“The Translation of the Foreign Novel in Romania (1794-1944): A Distant Reading” is a 24 month PD project conducted by Project Leader (PL) Ștefan Baghiu under the supervision of Project Mentor (PM) Mihaela Ursa that aims to put forward a series of articles and a collective volume in English about the foreign novel in translation in Romania. The TRANOV (1794-1944) project has its goal in a distant reading of all the translations of the foreign novel in Romania from the first translated novel in 1794 and until the end of World War II. It proposes an analysis of all the novels translated in this period through a quantitative approach of the archive metadata provided by DCRT [The Chronological Dictionary of the Translated Novel in Romania from its origins to 1989] and by several indexes of articles published in Romania in relation to foreign literatures. The project follows quantifiable data in order to see patterns of evolution and dispersion inside world literature. It encompasses over a century and a half of translations of novels and aims at creating a set of useful instruments for future transnational histories of the novel in Romania, for the analysis of the Romanian literary polysystem, and for the debate over the place and importance of the Romanian cultural system from a World Literature perspective seen as a “mode of reading” of all the texts that circulate beyond their culture of origin, as theorized by David Damrosch.
This project is supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research and Innovation, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2019-0946, within PNCDI III.