comments that bring
the play well into twentieth century England – not only through the visionary modernity
of the music with its atmospheric harmonies and tone painting, but also through gender
hints. Britten was a declared homosexual and his life-long partner was tenor Peter
Pears, also his partner in writing this libretto. It is a rarity in modern opera that the lead
male role should be written for a countertenor – another tribute to baroque opera, so
fond of the castrati. The part of Oberon was created for Alfred Deller and Britten wrote
specifically for his voice, which was weak in the high notes. Therefore, Oberon is almost
never required to sing both at the top of the alto range and forte. The result is a typically
postmodern “translation” of Britten’s homosexuality, since Oberon, the epitome of male
power and even macho vanity in Shakespeare’s play, appears to be completely
emasculated in the opera and, vocally, quite dominated by Titania’s virtuoso prowess.
Pascal Bentoiu45, Romanian composer and musicologist, wrote his Hamlet only a
few years later, between 1966 and 1969, and it was first performed on stage in 1971. He
wrote his own libretto, about which he said:
It is therefore not Shakespeare’s play; it is only inspired from the famous tragedy,
which it re-pencils – to musical ends – in a much simplified form. The great
themes remain, but denuded, stripped of poetry, almost abstract. The music
attempts to re-create – if it can – the poetry, the psychological depth, the
dramatic vehemence, the human and philosophical significance. The author
therefore proposes not illustrative music to Hamlet, but a musical drama that
constitutes a contemporary interpretation of the Shakespearean theme (Bentoiu
7) [my translation]
Unlike Ambroise Thomas’s opera, Bentoiu’s is extremely faithful to the spirit of

Shakespeare’s play and to his text, which he preserves as far as possible. Yet, as he
himself says,
45 Pascal Bentoiu, born in 1927, died four hundred years after Shakespeare, on 21 February 2016.
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Opera is in no way the musical illustration of a text, but – in a performance – the

visualisation of a complex musical structure which is in its turn based upon a
literary and dramatic structure. And the libretto cannot be regarded as a theatre
play, but as a necessary foundation that determines to a large extent the big
picture of the future musical construction (Bentoiu 7) [my translation]
The libretto, therefore, “translates” valences of the initial literary work into the
“language” spoken (and understood) by the audience. It is a well-known fact that
Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other powerful, poignant works of art, have been used as
political weapons or at least as means of subterfuge across the ages. Colonised peoples
have been identifying with Sycorax and Caliban, while the title role of Richard III has
been personifying dictators all over the globe. In a tacit conspiracy between stage
directors, actors and public, Shakespeare comes to express the innermost traumas,
dreams or aspirations of a people. In communist Romania, such stagings were frequent,
as they were a form of solidarity and of psychological refuge, helping in the survival and
the healing process of the nation.
However, this is not how Bentoiu chose to translate Hamlet into a Romanian
opera, but both the time and the place in which he composed it shaped it as such.
Besides the text, which is in Romanian, social, historical, and cultural facts have also left
their imprint. Historically, the libretto was influenced by the reality of the communist
regime. Thus the scene in which Claudius is praying (III, 3, 35-72) and the prince
refrains from killing him lest he should be redeemed is suppressed altogether, since
religion was banned by communist ideology. Consequently, the act of praying could not
be represented on stage, the idea of afterlife was denied, sin was reinterpreted in terms
of moral trespassing or infringement of the law, while the possibility of a merciful God
that might save souls was out of the question. No composer or librettist would have been
allowed to include such a scene in their work; it had to be eliminated.
Likewise, Bentoiu purged Ophelia’s ravings of all bawdy allusion, since socialist
censorship was bound to bowdlerise all unhealthy lack of decorum. Art was meant to
teach and educate, and sexual innuendo on stage was not a good example for the
masses, even if uttered by a deranged damsel. Besides, decades of censorship had
succeeded in rendering the audience quite shy, prudish, and sensitive. Therefore, those
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marks of loose morality of the rotten West and of an unfortunate society ruled by
despotic monarchy had to go.
But if Bentoiu did not make his opera subliminally or overtly anti-communist, he
did make it movingly Romanian. A slight hint is apparent from the very beginning of the
libretto, when the prince addresses the Ghost as “Hamlet-King-Father”. The national
demarcation present in the play – Dane (I, 4, 24) – is left out, which immediately
suggests the universality of the play, in no way connected to Denmark. This strategy is
quite akin to Shakespeare’s, in fact, since he himself used cultural matter from all
nations only to make it English. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he turns Athens into a
duchy, Theseus into a duke, and surrounds the arid city with deep woods reminiscent of
Britain., while in Hamlet itself he carefully maps the political and social hollowness of
Denmark only to ironically imply he is portraying England: “My tables,--meet it is I set
it down, / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; / At least I’m sure it may be
so in Denmark” (I, 5, 108-110). It is not in the state of Denmark (I, 4, 65), but in that of
England that something is rotten.
The same can be said of Bentoiu’s opera, in the case of Romania. However, the
most moving tool that he uses to translate Englishness into Romanian-ness is music.
Even before the beginning of the text, the modal wordless a cappella choral Prologue
bears a strong Byzantine influence (even if the chorus is mixed46), which immediately
renders this Hamlet more eastern. In the original version, this chorus did not exist. But
the composer felt that something was missing, and he added it in guise of prelude or
overture, which announces that this Hamlet was born and bred in Greek Orthodox
churches. The minor mode and the mournful pace make it sound like a threnody,
frequently in Orthodox Easter music.
The concluding Epilogue, which is also a chorus, is accompanied by the orchestra
and does have a text to go with the music: “A noble soul is dwindling. / Good night,
sweet prince. / May the song of angels’ wings / Eternally shroud thy rest” (Bentoiu 26)
[my translation]. The libretto echoes Ophelia’s lines “Good night, ladies; good night,
sweet ladies; / good night, good night” (IV, 5, 69-70). The collective character behaves
like the ancient chorus in Greek tragedies, while the text also gives an equivalent to
Mixed choruses include both male and female voices, while Byzantine music is traditionally written for
46
male voices only. But nowadays, this has changed and women are frequently included in Byzantine choirs.
209
Fortinbras’s final words: “such a sight as this / Becomes the field, but here shows much
amiss” (V, 2, 354-5). What it subtly adds, however, is the blessing – the religious,
Christian dimension lacking in the play written by a man who was notoriously
distrustful of the church, but taken over by a composer who lived in a time and place
where belief in God gave hope and strength that the horrors of a totalitarian regime
might be overcome. Even such a covert blessing – a mere reference to angels – was an
act of courage in a society where faith was surveyed by the secret police.
Musically, the Epilogue provides precisely the dirge that Shakespeare prescribed,
“A dead march” being the stage indication after Fortinbras’s speech. Going hand in hand
with the blessing in the text, the sonorities of the Epilogue remind the listener of Paul
Constantinescu’s Byzantine Easter Oratorio, lending symmetry to the opera through a
conclusion that matches the religious atmosphere of the chorus in the Prologue.
Four hundred years after the Bard’s death, the differences between all these
variants are enriching, making Shakespeare more accessible across linguistic and
cultural borders. Sometimes, his Englishness surges and is relished by the foreign opera
audiences, such as the Order of the Garter and the Garter Inn (La Giarrettiera) in
Verdi’s Falstaff. But more often than not, besides language, cultural notions are also
translated, so as to ease the bond between the new, remediated version and its public all
over the world, making Shakespeare travel transnationally and across the ages.
References
Barbier, Jules & Michel Carré. Libretto to Roméo et Juliette (music by Charles Gounod).
Translated by Joseph Allen. 1969. Web
http://www.murashev.com/opera/Rom%C3%A
9o_et_Juliette_libretto_French_English
Bentoiu, Pascal. “Cuvântul autorului” in Hamlet (Opera Română – Program). 1975. 7-8.
-------------------- Libret in Hamlet (Opera Română – Program). 1975. 11-26.
Bharucha, Rustom, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture,
London: Routledge. 1993.
210
Bolter, Jay David & Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press. 2000.
Dent, Edward J. 1948. “Preface” to Purcell’s The Fairy Queen as Presented by the
Sadler’s Wells Ballet and The Covent Garden Opera. Programme. Paulton &
London: Purnell and Sons Ltd. 12-18.
Enăchescu, Eleonora. Dualitatea text - muzică în genul operei [The Duality Text –
Music in the Opera Genre]. Bucharest: Editura Universităţii Naţionale de Muzică
Bucureşti. 2004.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World. How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
London: Pimlico. 2005.
Ionescu Arbore, Anghel. Realizarea spectacolului liric. Bucharest: Editura Uniunii
Compozitorilor şi Muzicologilor. 1992.
Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare’s Language. London: Penguin Books. 2001.
Lambert, Constant. 1948. “The Music of The Fairy Queen” in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen
as Presented by the Sadler’s Wells Ballet and The Covent Garden Opera.
Programme. Paulton & London: Purnell and Sons Ltd. 19-27.
Mandeville, Ross. “The Moor of Venice, Milan and Sant’ Agata”, introductory
study to the CD recording, Decca. CDs 411 619/20. 2002. 15-21.
Rice, John A. Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press. 1998. 575-585.
Salieri, Antonio. “Annotations retrouvées sur la partition de Falstaff” in Malgoire, Jean-
Claude, Martine Le Blan & Jean-Etienne Grislain (eds.) Salieri – Falstaff ossia Le
tre burle, cahier hors-série. Atelier lyrique de Tourcoing. Tourcoing: 4M. 1996.
---------------------- Falstaff. Canto e piano. Revisione Eva Riccioli. Florence: Edizioni
musicali Otos. 1969.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford
World’s Classics. Stanley Wells (gen. ed.). Peter Holland (ed.). Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2008.
---------------------------- Hamlet. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford World’s Classics.
Stanley Wells (gen. ed.). G. R. Hibbard (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2008.
211
---------------------------- Othello. The Oxford Shakespeare – Complete Works. Ed. W. J.

Craig. London: Oxford University Press. 1971. 943-976.
---------------------------- Romeo and Juliet. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford World’s

Classics. Stanley Wells (gen. ed.). Jill L. Levenson (ed.). Oxford: Oxford
---------------------------- The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford
World’s Classics. Stanley Wells (gen. ed.). T. W. Craik (ed.). Oxford: Oxford
212
Oana PURICE
Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest

Bucharest, Romania
E-mail: oanapurice@yahoo.com
TRANSLATING THE DIARIES OF DOSTOEVSKY AND TOLSTOY IN

COMMUNIST ROMANIA
Abstract: 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 practices in translating and publishing autobiographical literature.
Leftist intellectual who fulfilled his academic education in USSR and worked in the
Central Committee for almost nine years, Ion Ianoși is a key-figure in analyzing the
incipient reception perspective of the two Diaries; collating the 70s Prefaces with their
post-Communism republications and Ianoși’s Memoirs, I will dwell on the position the
scholar takes in the foreignization-domestication binary, as discussed by Sean Cotter
following two of Lawrence Venuti’s concepts.
Keywords: Russian translation, Communism, Ion Ianoși, diaries, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy
In his article “The Soviet Translation: Romanian Literary Translators after World
War Two”, published in the 2008 issue of Meta: Translators’ Journal, Sean Cotter
discussed about the literary translation phenomenon in the Communist Romania,
starting from the fact that the post-War period was characterized by a major translation
activity: “the number and quality of literary translations produced from a variety of
languages makes this period a kind of golden age of Romanian literary translation”
213
(846). The same idea is claimed by Gelu Ionescu, a Romanian critic who published a
study on Romanian literary translation in the early 80s: “in the last 30-35 year, the
Romanian translations were more and better than in all the previous periods put
together”47 (7). Both scholars bring evidence to the fact that Romanian Communism had
different ways of expressing itself in its two major periods: the Stalinist one and Nicolae
Ceaușescu’s national-communism. Whilst Gelu Ionescu only slightly mentions the
differences of the translation process between the two - “the translations from
contemporary world literature are made only after 1960 (except for the ones from Soviet
literature, which was massively translated a decade before)” [36]48- , Sean Cotter
emphasizes the ideological role that translation had especially until 1964. Having as
premises the Stalinization as a colonizing process49 and using Lawrence Venuti’s term,
Cotter discusses translation as a “policy of foreignizing Romania” (841). In other words,
in the late 40s and especially in the 50s, Soviet literature translation had not (only) a
cultural goal, but it was itself a means of importing “the soul of the new socialist, to
move the Romanian reader from his domestic subjectivity to one in line with the
ideology of the Soviet Union” (842).
Even though since the 1960’s thingsbecame more relaxed, as the relationship
with the Soviet Union was on a regressive path, ideology was still present in the editorial
field. Gelu Ionescu said that the Soviet Union was not any longer the only space which
provided books for translation. In this respect, the newly created publishing house
(Univers) and the literary magazine (Secolul 20) had a wide editorial programme which
included important Western authors, thus filling the gaps of the last decades 50. Still,
47 My translation. Original: “În ultimii 30-35 de ani s-a tradus în românește mai mult și mai bine decât în
toate epocile anterioare la un loc”.
48 My translation. Original: “abia după 1960 încep traducerile din literatura universală contemporană (cu
excepția celei sovietice, din care se tradusese masiv un deceniu înainte)”.

49 This statement is debatable, but, since it does not enter the sphere of this paper, I will not dwell on it,
but approach it only as part of Cotter’s demonstration. Several Romanian literary critics (Bogdan
Ștefănescu, Anca Băicoianu, Andrei Terian, Mircea Martin, Ion Bogdan Lefter) analyzed the parallel
between Stalinism/Communism and colonialism and their pro and con arguments should be included in a
discussion regarding the Romanian situation.
50 In his latest work, Critica de export, Andrei Terian makes a relevant analysis of the editorial plan of the
translation of criticism and literary theory, identifying as “a remarkable event” the initiation of “Studii”
series, focused on translating into Romanian the most important works of contemporary criticism:
“During two decades this series included more than 100 titles belonging to authors like Roland Barthes,
Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean Starobinski, Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, A.-J. Greimas,
Umberto Eco, Hans-Robert Jauss, Wayne C. Booth, Northrop Frye and many others. In this way, the
214
TRANSLATING THE DIARIES OF DOSTOEVSKY AND TOLSTOY IN COMMUNIST ROMANIA
Russian literature was not avoided, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s diaries being published in
the mid-70s. Aware of the fact that Cotter’s use of foreignizing-domestication binary is
not fully applicable on these diaries, my paper will discuss the manner in which both of
them were delivered to the public, how the introductory studies (written by Ion Ianoși)
prepared the reader’s conscience for the meeting with the two classical authors’
confessions. Literary translation was no longer a means of translating the Romanian
spirit itself into the soviet soul. Neverthelessit will be relevant to dwell on Ianoși’s
discoursive position within the binary discussed above. As Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are
influent cultural figures, their diaries could not just be innocently offered to the readers
without a controlled ‘manual’ of interpretation. Not only did those texts belong to
subjective literature (a still problematic genre of the time), but they represented a period
that closely preceded and supposedly justified the Soviet Revolution, the phenomenon
which was the core of the Communist regime, no matter in which of its appearances
(Stalinist, national-communist). In order to have a more complex perspective on the
way Ianoși possibly instrumentalized his Prefaces and on the importance of these
translations, I will shortly take a look on the regime’s views on both autobiographical
literature and on its translation policy.Becoming an important part of the propaganda
project, the Romanian literature of the late 40s and the 50s which received the
publication approval suffered a major turn, visible both in its form and content. The
Proletcultist requirements coated the interwar literary achievements and new genres
were encouraged. In the introductory study on an anthology of autobiographical texts
published in 1996, Ion Manolescu points out the fact that memoirs and diaries were
replaced by reportages in the 50s. Indeed, the first period of Romanian Communism
was not a proper ground for subjective literature, as it could not reflect the reality which
was under construction and the only one which had to be represented. Very few diaries
and memoirs (both original or translations) were published in the 1950’s; if we analyze
the meaning of Communism in that period, we can say that autobiographical literature
was replaced by self-denunciation and prison cell critique. In a vague but allusive
manner, Mihai Zamfir describes this phenomenon in his 1980 study, Cealaltă față a
prozei: “the publication of diaries does not exclusively depend on their authors, but on
Romanian intellectuals had access to several of the fundamental texts of contemporary literary studies,
and the Romanian literary criticism could go closer to the Western model [m.t.]” (183).
215
the possibilities of their distribution, thus the context before 1960 was not a propitious
one for personal narrative, confession and,even more, for intimate cultural experience”51
(131).Indeed, after 1960, due to the apparent cultural liberalization started by Gheorghe
Gheorghiu-Dej and continued by Nicolae Ceaușescu, autobiographical literature re-
entered the public sphere, several memoirs and diaries being published and translated.
Still, contemporary subjective literature was not easily accepted unless the authors
showed sympathy with the regime or at least did not mean to express any critical ideas.
Despite the above mentioned liberalization, censorship and self-censorship were
common practices, especially after 1971, when Ceaușescu adopted the so-called July
Theses52. Wanting to reassure literature’s strong role in the socialist project, the Theses
rejected “the artistic works impregnated with the moral principles of the bourgeoisie”
which did not lead to “the rise of the political consciousness of the authors” (Berindei,
Dobrincu, and Goşu, 643)53 or readers. Obviously, the personal narratives of those who
were not yet initiated in the socialist faith could not be published. Nor were the memoirs
of the old communists. Tiberiu Avramescu, former editor at the State Publishing House
for Literature and Art and coordinator of “Biblioteca pentru toți” series, recalls an
amusing experience from the 80s:
“We received peculiar directives from the Second Office of the Communist Party,
where the First Lady, the world-wide known scientist, used to interfere more and
more insistently and incompetently in the cultural matters. Once she ordered the
elimination of all autobiographical texts, both in Romanian and in translation,
from our editorial programme, without offerind any explanation. But the reason
was simple: there were rumors that communists from the old guard (Valter
Roman, Ștefan Voicu) were writing their memoirs, in which they may have
revealed the insignificant role played by Nicolae Ceaușescu and, what is more, by
his wife in the illegal communist activity. As results of these fears, elimination
51 My translation. Original: “apariţia unor jurnale nu depinde exclusiv de autorii lor, ci de posibilităţile
difuzării, or împrejurările de până în jurul anului 1960 sunt ostile notaţiei individuale, confesiunilor şi cu
atât mai mult evenimentului cultural intim”.
52 In a study published in 2008 issue of Central Europe review, Dennis Deletant relevantly describes
them: “Although couched in terms of ‘Socialist Humanism’, they in fact constituted a return to the method
of Socialist Realism, and were therefore a reaffirmation of an ideological basis for literature that had, in
theory, hardly been abandoned by the Party” (145).
53 My translation. Original: “producțiile impregnate de spiritul concepțiilor moralei burgheze”, which did
not lead to „ridicarea conștiințe politice a creatorilor”.
216
threats were set upon periodical publications of the Romanian Academy, such as
Memorials of the History Department or Memorials of the Science Department;
the assurance that these works are not exactly memoirs were not really taken too
serious. Still, her orders led to the exclusion of Saint-Simon’s memoirs from our
editorial plan, probably another potential enemy of Romanian Communist
regime." 54 (Avramescu 425).
Ideological interference in cultural matters was visible in the translation process too.
Sean Cotter pointed out that “the translation project was the cultural counterpart of
power consolidation and national modernization” (842). Even though in the first
decades of Communism the project was more visible, its implications continued after
1960 as well.
In an article pubished in 2009, Lucia Dragomir talks about the authors’ political
mission inside “popular democracies” and emphasizes the role the Soviet translations
had in consolidating cultural propaganda. In 1944, The Russian Book Publishing House
was created, with the aim, as Lucia Dragomir says, of “making the Soviet culture popular
and easy to reach”55 (195). Another important aspect of this plan was the price of these
cultural objects. As the free-market principles were no longer functioning and,
according to the 1948 Law for book editing and distribution, only state-controlled
publishing houses were allowed to publish, the editorial plans followed the “many cheap
books” slogan. Therefore, more than two million copies of Soviet and Russian
translations were published during 1944-1948. Among these, Mikhail Sholokhov’s The
Quiet Don had a 10.000 print-run and Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was
Tempered was initially printed in 16.000 copies (Dragomir 195). Nevertheless, these
54 My translation. Original: “De la Cabinetul II al Partidului Comunist, de unde prima doamnă a ţării,
cunoscutul „savant de renume mondial”, se amesteca din ce în ce mai insistent şi mai incompetent în
problemele culturii, veneau indicaţii aberante ca, de pildă, eliminarea din planurile editoriale a tuturor
lucrărilor de memorialistică, române sau străine, fără alte precizări. Explicaţia era însă foarte simplă: se
zvonise că îşi scriau memoriile comunişti din vechea gardă (Valter Roman, Ştefan Voicu) care, în aceste
amintiri, s-ar fi putut referi la rolul cu totul minor pe care Nicolae Ceauşescu şi mai ales consoarta sa l-au
jucat în ilegalitatea comunistă. Potrivit acestor temeri, erau vizate cu eliminarea din planurile editoriale
publicaţiile periodice ale Academiei Române de tipul Memoriile secţiei istorice sau Memoriile secţiei
ştiinţifice; asigurările că acest tip de lucrări nu sunt totuşi nişte amintiri n-au prea fost luate în seamă la
cel mai înalt nivel. Aceste indicaţii au dus, de pildă, la eliminarea din plan a memoriilor lui Saint-Simon,
probabil un alt potenţial duşman al regimului comunist din România”.
55 My translation. Original: “a face cunoscută și a populariza cultura sovietică”.
217
print-runs seemed not to be enough for “the popularization of Soviet ideology and
socialist education of workers” 56 (335) as it was written in the files studied by Liliana
Corobca and discussed in Controlul cărții. One of the critiques noted down in the files
accused the fact that Ostrovsky’s novel was published only in 89.000 copies in seven
years and another of Sholokhov’s books, Virgin Soil Upturned, had only 116.000 copies,
completely insufficient. As a proof that these Soviet translations had a positive impact
on the readers, a censor’s commitment from 1950 contained the following objective:
“the improvement of professional and political level by reading Kemenov’s brochure and
Maxim Gorky’s The Mother”57 (Corobca, Instituția cenzurii comuniste în România 213).
As far as Western authors were concerned, the situation varied according to
many factors. The titles published by Univers Publishing House between 1969 and 1989
tend to express a permissive policy concerning translation. Still, this freedom was
carefully controlled and the reader was not allowed to pass beyond these borders.
Otherwise he could face Augustin Buzura’s experience, whose books were confiscated
during an airport checking. Among the titles he was trying to bring home in 1975 after
his research trip there were Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor
Zhivago, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (Corobca, Controlul cărții
314). After the books finally received the translation approval, they had to pass through
the censorship procedures, where the censors decided which part did not obey the
regime’s views. A line from Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending had to be
eliminated because it could have been too allusive (Mocanu 195). Orpheus Descending
is one of the plays which received the imprimatur, but there were others which could not
pass the censor’s vigilance: Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss (translated by Gellu Naum for
Univers Publishing House) was not approved, one of the arguments being that its
content, with reference to the French Revolution, could have suggested “The
revolution’s general impossibility of achieving its great goals”58 (Mocanu 346).
As I mentioned above, the publication of a translation depended on many factors,
one of them being the translator’s or the coordinator’s influence. It is the case of Ion
Ianoși, who prefaced the diaries of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, both published by Univers,
56 My translation. Original: “propagarea ideologiei sovietice și educarea socialistă a oamenilor muncii”.

57 My translation. Original: “Ridicarea nivelului profesional și politic prin citirea broșurii Kemenov și
romanul Mama de Maxim Gorki”.
58 My translation. Original: “imposibilitatea în general a revoluției de a realiza marile ei deziderate”.
218
in 1974 and 1975-1976. Romanian scholar of Jewish Hungarian origins, Ianoși studied at
the Faculty of Philosophy at Jdanov University in Leningrad (Sankt-Petersburg). After
he returned to Romania he worked at a Hungarian magazine (Elöre) and then he
received a job as instructor at the Central Committee, where he worked for almost nine
years. Even though for him Romanian was a foreign language, he also started a prolific
career as professor of Philosophy and he also was a literary critic, who published
important studies both on Aesthetics and world literature (especially the German and
Russian ones). Influenced by his family (as he confesses in his memoirs Internaționala
mea), he grew up having strong socialist beliefs, which were intensified during his stay
in Russia. Convinced that the Bolshevik Revolution was the solution for the world’s
inequities, Ianoși remained loyal to Marxist-Leninist principles, even after his
disillusion caused by Stalin, Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceaușescu’s wrong ways of practicing
them59. His overtly expressed leftist opinions brought him enough influence and trust,
so he was in charge with writing the prefaces for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s diaries, the
latter one being translated by his wife, Janina Ianoși.
Leo Tolstoy was one of the privileged authors of the first period of Communism,
many of his works being considered educative for the masses and therefore printed in
large print-runs. In the same file cited by Liliana Corobca, the activist noted that
Resurrection had had only one print-run, again insufficient (Corobca, Controlul cărții
335).This observation was made in 1952, so it took another twenty years to publish
Tolstoy’s diary. Ion Ianoși mentions this in his memoirs, talking about how they had
access to the 13 volumes Diary of the Russian Complete Works (90 volumes), and how
they “selected the most representative fragments, but which also kept the dominant
perspective of his meditations, including the inconvenient ones, with anti-Marxist and
antisocialist critiques”60 (Ianoși 540). In the editor’s note of the Diary, the choice is
motivated more in the light of the time it was translated: “it was made in the perspective
of the most relevant components of the developing of this overwhelming and
contradictory personality, of course keeping in mind the interests of the Romanian
59The accusation oriented towards the “real Communism” (its put-into-practice form) while still believing
in the pure, theoretical principles of Marxism is a common behavior of the communist intellectuals who
published memoirs and diaries after 1990, with a more or less justificatory perspective.
60 My translation. Original: “am ales fragmentele cele mai semnificative și care să păstreze toate
dominantele meditațiilor, inclusiv pe cele incomode, cu tăiș antimarxist și antisocialist”.
219
readers”61 (Tolstoy 1975 IV). It is hard to say whether these “interests” are related to
those “inconvenient” parts Ianoși talks about in his 2012 memoirs or to the interest the
regime had regarding the readers’ education. What is for sure is that beside his carefully
edited preface, the censors eliminated several paragraphs from the second volume, but
“its vision remained the same, due to other fragments”62 (Ianoși 540).
Tolstoy’s diary was republished in 2000 by Elit Publishing House, and its third
edition appeared in 2011 at Ideea Europeană Publishing House – the definitive edition
which puts together the two previous volumes and the two prefaces. As Ianoși mentions
in the 2011 editor’s note, for the second and third editions they also used a 1985 Russian
edition of Works in twenty-two volumes, where he found many omissions, especially of
more intimate fragments related to the author’s sexual life, health or illness, or
paragraphs which could contain negative allusion to the Red Revolution, Marxism or
Socialism (Tolstoy 2011, 5). The 1975-1976 Romanian edition of the Diary included
these fragments, proving, as Ianoși suggests, a more liberal atmosphere than in the
Soviet Union. The idea is supported by the text itself, but gaining this controlled
freedom was possible by framing the confession with a paratext which placed it in a safe
ideological ground.
The aim of the introductory text (“Tolstoy and Tolstoyism”) is specified in the
editor’s note: “to facilitate the understanding of the text covering the respective period
and its connections with the author’s literary journalistic and theoretical works” 63
(Tolstoy 1975 IV). This goal is achieved both for the first and the second volume (which
continues under the same title), Ianoși dividing the diary into relevant periods and
making punctual notes for each of them, relating the personal narrative with Tolstoy’s
works. A common approach of this study and of the one that precedes Dostoevsky’s
Diary of a Writer presupposes reading the literary worksthrough the lenses of the
author’s confessions. The other possible way is to fill the gaps of the diaries with
information supposedly transmitted by the novels. This mixed perspective of both
genetic and social criticism has double results: on the one hand it is a concentrated
61 My translation. Original: “s-a efectuat în perspectiva celor mai de seamă componente ale devenirii
acestei atât de copleșitoare și contradictorii personalități, ținându-se, evident, seama de interesele
publicului cititor românesc”.
62 My translation. Original: ”orientarea a rămas intactă datorită altor fragmente”.
63 My translation. Original: “să faciliteze înțelegerea textului perioadei date și conexiunile lui cu opera
literară și publicistic-teoretică”.
220
interpretation of the authors’ most important literary works and, on the other hand, it is
a slightly superficial interpretation of the diary itself, as it focuses more on how the
authors’ ideas, emotions and meditations are reflected or transposed in their literature
and less on their importance in their individual evolution, avoiding to comment on the
autobiographical techniques and strategies they used.
The preface of the first volume summarizes Tolstoy’s dilemmas and inner
tensions, only shortly commenting on his obsessions, confessed vices and perpetual
oscillations between faith and rebellion. Only after several pages does Ianoși give his
definition of Tolstoyism: “a vision intolerant with the unjust walks of life and the
medieval-capitalist state’s position, rejecting both civilization and intellectual activity,
science and progress, a vision which is critical and regressive at the same time, which
opposes to the inhumanity which is intellectually institutionalized and theologically
haloed the apology of a rural patriarchal simplicity”64 (Tolstoy 1975 XX). This will be the
frame inside which Ianoși will discuss Tolstoy’s self-oriented discourse and his literary,
theoretical, and journalistic works, finding his alter-ego in Levin, the character from
Anna Karenina, whose transformations and problems of conscience are similar to
Tolstoy’s behavior.
If the narrative techniques and the relation between autobiographical discourse
and memories, or between fact and fictional intrusion do not enter Ianoși’s
interpretation, instead, the critic pays attention to Tolstoy’s perspective on the peasants’
problem (especially after his “second birth” from 1881, revealed in his short work A
Confession). Later on, his commentaries stop on the author’s professional crisis and his
socio-political meditations against the Church, the state, the Army, the land property,
the factories and the vices. As these are all critical issues which can be directly
connected to the communist ideology, Ianoși makes sure he accompanies each of
Tolstoy’s deviations from the Marxist principles with an explanation which stresses that
Tolstoy’s position is either based on a misunderstanding or it is only an inaccurate
vision of the world; the final goal seems to be to avoid the readers associated Tolstoy’s
figure with an anti-Marxist point of view. Even though it does not directly reflect the
64 My translation. Original: “o viziune intolerantă față de nedreptele stări sociale și statale medieval-
capitaliste, repudiind totodată civilizația și intelectul, știința și progresul, o viziune concomitent critică și
regresivă, care opune inumanității elitar intituționalizate și teologic aureolate apologia unei simplități
țărănești patriarhale”.
221
foreignizing procedure Sean Cotter discusses, this way of framing Tolstoy’s diary is a
means of foreignizing its interpretation, leading the readers to a ground familiar with
the Communist ideology. Setting the Marxist mirror in front of Tolstoy’s beliefs,
explaining their reflection on this mirror and not their meaning as they are, connected
with the pre-Soviet time, is, using Cotter’s keywords, a method of translating the
reader’s consciousness into the Communist ideology.
The first occurrence of this translation refers to Tolstoy’s general understanding
of Marxism. Starting from the author’s critique of the entities mentioned above, Ianoși
explains: “The social-Marxist perspective does not seem acceptable to him because it is
favorable to the improving of our civilization, which he, Tolstoy, disapproves as
generating luxury, corruption, oppression. The capitalist accumulations are profoundly
vicious to him only because he shares the illusion [my underlining] of their spreading by
all socialist programme of sanitation”65 (Tolstoy 1975 XXVIII-XXIX). Using internal
focalization, Ianoși already gives a verdict to Tolstoy’s beliefs: his equivalence between
the effects of capitalism and socialism is just an illusion. Ianoși wants to be sure that the
reader will understand from the beginning Tolstoy’s misconception and that he will not
validate it through the authority given by his symbolic capital 66. This idea is proved by
the stylistic turn this sentence was given in the post-communism edition: in 2011 Ianoși
no longer uses the term “illusion”, but a less connoted phrase – “The capitalist
accumulations are profoundly vicious to him only because, in his opinion [my
underlining], they would be spread by all socialist programme of sanitation” 67 (Tolstoy
2011 32). Ianoși no longer judges the author’s ideological beliefs, but just objectively
describes them.
Another commentary that helps foreignizing the interpretation of the diary refers
to Tolstoy’s mystical crisis; he no longer resonates with theChurch’s practices, yet he but
is not able to imagine a better way of experiencing faith either; therefore he decides to
65 My translation. Original: “Concepția socialist marxistă nu i se pare acceptabilă deoarece ea favorizează

perfecționările civilizației noastre, pe care el, Tolstoi, le dezavuează ca generatoare de lux, depravare,
asuprire. Concentrările capitaliste sunt pentru el profund vicioase numai că împărtășeşte iluzia extinderii
lor prin orice program socialist de asanare”.
66 The risks of perverting the readers’ consciousness was a real one, as the print-runs of these diaries were
a lot larger than the ones we are used to nowadays: Tolstoy’s diary was published in 7130 copies each
volume, and Dostoyesky’s volume in 5360 copies.
67 My translation. Original: “Concentrările capitaliste sunt pentru el profund vicioase numai că, după
părerea sa, ele ar fi extinse prin orice program socialist de asanare”.
222
remain with the purest conception of Christianity, Jesus’s teaching. Nevertheless,

“Tolstoy puts in opposition the eternal ideal of the Sermon on the Mont with both the
existing order of our upper classes and with the positivist, communist, socialist
brotherhood – with the last because it only advocates love for the siblings and not for
God too”68 (Tolstoy 1975 XXXIII). Whilst Tolstoy finds no fundamental difference in the
existing social system and the one promised by the Communism, as none of them could
follow Jesus’s teachings of equality and justice, Ianoși emphasizes a hierarchy of the two
social systems based on a fallacious assumption. The only problem with “the positivist,
communist, socialist brotherhood” is that, in Ianoși’s, not in Tolstoy’s words, it does not
substantiate its ideology on God’s love too, but only on love shared among people. It is
not even necessary to recall the tragic effects of Communism to contradict this false
hypothesis; a simple look at its core principle – class struggle – reveals the foregnizing
strategy. The 2011 edition maintains the same structure, proving the author’s Marxist
beliefs, implying his atheism, confessed and explained in his memoirs: “after the War, I
began to share the Communist ideal and never since have I felt the necessity of a
religious contact, as a ritualI have been reading and re-reading the Old and the New
Testament as a man of culture”69 (Ianoși 107).
Whilst in the Preface of the first volume Ianoși’s Marxist commentaries are more
allusive, in the second volume (the one which needed the censor’s intervention) the
critic makes no use of subversive language, but overtly criticizes Tolstoy’s position
against Marxism. He cites Tolstoy:
“The revolutions from the 30s, from ’48 did not succeed because they had no
ideals and found their resources in the remains of the great revolution. The ones
who are making the Russian revolution now have none of these: the economic
ideals are not ideals”70 (25).
68 My translation. Original: “opune idealul veșnic al Predicii de pe munte atât ordinii existente, a claselor
noastre de sus, cât și frăției pozitiviste, comuniste, sociale – celei din urmă deoarece ea preconizează
numai dragostea față de oameni, nu și față de Dumnezeu”.
69 My translation. Original: „după război m-am atașat idealului comunist, niciodată de atunci nu am simțit
nevoia vreunui contact cu religia, în sens de cult. Am citit și recitit Vechiul și Noul Testament, ca om de
cultură” (107).
70 My translation. Original: “Revoluțiile din anii 30 și 48 n-au reușit pentru că n-au avut idealuri și se
însuflețeau din rămășițele marii revoluții. Cei care fac acum revoluția rusă n-au de niciun fel: idealurile
economice nu sunt idealuri”.
223
Right afterwards, he annotates:
“The observation of the regression of 1830 and 1848 in comparison with 1789 is
correct and involuntarily conformable to Marx’s analysis, while his opposition
between economy and morality, reality and ideal is false and deliberately set
against Marxism”71 (Tolstoy II 25).
In other words, Tolstoy seems to be an unconscious advocate of Marxism, but who could
not find the proper means of appropriating and expressing it. Nevertheless, taking into
consideration Ianoși’s loyalty to Marxism, this might also be a unidimensional polemical
argumentation, a personal opinion that he supports against Tolstoy’s.
The ideologically oriented discourse is visible again when Ianoși uses his death as
an instrument to construct his post festum adhesion to Marxism:
“death reaches him in the middle of his struggle, on November 7 (old rite), just
seven years before the revolution which he would have not accepted but in whose
preparation he had involuntarily participated. The workers and the peasants
understood this. The proof is in the workers’ solidarity postcards” 72 (Tolstoy 1976
28).
This fragment is completely modified in the third edition of the Diary. No connections
with the great events of Soviet Revolution were needed anymore, the target of the
translation were no longer the masses who had to be instructed: “death reaches him in
the middle of his struggle, on November 7 (old rite). Many mourned for him: the proof is
71My translation. Original: “constatarea regresului din 1830 și 1848 față de 1989 este corectă și involuntar
conformă analizelor lui Marx, în schimb falsă și voit opusă marxismului opoziția dintre economie și
morală, real și ideal”.
72 My translation. Original: “moartea îl surprinde în toiul luptei, la 7 noiembrie (stil vechi), cu șapte ani
înaintea revoluției pe care el nu ar fi acceptat-o, dar la pregătirea căreia participase de fapt fără voie.
Muncitorii și țăranii au înțeles asta. Dovadă telegramele de solidaritate ale muncitorilor”.
224
in the postcards sent by so many intellectuals [my underlining] and workers”73 (Tolstoy
2011 61). The intellectual was already permitted to re-enter the stage.
Not only his death was instrumentalized, but also his posterity, the
propagandistic discourses claiming Tolstoy as a precursor of Communism. This idea is
emphasized in the end of both the first and the second prefaces, where Ion Ianoși uses
Lenin as his argument of authority:
“Leo Tolstoy was not able to solve the vicious issues he so profoundly felt. Or, as
Lenin will say: in Tolstoy’s set of principles «the great people’s ocean stirred deep
inside with all his weaknesses and all his positive parts reflected» in him” 74
(Tolstoy 1975 XXXVI).
It is a common trick of that period to include the texts into a visibly ideological frame,
just to catch the censor’s eye and not giving him any interest in looking for mistakes
deeply inside the text. This might be the case as well, but, again, aware of Ianoși’s
socialist structure and correlating it with all the above mentioned strategies, Lenin’s
presence could also be meant to enforce the proper reading of the diary, as, in Ianoși’s
words, he is “the most astute critic” of Tolstoy’s work (Tolstoy 1976 41). As one would
expect, the critical references to Lenin were eliminated from the 2011 edition.
Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer was translated by Leonida Teodorescu and
published by Univers Publishing House a year earlier than Tolstoy’s diary, in 1974, being
the eleventh volume of the Works in 11 volumes series dedicated to the Russian writer.
Ion Ianoși is the author of this preface as well, there being many similarities between the
two introductory texts. The title resembles the previous one – “Dostoevsky and
Dostoevskyanism” – the critic dwelling on the writer’s experiences as depicted from his
confessions and on his vision of the world which dominated both his life and his
literature. Unlike the Tolstoy preface, here Ianoși pays more attention to the author’s
contradictory states of mind. He continues with making connections between the diary
73 My translation. Original: ”Moartea îl surprinde la 7 noiembrie (stil vechi). L-au plâns mulți; dovadă
telegramele atâtor intelectuali și muncitori”.
74 My translation. Original: “Lev Tolstoi nu putea soluționa viciile atât de pătrunzător intuite de el. Sau,
cum va spune Lenin: în doctrina lui Tolstoi s-a reflectat «marele ocean popular răscolit până în adâncuri,
cu toate slăbiciunile lui și cu toate laturile lui pozitive»”.
225
and his novels, but he seems more interested in explaining Dostoevsky’s emotions inside
his first person discourse:
“The sad and solemn symptoms of this time of transition, the chances of
replacing his life on a more solid ethical ground (and religious too) – these are
the supporting and coordinator pole of the Diary, as well as the general idea of
Dostoevsky’s novels, short stories and letters” 75 (Dostoevsky 10).
Sean Cotter talks about the importance of language in the process of cultural
colonization: “culture, language, and power come together, creating unique forms of
both domination and resistance”. A thing which draws the reader’s attention in this
preface and which was more subtle in the previous ones is the use of ideologically
marked phrases: Dostoevsky was “initially supporting the revolutionaries of his time,
and then he went along with the obscure and retrograde forces” (Dostoevsky 8). The
adjectives “obscure” and “retrograde” are very common in the communist discourse,
referring usually to the entities which come against the progressive ideology:
bourgeoisie, religious commitment, and capitalistic order. After appealing to Lenin’s
authority to introduce Dostoevsky’s figure (alongside with Tolstoy’s, a more familiar
author for the Romanian readers), Ianoși puts a stamp on his identity referring to his
adherence to Orthodox Christianism. As the text continues, he seems to successively
contradict this statement, constructing an image of Dostoevsky which is more
compatible with the communist ideology.
This diary explicitly sums up, as Ianoși says, all Dostoevsky’s obsessions, but it
does not threat the reader’s socialist education, as it seems to approach the dialectical
practice of discovering the truth:
“thus the Marxists remain loyal to Dostoevsky, loyal to themselves, in their

decision to grasp this violent confrontations between heroes, inside each other’s
soul, in the conscience of the novelist himself, between him and his critics,
75 My translation. Original: “Simptomele triste și grave ale acestei epoci de tranziție, șansele reașezării
vieții pe o mai solidă bază etică (și religioasă) – iată axa de susținere și ordonare a Jurnalului, ca și ideea
general a romanelor, povestirilor și scrisorilor lui Dostoyevsky”.
226
between this whole contradictory universe and the contemporary ideals of

socialist humanism”76 (Dostoevsky 9).
The foreignizing interpretation is present here as well, because Ianoși continues

to defend the Marxist principles against the author’s opinions, like he did in Tolstoy’s
prefaces. He points out the error and delivers the reader the proper perspective:
“The fact that the lack of an ideal generates indifference, dehumanizes and leads
to murder is an indisputable truth, proved by the history of modern
individualism, by proofs that could be delivered by Dostoevsky himself; the fact
that atheism would be equivalent to the mandatory lack of any superior idea, so
it would be confused with bourgeois individualism is a severe misconception
which the fights, sacrifices and ideal of the consistent revolutionaries have many
time refuted”77 (Dostoevsky 18).
Dostoevsky’s more dilemmatic existence (therefore more difficult to subordinate

to a posthumous ideology) required a special attention in introducing it to the
Romanian public. That is why Ion Ianoși combined the interpretation of the reflexive
discourse with discussing the connection between the author’s life experiences and his
characters’ development, trying to clarify any opinion that might stir reactions against
the Marxist ideology. Dostoevsky’s Diary was published again in three volumes by
Polirom Publishing House (Jurnal de scriitor) in 1998. This new translation was made
by Adriana Nicoară, Marina Vraciu, Leonte Ivanov, and coordinated by Emil Iordache. A
later edition (2008) accompanied the text with a preface signed by Sorina Bălănescu.
Since it has no connection with the 1974 edition, as it is a result of the post-communist
age, I found no relevance in placing it along with my discussion on Ion Ianoși’s prefaces.
76 My translation. Original: “Marxiștii îi rămân în acest sens fideli lui Dostoyevsky, lor înșiși fideli, în
hotărârea de a pătrunde aceste violente confruntări și înfruntări între eroi, în sufletul fiecăruia dintre ei,
în conștiința romancierului însuși, între el și comentatorii săi, între acest întreg univers contradictoriu și
idealurile contemporane ale umanismului socialist”.
77 My translation. Original: “Că lipsa idealului generează indiferantismul, dezumanizează și impinge la
crime este un adevăr incontestabil, demonstrate de istoria individualismului modern, de probe pe care le
furnizează Dostoievski însuși; că atesimul ar echivala cu lipsa obligatorie a oricărei idei superioare, deci s-
ar confunda cu individalismul burghez, este o gravă prejudecată, pe care luptele, jertfele, idealurile
revoluționarilor consecvenți le-au infirmat în repetate rânduri”.
227
Before reaching the conclusion of this paper, it is important to mention that, both
in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s cases, the translation itself does not bear major marks of the
foreignizing process Sean Cotter discussed. Due to the two translators, a domestication
practice is visible, that is an attempt to transpose the authors’ discourse in a language
familiar to Romanian readers 78. The strategies of domination are common in the
translations of the first decades of Communism, but they seem to have migrated in the
paratextual space of the post-60s translations. Ion Ianoși infiltrated them in his critical
discourse therefore making a shift from the linguistic foreignization to an interpretative
one. This phenomenon also reflects the state’s level of interference in the cultural
matters: while in the 50s its intrusion was violent and easily visible, in the following
period its activity became more subtle using softer mechanisms and strategies, from
maintaining a continuous uncertain atmosphere to delivering a subversive manual of
interpretation like these three prefaces.
A more general conclusion of my paper is related to the importance the context
has in discussing translation related subjects, an issue Sean Cotter emphasizes in his
study. In order to understand the strategies staged in the paratext, it was useful to have
a general look at the regime’s imposition regarding autobiographical literature and the
translation policies. It was also important to know the professional and ideological
background of the author of the paratexts and then to identify several key-words of that
specific historical phenomenon that could reveal the meaning of the discourse that
introduced to the Romanian readers the confessions of two iconic authors of Russian
literature and Soviet propaganda.
References
78 Referring to this subject, in the 2011 editor’s note, Ianoși mentions the changes that the translation
process encountered from one edition to the other: “the main successive changes in translation concern
its stylistic dimension. In thirty years, both language and its handler evolve. A certain too strict obedience
towards the original needed to be tamed not bringing prejudice to the meaning, but improving it” (m.t)
(Tolstoy 2011 6).
228
Avramescu, Tiberiu. „Cenzura în edituri”. Cenzura în spaţiul cultural românesc.

Ed. Marian Petcu. Bucureşti: Comunicare. ro, 2005.
Berindei, Mihnea, Dorin Dobrincu & Armand Goşu (eds.). Istoria comunismului
din România.Documente, Vol. II: Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965-1971). Iaşi: Polirom, 2012.
Corobca, Liliana. Controlul cărții. Cenzura literaturii în regimul comunist din
România.București: Cartea Românească, 2014.
Corobca, Liliana. Instituția cenzurii comuniste în România. 1949-1977, Vol.II.
Oradea: Ratio et Revelation, 2014.
Cotter, Sean. “The Soviet Translation: Romanian Literary Translators after
World War Two”. Meta: journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal, Vol. 53,
No. 4 (2008): 841
859. Accessed January 5 2016.
http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2008/v53/n4/019650ar.pdf.
Deletant, Dennis. “Cheating the Censor: Romanian Writers under Communism”.
Central Europe, Vol. 6 No. 2, (2008): 126–175. Accessed February 2
2016.https://www.academia.edu/8601599/Cheating_the_Censor_Romanian_Writers_
under_Communism.
Dostoievski, F.M. Opere în 11 volume. Vol. 11: Jurnalul unui scriitor.
Translation by Leonida Teodorescu, Preface by Ion Ianoși. Bucuresti: Univers, 1974.
Dragomir, Lucia. “Schimbarea ordinii lumii – misiunea politică a scriitorilor în
«democrațiile populare»”. «Transformarea socialistă». Politici ale regimului comunist
între ideologie și administrație. Ed. Ruxandra Ivan, Institutul de Investigare a Crimelor
Comunismului în România. Preface by Daniel Barbu. Iași: Polirom, 2009.
Ianoși, Ion. Internaționala mea. Cronica unei vieți. Iași: Polirom, 2012.
Ionescu, Gelu. Orizontul traducerii. București: Univers, 1981.
Manolescu, Ion (ed). Literatura memorialistică. Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1996.
Mocanu, Marin Radu. Cenzura comunistă. Documente. București: Albatros,
2001.
Terian, Andrei. Critica de export. București: Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2013.
Tolstoi, Lev. Jurnal. Vol. I (1847-1895). Translation by Janina Ianoși, Preface,
chronological table and annotations by Ion Ianoși. Bucuresti: Univers, 1975.
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Tolstoi, Lev. Jurnal. Vol. II (1896-1910). Translation by Janina Ianoși,

Preface, chronological table and annotations by Ion Ianoși. Bucuresti: Univers, 1976.
Tolstoi, Lev. Jurnal. Translation by Janina Ianoși, Preface, chronological
table, annotations and names index by Ion Ianoși. Bucuresti: Ideea Europeană, 2011.
Zamfir, Mihai. Cealaltă faţă a prozei. Bucureşti: Eminescu, 1988.
230
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.
Review by Adrian-George MATUS
UFR Histoire Contemporaine, Université Sorbonne Paris IV
Paris, France
E-mail : thematusadrian@yahoo.com
Thierry Wolton is a controversial character in French historiography. This aspect

is due to a specificity of the French elitist mentality. Up to this day, only the academic
degree of a person lends credibility to the intellectual in the public sphere. While
across the Ocean the issue of academic background is more relaxed, France is still
dominated by a mentality of being-a-specialist-only-in-one's-own-graduating-field.
Therefore, Thierry Wolton, who wrote an extensive analysis about the history of
communism in Eastern Europe, has little credibility, even though his volumes are
very well documented and perhaps even unique researches.
Born in 1951, Thiery Wolton’s main profession is journalism, currently writing
in Libération, Le Point or Radio France Internationale. However, he is better known
in the French intellectual milieu for his complete analysis of the consequences of
applied Communist principles throughout the whole 20th century. He started
publishing his two volumes in 2015 at the famous publishing house Editions Grasset,
and the third part will be published in 2017. Thierry Wolton divided his analysis in an
elegant triad. In his first volume, he deals with the oppressors (Les Bourreaux), while
in his second book he presents the victims (Les Victimes). The third part, to be
published in 2017, will deal with the collaborators of the system (Les Complices).
In other words, his works deal mainly with the history of the communist
countries and the French politics. The first historical work that stirred strong
231
controversy was Le KGB en France, published by Wolton in 1986. The historical

essay Le Grand Recrutement touched upon another delicate subject: the relationship
between Henri Robinson and several French politicians from the 1940s. His
historical lecture was quite controversial because he unveiled certain delicate affairs.
Famous historians like Annie Kriegel and François Furet came in his defense
following the debate (Péan 655-657). However, he was strongly attacked due to a
pretended claimed absence of history knowledge.
One may ask himself who are the detractors; but the issue is too complicated
to only name a few intellectuals. In fact, when dealing with Communist studies,
French historiography always witnessed a strong battle between two main academic
currents: the revisionists and the totalitarians. In a few words, due to limited access
to URSS archives until the 1990s, historians only speculated on the mechanisms of
the Communist system (Werth 1999). The totalitarian school invoked figures like
Alain Besançon (1977), François Furet and Martin Malia (1995), while the
revisionists, like Sheila Fitzpatrick and John Arch Getty, who were influenced by
Marxists, wanted to show a world less ‘dichotomic` view of the world. Moreover,
France had strong communist affinities (in certain periods, like 1968-1971, even
Maoists) due to the influence of highly respected intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre or
Simone de Beauvoir.
In this context, the reception of Thierry Wolton’s work was highly controversial.
His starting point was a global understanding of the Communist phenomena. Even
though long before Thiery Wolton’s work other important writings tried to explain
this global phenomenon, they only touched essential topics. For instance, the highly
acclaimed Le Livre Noir du Communisme only dealt this the repressive part of the
Communist system. From the philosophical point of view, the links between Marxism
and Communism were deeply explained by Leszek Kolakowski in the 1970s in the
essential three volumes book called The Main Currents of Marxism.
The starting quote («D’une main de fer, nous conduirons l’humanité vers le
bonheur » (Wolton, 2015, 5) - reflects a paradox upon which the whole argument of
the book will be developed: the tension between the ideals of the ideology and the
actual ways means of achieving them. According to Thierry Wolton, the visible
difference emerged from the first days of the Russian Revolution. In his the first part
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of his work, called Le mythe de la Révolution, he explains how the October

Revolution was constructed as a myth through various forms. Wolton argues, taking
into consideration other historical works (Ozouf 432-434), that in the European
culture we witness “an eternal retour” of the French Revolution theme. Taking this
argument further, the French author explains how the Russians borrowed many
aspects: anticlericalism, regicide, the supreme, Leviathan-like state and the constant
decimation of those who have a different opinion (Wolton, 2015, 107-180). In other
words, before Stalin’s crimes from the 1930s, a strong mechanism of repression
developed. From the first days of the Civil War, concentration camps emerged.
In the second part of the first volume, Thierry Wolton explains how the
socialist doctrine of the socialist in a country appeared (219). After the First World
War and in the early 1920s, there were real possibilities of spreading the Communist
ideology throughout the whole Europe: Hungary and Germany (219-224). After the
failure of ‘sharing’ the Communist ideology in other countries, Stalin decided to insist
on developing the Marxist principles only in URSS (185-219).
More than just trying to explain the main directions, Thierry Wolton also offers a
pertinent understanding about the background games for power. For instance, he
goes beyond the methods of the totalitarian historical school when he explains how
Iossif Djougachvili achieved power. The totalitarian school was not particularly
interested in the power games. What is more, in order to explain this issue he
analyses a controversial document- the Testament of Lenin. This official paper caused
many problems for Stalin because Lenin did not want him as his successor (246-248).
The whole affair is explained in depth by the historian in the chapter called
L’irrésistible ascension de Iossif Djougachvili (231-261).
Once in the position of leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin was strongly interested
in enforcing his power. At the beginning of his career he appeared as a moderate
faction between Bukharin and Trotsky (252). Thierry Wolton sums up the main
methods used by Stalin in order to gain power: repression, charisma, extraordinary
working power and the use of the local Georgian faction to support his ascension.
These aspects had been clarified in exhaustive works like Robert Conquest’s Stalin
(1999) or Simon Sebag’s Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court Red Tsar (2003). However,
233
there is a delicate point regarding the links between the personality of Stalin and the
great events of the era. Given all this, Tierry Wolton is highly conscious about the
risks of making sensationalist interpretations and explains with caution the influence
of the personal life of the dictator upon politics.
In other words, the reader may be surprised that Stalin did not have a personal
life during his leadership period. What is more, after the death of his second wife,
Nadejda, he decided to dedicate himself only to the Communist cause (Sebag 341).
Following the arguments of another important historian writing on the Russian
history, Orlando Figues (1996), Wolton explains through a metaphor the issue of
Iakov Djougashvili, the son of Stalin who died in an imprisonment camp. Neglecting
his own son reflects the sacrifice of an entire generation: those born in the 1910s or
early 1920s witnessed the traumas of Second World War, or as it still remembered
today in Russia, The Great Patriotic War.
From an ideological point of view, Stalin creates an interesting shift between
Marxist-Leninist principles and nationalism. In 1930s, he realizes the limits of
Marxist-Leninist ideology and the need for a surrogate (« plus l’experience socialiste
s’érode, minée par l’épreuve de la réalité, plus le nationalisme aura tendence de se
substituer à elle » Wolton 352). This is the starting point for an ideological hybrid
called national-communism, which will be exported throughout the whole Eastern
Europe after the Second World War (Tismaneanu 2003). Thierry Wolton considers
that this was the starting point for the unusual alliance between Germany and CCCP
at the beginning of the Second World War. To the common ideological aspects (anti-
capitalism, nationalism) the geopolitical common interests between Hitler and Stalin
were added. This aspect is clarified in the seventh chapter of the second part, called
Rouges et Bruns [Reds and Browns]. We should also add that Thierry Wolton was
also previously interested in explaining the similarities between the Reds
(Communists) and the Browns (the Nazis). He developed the subject in a previous
book, called Rouge Brun, Le Mal du Siècle (1999). Therefore, the chapter from Une
Histoire Mondiale du Communisme is only a shortened form only of the greater
discussion.
The third part of the book explains how Communism was imposed through the
whole world after the Second World War. Following Martin Malia’s argument,
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Wolton states that the best promoter for Communism in Mitteleuropa was actually
Hitler himself. After the Second World War, the Red Army used the argument of
being the liberators from the Fascist domination. As such, Stalin used all his
diplomatic resources in order to control the Eastern European territories. He used
the colonial interests of Winston Churchill to his own advantage (Wolton 450). This
is the explanation provided by Thierry Wolton regarding the recognition of the power
of the CCCP in Eastern Europe by the Allies. Therefore, the support towards the local
Communist parties was already prepared by Moscow from 1940s (Wolton 1999 470).
Furthermore, the French author explains the mechanism of seizing the power in
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Eastern Germany, by pinpointing
the particularity particularities of each country. Moreover, he anticipates the theme of
the next chapter (L’empire désuni)[The Dissolved Empire] by explaining the birth of
the conflict between Yugoslavia and CCCP (Wolton, 1999, 522-524).
As Wolton states, the Moscow’s world domination of the Communism movement
by Moscow lasted only a few years. Other centers of power emerged: China and
Yugoslavia. In this chapter, the author moves with high ability between macro-
history (the explanation of the framework of the Cold War) and micro-history (the
increasing paranoia of Stalin and the reaction of his close group- Beria, Mikoian,
Molotov and Malenkov). After the death of Stalin, Khrushchev obtained the power,
arrested his enemies (Beria), and accused, behind closed doors, the crimes done by
Stalin. However, Wolton explains very accurately why the de-stalinisation is actually
a return to Leninism (Wolton 722-723). This reform was felt in the whole Communist
bloc. In 1956, revolts began in Eastern Germany, Hungary, and Poland (Wolton 723-
745). The Soviet model was rejected by the Eastern Europeam countries from the
Eastern Europe. Hybridizations between nationalism and communism started to be
more and more often ound, starting from the late 1950s in countries like Romania or
the German Democratic Republic. Unfortunately, Wolton does not insist very much
on the 1960-1990s period in Eastern Europe in the first volume. Rather, his interest
is focused on what he calls “ the Asian apotheosis”. The roots of essential events like
The Red Khmer Revolution, The Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War are
235
deeply explained explored in depth in extensive chapters. Still, the issue will be
explained in the third volume, called Les Complices, which will be published in 2017.
The second volume deals with the victims of this ideology, pinpointing
interesting themes like the experiments on prisoners, organ traffics trafficking in the
Goulag, the psychological weapons, and the privileges of the nomenklatura. In the
end, he explains the emergence of alternative voices, samizdat and dissident
intellectuals. He shows how the Homo Communistus was formed created and, by
using Dante’s metaphor of Dante, he describes the circles of Communist Inferno.
To conclude, this author may offer a deep perspective on the Communist
phenomenon, with strong academic arguments, both derived from primary sources
(archives, testimonies) and from second sources (as indicated by the richness of his
references). His thesis is that the Soviet pattern was expanded, with some variations,
in the whole world. Une Histoire mondiale du Communisme unveils the roots of
Communism, the context(s) which made possible the application of this philosophy
(China and Russia) and, moreover, why this ideology was so appealing. Except for the
Eastern Europe, Communism was highly appealing because it answered to a critical
demand: the abolition of social inequality (Wolton 1114) . Whether it is about Tsarist
Russia, Imperial China and Ethiopia or colonial powers, the ideology came as a
surrogate, as an opium for the elites, as stated half of a century before by Raymond
Aron (1955).
To this we may add the fact that during his youth, Thierry Wolton was one of the few
journalists who had access to CCCP and at the same time could take interviews of
influential dissidents, like Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov, as he
states in the Le Point interview. However, the main lack of the work of Wolton is that
he uses mainly French or French translated references in order to support his
arguments. This is a strong downside because, in contrast, strong schools developed
in the Anglo-Saxon space are producing essential works in this field.
236
István KIRÁLY V., Death and History, Lambert Academic Publishing,
Saarbrücken, ISBN: 978-3-659-80237-9, 172 pages, 2015.
Review by Constantin TONU
Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University

Cluj, Romania
E-mail: costeaunot@yahoo.com
Throughout this provocative book, István Király invites us to leave behind

our current linguistic habits and the comfortable ways of thinking, specific to a
world of “certainties". The author encourages his readers to begin analysing the
process of thinking from an existential-ontological perspective, as structures of
being. In light of these remarks, we should step towards understanding the most
important purpose of this book: identifying the opportunities for a new philosophy
of history, i.e. a philosophical inquiry about history which, from an ontological
point of view, is to be understood, ultimately, as an ontology of history. This
endeavour is announced from the title, through the interconnection between
death and history, where the use of "and" must be perceived as a "question" in
itself and therefore "must first be explicitly and articulately: asked."
In order to highlight the relationship between history and death, the author
claims we must first interrogate the very terms with which we operate.
Accordingly, in the first chapter (Human Finitude and History – Prolegomena to
the Possibility of a "Philosophy of History" and Ontology of History) he begins by
asking: “what is history?”. Moreover, the following questions are how can a
concept such as death be properly discussed? What is death for the "living
humans" who are wondering, always in the present, about the meaning of death
and whose lives are always "threatened", in an inexorable way, by the possibility of
death?
First, death must be thought and properly assumed as dying. The firmness
with which the author states this nuance is due to the manner in which the entire
237
Western philosophical tradition understood and still relates to death – that is,
without ever dying. In the Greek-Christian interpretation of being, this
"everlasting-problem" was either shrouded in silence, or was seen through the
light of "a metaphysics of immortality, a metaphysics of «What next?» or «What
comes after death»". However, through these (comforting) attempts to escape the
fear and the anxiety of death, which are perhaps noble in their intentions, but
constitute a failure for a proper philosophical inquiry, "it is not only death which
loses its weight in a denied death, but life itself as well", inasmuch as death is (and
has to be thought as such) – among the possibilities of being of mortal human
beings – the most certain and unavoidable possibility of being, i.e. the possibility
of their no-longer-being, which,
"by its own «substantive» happening which is dying – precisely by it but

always beyond it – derives and constitutes, as well as structures, articulates,
permeates and colours all of their other modes and possibilities of being. In
other words, it opens them up, truly and really, structures them opened in,
and precisely because of its finitude".
Here it is already possible to make the transition to history, since, if death is a

"something" that continuously radiates upon every moment of human life as the
sole horizon in which these moments, actions, deeds etc. make sense, then history
itself "exists in fact because there is human death, because there are beings who
relate – explicitly or implicitly – to death in and with their being, in and with their
mode of being, in a being-like way."
István Király states that throughout the history of philosophy there were
(only) two (great) thinkers who saw "this force and weight of death and mortality
which grounds and articulates history and historicity", namely Thomas Hobbes
and Martin Heidegger. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argues that man, in his
natural state – following the logic of homo homini lupus – is inclined to war,
destruction, and, consequently, death. Due to this continuous threat (of death)
and in order to preserve the precious human life, people found necessary "first to
create public authority and then obedience to it"; and what is more, not only all
that organizes and articulates public life, but in fact all modes of being of this
particular being – “which is originally temporal due to its mortality" – all human
238
DEATH AND HISTORY
things, events and processes are unthinkable and meaningless without death, and
therefore history itself “derives and gains its always actual weight and dynamism
from where time originates. Namely, precisely from death, from human finitude."
The German thinker, with whom István Király repeatedly starts a dialogue
in this book, by highlighting, examining, and also by going further with the inquiry
of some issues, is Heidegger. Király tackles not only Heidegger’s works or the
Greek-Christian tradition of the thinking in which this great philosopher created a
radical and essential turn, but also with the way in which Heidegger was
understood or, what is more important, misunderstood by those who followed
him. The author mentions and discusses not only Being and Time, but also one of
Heidegger’s former (and less frequently analysed) works: Phenomenological
Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, "which expose for the first time the
basic ideas of Being and Time", and where Heidegger’s philosophical approach is
articulated in the service of a history of ontology and logic. In this book, death is
seen as the "how" of life and, as such, it "constitutes the temporality – that is:
historicity – of factic life. For, with its future standing-before, death makes visible
for factic human Dasein both its present and past." Also, history cannot be
understood without a factic human Dasein – which is always in a living-present –
who questions its nature. Hence, "it is the question-points of the present
(pertaining and supporting, as well as deriving from the future) which direct such
investigations, as well as the questions which move them, to the landscape of an
always historically articulated past." In this specific (always present) process of
questioning made by a Dasein-like being, "whose meaning cannot be taken
beyond question and questioning", history, or, more precisely, the dimensions of
history, past and future become two horizons of possibilities, temporally
simultaneous with that inquiring present.
From this point of the interpretative discourse it is already clear that the
obvious and major consequence of all of the arguments above is the fact that the
common way in which time itself was understood – linearly, as past-present-
future, the grammatical time – becomes a main critical target of this book. Of
course, for the author it can no longer be a valid method of interpretation. Thus
far this inquiry revealed the "why" and the "wherefrom" of history, with the
answers: (because of) death (as dying), thought and assumed as the most certain
and unavoidable possibility of being (and not mere as a givenness) which, as the
239
"how" of life, defines, articulates, opens up, and gives weight and sense – in an
existential, ontological and constitutive way – to all other possibilities and modes
of being and, as such, opens Dasein’s freedom itself, because "freedom can only
derive and come from where the weight of being also derives and comes from."
However, there is still a need to clarify the issue of the "what" of history, namely
by thematising the dimensions, the ecstasies of time. This is why in the second and
the third chapters, the author focuses on the past and, respectively, on the future.
The second chapter ("HAD-BEEN-NESS" AND PAST – History and
Memory. An Essay in applied philosophical dialogue with Martin Heidegger)
begins with the idea that the issue of the past has not been raised (so far) "as as a
problem of being, but only as a problem of time" – a way of thinking by which
solely temporal distance is that which makes something become past and in which
"there are no relevant ontological differences between past and present, only
methodological differences". On the contrary, says István Király, “Had Been" does
not automatically form the Past, i.e. due to the simple "passage" of time. All of its
possibilities of existence as such were suspended. That is to say, Had-Been-Ness is
by itself detached of time, it is "outside" of time, and we are those who have the
responsibility to choose what to assume, turning it into (our) Past because "Had-
Been-Ness will only turn into an actual Past if we make it past, that is, if we make-
pass that what Had-Been", and what to annihilate, in which case "nihilised Had-
Been-Ness is a disappeared no-longer-being. We do not know about it when was it
nor that it «was» at all because it does not even appear as absence on the horizon
of forgetting." As a result, the Past "is not simply connected to time, but to
ourselves", and in this connection it becomes a zone of our existential possibilities.
We are open towards the Past, we are in search of it, and “there" we can find what
Had Been, but what is to be noted is the very fact that what Had-Been, now, is not,
that it is-no-longer, and "we can only liberate us from what Had Been and what we
ourselves Had Been if we realize that we will never or no-longer be like that".
In the same manner as with the search for the past, if we search for the
future "we are promised that which Will Be" but, which now, obviously, is not.
However – as the author asserts in the third chapter (The Future, Or,
Questioningly Dwells the Mortal Man... Question-Points to Time) – we should
not think about this dimension of time only in a negative way (due to its Not-Yet-
Being), because Future is "that what Is-Not-Yet (but) Will Then Be", this "Then"
240
DEATH AND HISTORY
opening a horizon of "highly articulated «positiveness»". This also applies in the

case of death, which is always in the future, which is not yet, but which, as an
unavoidable possibility of being, will (Then) definitely happen. Therefore, future is
to be thought as a realm of possibilities, of our possibilities, revealed in the very
process of questioning. That is why "future is something that always pertains and
belongs to us."
Moreover, from an ontological perspective, by questioning this dimension
of time (questioning the "When?", perceived as an existential category), we project
ourselves into the future, holding the possibilities of (our) being. In this way,
following the Heideggerian idea of human as Dasein, that is, of a being which "is"
not, but rather has-to-be and which, "in its very Being, that Being is an issue for
it", the mortal human being, says István Király, precisely because of its mortality,
dwells questioningly. Thus, questionableness, in an existential-ontological sense,
is a mode of being through which, from all possibilities of being which are opened,
articulated and constituted by (our) death, we hold to our being, becoming
ourselves. Consequently, if Being and the meaning of Being are held in this
particular way and if man dwells questioningly precisely due to its mortality, then
death "is exactly that «something» which originally holds in our existence... and
which, as such, «gives» weight to our constraints with the past and the present,
coming from and going towards the future."
However, claims István Király, starting with an idea presented by
Heidegger, in order to become ourselves, to have an authentic existence, we must
first "become mortals". That is to say, we must assume and make death-as-dying
possible (and not only be aware of it) and, as such, to open and to free ourselves
towards this certain possibility. And this can be done, as the author states, by
philosophy alone. That is why, in the forth chapter of the book (HISTORICALITY
– MORTALITY – FACTICITY. The Foundation of Philosophy an Atheism in
Heidegger`s Early Works – Prolegomena to an Existential-Ontological
Perspective), he states that philosophy is "a mode of existence of the Dasein" and,
as such, it is that mode of being constituted against the "declining tendency of
factual life", i.e. against the "how" of the non-authentic existence in the zone of the
impersonal "it". As Heidegger declared, it is necessary that this philosophy
become "fundamentally atheist". By this, it is envisaged that philosophy is to be
totally non-biased and without any ideological implications. Also, this does not
241
make philosophy a comforting and consoling mode of being, but, as the author
states, it is not in fact its role and task to be so; religion and perhaps sciences deal
with consoling, but philosophy has to assume, to show, and to explicit the
complexity and the difficulties of life.
The book ends with an Appendix (Life – Death – Secret – Terrorism),
where the phenomenon of terrorism is analysed in the light of the above-
mentioned explanations about death and also in the light of another subject
preferred by István Király: the secret. "For terrorism cannot be understood – says
he – without the secret and the instrumentalization of death, which presupposes
and is conditioned by the denial of death". Moreover, terrorism is to be perceived
as a mode of existence, because, once a person upholds an oath in a specific
terrorist organisation, the oath involving the assumption that one will surely be
put to death in case of betrayal, becoming thus an initiate, his identity is
ontologically changed. He is no longer determined by any ethics or common
"human" values because the power of the secret gives him "rights of disposing over
life and death". Acting in secret is the very condition of the existence of terrorism
and therefore here we should attack, if we want to fight against terrorism, its very
core: the secret. Regarding the rapport established with the idea of death through
sacrifice, terrorists want in fact to ensure their existence beyond life and, as such,
they deny (their) death as dying, i.e. as that "something" that ends their existence.
To conclude, this book proposes reconsidering, from an existential-
ontological point of view, the way in which we perceive the ecstasies of time and
our relation with death. In his inquiry, István Király demonstrates that history
itself exists only because we are mortal, that due to our mortality we questioningly
dwell on the idea of death. This is our most certain and unavoidable possibility,
that opens, articulates, constitutes and gives weight and sense to all other
possibilities and modes of being.
242
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.
Review by Eliza POP
Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University

Cluj, Romania
atropa91@gmail.com
A compelling book, abundant in scientific references, Personal Narratives

of Romanian Women during the Cold War (1945 – 1989): Varieties of the
autobiographical genre by Andrada Fǎtu-Tutoveanu is the result of important
research in interdisciplinary discourses, using methodologies such as gender
studies, personal narratives, cultural studies, comparative literature and history.
Despite the fact that personal narratives written under or about incarceration
during the communist regime is a field of great interest among scholars, female
personal narratives did not generate enough interest, thus the subject remained
seriously uncovered. The author herself claims that the lack of studies and
scientific articles during her research proved to be a challenge. Following this trail
of thought Fǎtu-Tutoveanu’s book, in spite of its shortness, aims to cover a gap
and inspire further research in the area of female personal narratives in Romania
under the communist regime.
In the introductory part, Fǎtu-Tutoveanu charts the territory from a
cultural and literary perspective, pointing out the fact that, after the fall of the
communist regime in Romania, the book market was flooded by personal
narratives such as letters, biographies, confessions and autobiographies: “This
phenomenon was based on a complex process that aimed at recovering the lost
pieces of a historical jigsaw. It also involved the attempt to retrace the collective as
243
well as individual identities which had been destructured by the invasive regime
that aimed at producing a totally different social category, the “New Man”.” (p.1)
Concerning the autobiographical genre, Fǎtu-Tutoveanu points out the fact
that so far different types of personal narratives such as letters, diaries, memoirs
etc. have been placed under the label of autobiographical genre, however she
proposes that these writings should be read with great attention towards the
subgenres in which they place themselves, preferring the term “personal
narratives” rather than the other terms. An important aspect of these narratives is
brought to the reader’s attention: these writings are not just historical documents
but fictions as well; even a diary is written with some kind of composure and
meditation, and certain styles are often adopted quite consciously. Nevertheless,
the main attribute that each of these writings has is historicity, which the author
describes as follows: ”The traumatic experience under the dictatorship links these
individual episodes as a red thread, contributing to recovering a larger, both
internal and external framework.”(p.5)
The first chapter, “Gender and genre”: women’s diaries and memoirs,
highlights the importance of female writings despite their small number, with a
special emphasis upon the female voice as such, under the dictatorial regime. This
way of approaching these texts is important in gender related studies. Thus the
author considers that the relation between gender and genre is of crucial
importance because in most cases the experience of women was even more
traumatic in this historical period.
The same chapter offers an insight regarding the emancipation of women,
which in fact only took place after 1989. A change occurred in women’s social and
private lives, an added burden. It was expected of women to work and to have a
share in political activism, just like men, the difference however occurred in their
household activities, a domain still belonging to the wives. Moreover, it was also
expected of women to have at least four children, abortion being illegal at the time.
In more radical cases, the personal narratives served as a steady point in
the lives of women, especially those who have been persecuted or incarcerated. It
represented “a crucial part during isolation”(p.16) for it was in close relation with
their social and mental survival. In collective imprisonment they shared their
narratives, as writing and reading were banned. This was the case of Alice
244
PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF ROMANIAN WOMEN DURING THE COLD WAR (1945 – 1989):
VARIETIES OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GENRE
Voinescu who left a diary about her experiences during imprisonment in which
she relates the role of the narrative in maintaining her mental health.
In the following chapter, “The lives of others” Postcomunist publication
and reception of female writer’s diaries and memoirs, Fǎtu-Tutoveanu analyses
the increase in personal narrative publications after 1989. As it is depicted in this
chapter, there was a general need for filling in the missing pieces of the ‘jigsaw
puzzle’ of that period, a general thirst for truth in other words. These narratives,
even if they were deeply personal in whichever form they appeared, represented
first and foremost a certain type of historical document, that was highly desired
for the reading public. It was also a rush towards truth after a long period of
deceits, half-truths, and lies.
The third chapter of the present book deals with “personal narratives
encountering history” as the author points out and it is mainly concerned with
Annie Bentoiu’s personal narratives Timpul ce ni s-a dat (The time we were
given) relating events from 1944 to 1959. Bentoiu is especially important for her
method of constructing narratives using both notes from her diary as well as
historical accounts in order to give a more accurate view of the events. As a result,
“This process de-structures and re-structures the female identity and the
experiences later reassembled by her memoirs.”(p.32). The emphasis in Bentoiu’s
case falls upon the grand narrative, and not the personal one, as she claims she is
only an “eye”, a witness having the sole purpose to narrate what she had seen,
often writing about memory and the importance of it in the process of writing.
However, due to the censorship and constant surveillance silence came before
everything else : “A compact, very deep layer of silence has remained inside us for
the rest of our lives.”(p.40). In Bentoiu’s case the author depicts a double
structure in her narrative: History, consisting of facts, and memory, which is
Herstory, in this case. Her narratives are dominated by History being written
upon a historical model as well.
After 1989, writing became possible once more and the personal narratives
appeared in large numbers on the book market not only because they were
requested but the writing process also acted as a coping mechanism with the
experienced traumas and repressions. In most cases writing was a painful process
but it also had a cathartic dimension.
245
The fourth chapter depicts the case of Alice Voinescu and her type of
narrative which was not intended for publication. Fǎtu-Tutoveanu considers this
kind of narrative as being more personal, focusing on intimate events rather than
historical facts, nevertheless covering an extended period from 1929 to 1961.
A significant part in her personal narratives is represented by the 19 months
uncovered in her diary, time she spent imprisoned. It was a period in which, once
again, memory was used as a technique in keeping the integrity of the human
psyche. In the subchapter “Waiting for Judgment Day” it is analyzed the
terrifying yet impressive part of Voinescu’s diary that depicts the installment of
the communist regime from 1948 to1953.
If the previous chapters dealt with the outcasts and the marginalized female
writers of the communist regime, chapter five presents those “engaged” writers,
like Nina Cassian, who wrote in favor of the regime. Choosing not to avoid
discussing about this aspect of personal narratives, I think is very effective in
creating an integral perspective upon the entire subject. This chapter focuses upon
the social and financial privileges achieved by means of writing, as it is the case
with Nina Cassian. The new intellectual elite was formed of those who let
themselves being entirely modeled after the regime. Their position did not suffer
as of the marginalized writers, it was however strongly expected of their writing to
influence the readers in a certain direction, and everything was dominated by
politics. “It is also relevant for the artificial manner of reorganizing literary life
and publications as well as for the creation of a new – obedient and in many cases
privileged – category.”(p.64)
Thus the main feature of literature and other cultural products is that they
were infused with political ideologies and stereotypical typologies of both men and
women, destined to “educate” the people reading it but also to diminish the
resistance towards the authoritative figures. Writing became an act of obligation,
and the right to choose disappeared as well.
In chapter six, Fǎtu-Tutoveanu discusses the new generation of communist
female writers, mainly the case of Constanța Buzea as well as the gap “between the
official communist ideology concerning gender and the Romanian social practice
and mentalities.”(p.85) As it is depicted in this chapter the women writers were a
necessary addition to the male writers, while their writing adopted the same
246
PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF ROMANIAN WOMEN DURING THE COLD WAR (1945 – 1989):
VARIETIES OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GENRE
uniform style in a politically and ideologically oriented manner until the mid-
1960s. While gender equality was proclaimed everywhere women were expected to
support the political propaganda and to be morally pure as well.
Buzea’s diary covers a short but intense period from 1969 to 1971, and it
was only published in 2009 under the title of Creștetul ghețarului [The Top of the
Glacier]. Fǎtu-Tutoveanu places the important aspect in Buzea’s work upon the
inner experience and upon the relationship between family members; nevertheless
what is also important is the description of literary environment and its influential
figures.
While many other writers have distorted events or even created a
mystifying process in order to place themselves in a better light, Fǎtu-Tutoveanu
observes the extreme, almost raw frankness in which Buzea describes events and
her troubled relationship with her husband, who was also a writer. In Buzea’s case
the process of writing a diary was an escape for an introverted personality such as
herself, while her husband gave up on writing the diary being too much of an
extrovert. Another reason for writing was to preserve her memories for the future,
and here the author compares Buzea to Isabel Allende because “writing is
perceived by both of them as an antidote for suffering and forgetting”(p.92)
Another important aspect that is discussed here is of the woman’s status in
the society, which was maintained just as in the patriarchal societies. Despite the
fact that some of these women were acknowledged writers, they were directly
submitted to their husbands and lacked independence or a stable employment, as
was the case with Buzea.
In the book’s final chapter which is entitled Collective memoirs: Female
fellow travellers. Female experience under communism, Fǎtu-Tutoveanu analyses
the burdened state of women during a regime which constantly talked not only
about the equality of people in general but about equality between women and
men as well. In reality women were expected to work as much as men, to be
politically active and in their domestic lives they were also responsible with the
education of their children, being in charge of their households as well, not to
mention the fact that they were expected to be the previously mentioned “heroine
mothers” of at least four children. Even if they were expected to have at least four
children per family, the state didn’t offer enough support in their upbringing. Thus
the best word describing women’s status in those periods is “burden” and Fǎtu-
247
Tutoveanu goes even further, highlighting the fact that burden becomes a
metaphor for History itself. In this chapter it is also analysed Babeți’s meta-
narrative which too deals with the need to narrate in order to understand the
historical events as well as the personal ones undergoing in that period.
It is further discussed in the chapter the impact of Ceaușescu’s 1966 770
Decree, according to which abortion and the use of contraception was banned,
upon women and their mental and physical health. Many of them did illegal
abortions which often led to added medical complications.
Fǎtu-Tutoveanu proposes a retracing of smaller personal narratives that
deal with the female experience under communism, narratives which contribute to
art of a larger perspective and which helps describing the roles, experiences and
burdens of women in the absurd 1980 Romanian society. Authors such as Mihaela
Ursa, Simona Popescu, Otilia-Vieru Baraboi and others are evoked with smaller
narratives describing their experience as adolescents during the above mentioned
period. All these narratives mirror a period where everything was rationed: heat,
electricity, food and intrusion was perceived not only upon peoples mentality but
also upon the female body - unwanted medical controls, abortion severely
punished - all these aspects were seen as a siege upon their bodies which
unavoidably led to different traumas.
Personal Narratives of Romanian Women during the Cold War (1945 –
1989): Varieties of the autobiographical genre is a more than necessary piece of
the large and complex picture of life during communist times, gradually unveiled
by interdisciplinary researchers like Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu.
248

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Metacritic Journal for Comparative

Studies and Theory

Main contact: Mihaela Ursa, mihaela.ursa@ubbcluj.ro

Managing editor MJCST

Editors-in-chief Mihaela URSA, Alex GOLDIȘ

Associate editors Laura PAVEL, Adrian TUDURACHI

Assistant editors Ana-Maria DELIU, Cristina DIAMANT, Emanuel MODOC

Editorial board Gianina DRUȚĂ, Anamaria MIHĂILĂ, Emma PUSTAN, Adrian

Advisory board Ioana BICAN (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania)

Translation editors Oana VĂSIEȘ, Cristina POPESCU

Proofreaders Andreea STOICA, Alexandra TURCU, Daria CONDOR

Layout editors Adelina HAȘ, Daniel MATIȘ

Thierry WOLTON, Une Histoire Mondiale du Communisme. Les Bourreaux, Essai

István KIRÁLY V., Death and History

Andrada FĂTU-TUTOVEANU, Personal Narratives of Romanian Women during the

University of Western Ontario

TRANSLATION AND MUTUAL TRANSCENDENCE

“Mother is mère est Mutter ist cara madre es mamma. Mater,

existence. The value of anything is seen in its reproducibility – and whatever is

1And Benjamin, Borges and de Man.

Benjamin was a devotee of the ruined transcendental. To him, a translation

“Hölderlin’s translations in particular are subject to the enormous danger

obsession, otherness in focus. Stuck to the sacredness of a mechanically conceived

Benjamin. Prophecy is, though, a destined question of taste, as damned as my

5Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell (1995), 2000.

poetic foreignization of languages as historically established. As Rudolf Pannwitz,

Extreme translation Hinduizes German, only to transcend the product into a

However, the Hebraicizing German attempted by the likes of Buber and

that German translations must de-domesticate their rhetorically exoticizing

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment (1790). Trans by Werner Pluhar.

LOST IN TRANSLATION: ON KAFKA’S LANGUAGE OF ABJECTION IN

Kafka’s timeless story Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) from 1915 poses

Rudent reduce the Ungeziefer to “un monstrueux insecte.” Likewise Corinna

Corngold’s monster traditionally as something to be ‘shown’ (It. mostrare) is a

The Technical University of Civil Engineering

IMAGETEXT AND EKPHRASIS AS CHANCES OF REVIVAL IN

Abstract: Translation Studies has crossed a tumultuous interval of theorization. But

As we know, the saga of intersemiotic translation, involving an almost infinite

Time for opening the textual gates

The enlargement of translation scope is the equivalent of a semiotic leap.

As we can see, there are opinions in favour of the transparency of the

Maybe intersemiotic translation resides more in discourse than in verbal

Fonts and transcreation after mainstream theories

In non-academic fields, the understanding of translation proves to be,

During the functionalist stage emerged the epistemological scenario of

Special semiotic systems

Nushu is a system of writing that can be described as “Woman’s Writing” in

Various researchers commented differently on their findings regarding the

b. Ekphrasis and graffiti

Graffiti are salient examples of transmitting messages along non-institutional

b1. Is it profitable to translate graffiti?

There is a binary perception related to the status of graffiti: some people

Whatever aesthetic quality tagging may possess, it resides in the style of

As a rule, murals beautify urban-scape and are commissioned. They resort

In Pompeii, historians uncovered some etchings related to sexual boasting or to

Crew = organized group of writers;

Floaters = graffiti on trains at window level;

King/Queen = the best writer in every possible category;

Motioning = writing on a subway car while it is circulated;

Tag = a writer’s name and signature;

Throw-up = a piece rapidly executed and many times consisting of only an

Wallpaper = the repetition of a tag until it becomes a pattern;

In spite of Mailer’s celebration of graffiti, some city mayors took harsh