AHCI Articles:
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Baghiu, Ștefan. “The Rise of Translations: Foreign Novels in Romania in 1877, 1945, and 1989.” Transylvanian Review XXXI, supplement no. 1 (2022): 250-261.
(print version, online forthcoming)
This article analyzes the growth of translations of novels in Romania in relation to historical events that changed the administrative orientation of Romanian Principalities and the Romanian state within the world system. The data used is an exhaustive account of the ratio of local productions to translations provided by Andrei Terian in 2019. Shifting consequently its subaltern state from Ottoman to Western influence, from Western to Soviet, and from Soviet to Western again, the Romanian administration also ensured the growth of literary translations—at least in respect to novels. This points out to a complex system of legitimation, through which state-building processes are followed by periods of translation growths in order to secure the alignment to the new center of influence. Translations of novels are thus accommodators for new dependencies within the world system. The article also depicts the situation of small cultures and their specific behavior towards translations. Following Franco Moretti’s observation regarding proportions between translations and local production and Sean Cotter’s definition of minor cultures as “translated nations,” this research arrives to the conclusion that the “translated nation” is a stage within semi-peripheral and peripheral literatures when shifting their orientation within the world system.
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Baghiu, Ștefan. “Avoiding Translation as Nation Building Strategy: Forging World Literature in Modern Romanian Culture through Novel Edits, Remixes and Reinterpretations.”
(forthcoming)
This article deals with local East European strategies of nation building as viewed from the perspective of non-translated world literature masterpieces between 1845 and 1947. As Emily Apter has strongly demonstrated in Not Translated, Non-Equivalent, Incommensurate, 2015), world literature has been a fruitful domain especially for the incomparable and untranslatable. Moreover, as Sean Cotter has defined the place of Romanian literature in his Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania, “the minor is not a failed state or potentially great one, but a translated nation.” It is true that translations tend to overwhelm minor cultures, yet my argument is that the nation building process of modern Eastern Europe was, in fact, a process of “avoiding translation” at the same time, meaning the—voluntary—strategy of avoiding several translations in order to avoid the inhibition of local production or the—involuntary—delay in translation. The main goal is to understand how avoiding translation was consequently a strategy to inspire local production of “structural correspondences” (Goldiș, 2017) with untranslated authors. I therefore analyze the connections between several main authors that were fundamental in building the French national and also the European canon and their insignificant presence in translation in East European peripheries as strategies of local authors to avoid being related to their core masters. From analyzing the lack of translations from Eugene Sue and other mistery novel authors for the development of Romanian literature, to the absence of translations from Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Wolf and Faulkner as an incentive to monopoly modernism, the three concepts I want to put forward (edit, remix, reinterpretation) are mainly pointing out strategies of cover up. The article states that in order to understand the interferences between two or more literatures, and even World Literature during Nation-Building processes requires a strong focus on the delays in translation and the developing of similar styles with those delayed novels. Avoiding translation is one of the main strategies of modern semiperipheral literatures, an all too elitist strategy which led in turn to plagiarism (reinterpretation), monopoly (edits), and later on structural correspondences (remixes).
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SCOPUS & ESCI Articles
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Baghiu, Ștefan. “Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Long 19th Century: A Quantitative Perspective.” Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 6, no. 2 (December 2020). https://www.metacriticjournal.com/article/167/translations-of-novels-in-the-romanian-culture-during-the-long-nineteenth-century-1794-1914-a-quantitative-perspective
This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five other groups of novels translated during the period (the atomizing agents: the East European, the Spanish, the Austrian, the Nordic, and the Asian novel).
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Baghiu, Ștefan. “Romancierele. Traducerile de romane scrise de femei în cultural română (1841-1918).” Transilvania, no. 6 (June 2021). https://revistatransilvania.ro/romancierele-traducerile-de-romane-scrise-de-femei-in-cultura-romana-1841-1918/
This article uses the data from the Chronological Dictionary of Novels Translated in Romania from its Origins to 1989 in order to chart the presence of foreign women novelists and their works in Romanian translation between 1841 (the year of the first translation of a novel originally written by a woman author, Sophie Cottin) and 1918 (the year marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the unification of Romanian provinces). The study separates two main periods, starting from the domination of the French novel: 1841-1890 and 1890-1918. The former period comprises more French novel translations, from authors such as Sophie Cottin, Stephanie-Felicité Genlis, George Sand, Countess Dash, M-me Charles Reybaud, and MieD’Aghonne. The latter comprises Italian and American authors, such as Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Anna KatherineGreen, Frances Elisa Hodgen Burnett, and even northern authors such as Clara Tschudi.
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Baghiu, Ștefan. “Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Interwar Period and WW2 (1919-1947): A Quantitative Perspective.” Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 7, no. 2 (December 2021). https://www.metacriticjournal.com/article/201/translations-of-novels-in-the-romanian-culture-during-the-interwar-period-and-wwii-1918-1944-a-quantitative-perspective
This article continues the quantitative analysis of translations of novels in Romania for the 1918-1944 period. Baghiu discusses the decay of the French novel (from almost 70% of the total of translated novels during the long 19th century to almost 43% during the interwar period), and the case of two competitors in the second line of translations (American and Russian). The article turns then to the European and Global peripheries from the perspective of the colonial ‘20s and ‘30s, and discusses the eco narratives of the Nordic novel, and the identity function of the Asian novel within this translationscape.
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Baghiu, Ștefan, and Emanuel Modoc. “Compensation and Kin Selection in the Long Nineteenth Century Translationscapes”. Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 8, no. 1 (2022): https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2022.13.13.
Using network models and quantitative methods, the present article provides a bird’s-eye-view of the Romanian novelistic translationscape published in volumes during the “long 19th century”. The study approaches the cultural production of translated novels in the selected period from a relational perspective, aiming to investigate the connections between different publishers, with their respective editorial practices, and the translated authors selected from both major and minor source cultures. With this in mind, our paper will attempt not only to analyze the actor-network aspect of the translational networks established in the country, but also to provide an interpretive model for the selection of specific translated authors over others and their role in the cultural and nation-building process of early-modern Romanian culture.
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Edited Volume
Ștefan Baghiu, Mihaela Ursa, and Andrei Terian, eds., The Novel and World Literature in Modern Romania: Transnational Networks and Peripheral Capitalism
(forthcoming)
chapters:
Ștefan Baghiu, “First, Second, and Third Hand Experiences of the World: The National Modern Epic and Translations”
This chapter focuses on the untranslated spaces in Romanian culture during the long 19th century and interwar period. Baghiu argues that, while the perspective on the world/planet as seen through novelistic translations from the point of view of their source cultures is limited to European borders, the worlding process was reserved for local production during the emergence and development of the novel as self-conscious literary genre in Eastern Europe, which raises some questions regarding the invention of the world through fiction across the peripheries. Simply put, while translations of novels mainly limit themselves to Euro-Atlantic sources, the Romanian novel generates narratives covering the entire planet, from Rio de Janeiro to New Delhi and Tokyo, therefore worlding the genre. This points to the fact that the local acceptance is sometimes more important in world literature than the foreign origin. Moreover, Baghiu puts forward a triadic perspective on the novel in transnational contexts. First hand experiences of the world represent translations of works which focus their narrative on the source culture milieu and are written by authors born in the source culture. Second hand experiences of the world are delivered by works written by local writers on direct experiences of other cultures. Third hand experiences are here translations of novels written by novelists who describe a milieu foreign to their own.
Anca Simina Martin and Ștefan Baghiu, “Vampires and Feudalism: The Rise of Monsters in the European Peripheries”
The vampire has long been portrayed as a sensual aristocrat from distant lands, who dwells among the living and preys upon the unknowing. Karl Marx’s Capital introduced a new paradigm, uprooting the bloodsucker from oral mythology and gothic novels, and repurposing it to explain how the “dead” capital, “vampire-like” (342), “sucks up the workers’ value-creating power” (716). In doing so, however, the exploitative vampire does not become an aristocrat who channels his servants’ sweat into productive and creative progress. As Franco Moretti aptly notes, Dracula, the most iconic bloodsucker, “is an aristocrat only in a manner of speaking”: he visits neither the theatre nor literary evenings, he neither throws lavish parties nor spends his fortune on the latest fashions. “The money that had been buried [in Dracula’s castle] comes back to life, becomes capital and embarks on the conquest of the world: this and none other is the story of Dracula the vampire,” who is cursed, much like capital itself, to accumulate. The vampire’s long-sung hedonism is, therefore, a simulacrum of what the un-dead capital feeds on; “[t]he less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume — your capital” (361). In this essay, Martin and Baghiu argue that the depiction of the vampire in early Romanian novels falls within this economic understanding of the figure: the vampire is the urban class-superior other, “who manages to live thanks to” and through “the sensuousness of the living” (Neocleous 683). Conversely, its local counterpart, the strigoi, as well as other culture-specific supernatural beings such as moroi, pricolici, drăgaice, iele, știme, and muma-pădurii remain relegated to villages and remote corners of the country, i.e., the spaces traditionally reserved for the exploited, be it peasants or nature as a whole. In short, the authors deal with the image of vampires in Romanian novels as foreigners who exploit the national resources during the rise of capitalism.