Prefaces by Anca Simina MARTIN
Editura Dezarticulat, 2023
Single-author Articles by Anca Simina MARTIN
Revista Transilvania, 2024
One of the earliest and most important works of vampire literature to be translated into Romanian... more One of the earliest and most important works of vampire literature to be translated into Romanian is Jules Verne's Le château des Carpathes (1892), which saw no less than two renditions in 1897, the year in which Bram Stoker released his famous Dracula: Victor Onișor's, published in the then Austro-Hungarian province of Transylvania and an anonymous version, serialized in a Bucharest-based publication from Romania. Although not comparable in terms of production value and critical reception, the two translations find common ground in the fact that they reduce the already minimal presence of vampires in the French author's work in favor of the local "strigoi." This domesticating practice, witnessed as late as 2009 in the case of renditions from the Romanian, appears to have applied in the opposite direction as well, which contributed to a belated association of the term "vampire," heavily influenced by the late nineteenth-century political and pop culture discourses from the West, with the bloodthirsty monster popularized by Stoker.
Revista Transilvania, 2023
This article explores the different iterations of the vampire trope, as they emerge from the cult... more This article explores the different iterations of the vampire trope, as they emerge from the cultural products which originated in Romania or were imported to this country between 1839, the year when the term "vampire" entered the Romanian language, and 1947, which marks the debut of the communist regime in the country. For reasons of space, the study briefly touches on the myth of the strigoi and only insofar as it deviates from or converges toward the various manifestations of the vampire trope in the interval submitted for analysis. By looking at a wide range of media-literature, theater, music, cinema-and cultural products-prose fiction, poetry, translations, drama, radio performances, and motion pictures-, I show that the early evolution of the vampire trope aligns closely with the German and French cultural models emulated by the fledgling Romanian society and that its development reflects those pop culture elements and real-life phenomena which left their mark on public consciousness until the late 1940s. However, the Romanian culture was late to embrace the supernatural dimension of the trope, so much so that G.M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu's Vampirul (1938), the first Romanian novel to feature an explicit vampire antagonist, was published a century after the introduction of the word in the Romanian language.
Transilvania, 2021
Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubo... more Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubonic Plague and, according to some scholars, the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic. This practice reemerged in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when more and more fake news outlets in the US and Europe started publishing articles on a perceived linkage between Jewish communities and the novel coronavirus. What this article aims to achieve is to facilitate a dialogue between the observations on the phenomenon made by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and the latest related EU reports, with a view to charting its beginnings in Romania in relation to other European countries and in an attempt to see whether Romania, like France and Germany, has witnessed the emergence of “grey area” discourses which are not fully covered by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2020
This article proposes a quantitative analysis of the Romanian translations of 325 ribald Shakespe... more This article proposes a quantitative analysis of the Romanian translations of 325 ribald Shakespearean puns, which originate in 20 plays and 71 renditions, with special focus on assessing the impact of translator-subjective and objective factors on the rendition process in the pre-communist, communist, and post-communist periods. The findings invalidate several widespread beliefs: Dragoș Protopopescu's renditions, banned by the communist regime for their 'modernizing' approach to the Shakespearean text, bowdlerized more bawdy puns than 'ESPLA', which replaced it as the Party-approved Romanian edition of the dramatist's plays; Adolphe Stern's translations, harshly criticized in his period, fare better in terms of ribald pun rendition than Scarlat Ghica's and Dimitrie Ghica's, hailed as the most successful of their time; modern translations of Shakespeare display a heterogeneous distribution of target-text puns across the surveyed rendition strategies, despite enjoying similar availability of and access to pun translation studies.
Transilvania, 2020
The history of Dracula in its topological Romania is as riddled with mysteries as Bram Stoker’s n... more The history of Dracula in its topological Romania is as riddled with mysteries as Bram Stoker’s novel itself. Scholars are still debating when its first Romanian translation was produced, with Barbu Cioculescu and Ileana Verzea’s 1990 version being, to the best of current knowledge, the first Romanian translation of Dracula to be published until Dan Costinaș’s 2020 re-rendition. By analyzing Cioculescu and Verzea’s renditions of all the occurrences of the novel’s keyword, the verb “(to) kiss” and its noun form, the present article advances the possibility that the 1990 Romanian translation of Dracula, the only one to be available for thirty years, originates, in fact, from a French intermediary.
Transilvania, 2019
“For all his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly once or twice burn... more “For all his admiration and even imitation of Rabelais, Shakespeare has hardly once or twice burnt so much as a stray pinch of fugitive incense on the altar of Cloacina,” notes Algernon Charles Swinburne poetically on the playwright’s toilet humor. Sixty years later, Eric Partridge, author of the seminal Shakespeare’s Bawdy, would reiterate, along much the same lines, the dramatist’s alleged contempt for the crudest of all manifestations of wit. Since then, however, scholarly attitudes toward crude humor have gradually become more lenient and inquisitive about what we perceive today as instances of off-colour wordplay, challenging linguistic myths about their anachronic attribution and devoting book-length studies to them. This article follows several of the Bard’s most obvious and obscure puns on the podex and flatulence in an attempt to ascertain whether Romanian translators have aligned themselves with this phenomenon or, if not, how they approach this form of Shakespearean wit.
Transilvania, 2019
Shakespeare’s wordplay and bawdy have largely been neglected for most of the playwright’s history... more Shakespeare’s wordplay and bawdy have largely been neglected for most of the playwright’s history in Romania. The only mentions made of this topic are often relegated to the occasional brief remark in paratexts or fleeting statements regarding characters that often deploy such language or stylistic device. Therefore, one cannot speak
of a Romanian critical tradition in the case of Shakespeare’s obscene vocabulary and ribald puns. However, several hypotheses on the evolution of scholarly and translational attitudes towards these instances of language can be extracted from these sporadic comments and the quantitative and qualitative analyses conducted on the translation
of the playwright’s bawdy and wordplay into Romanian. What this article aims to achieve is, on the one hand, to demonstrate that critiques of Shakespeare pun/ bawdy translation long predate contemporary studies of this kind and, on the other, to highlight the premises they give way to, which future research may validate or refute.
Transilvania, 2018
Subtitling in Romania, a subbing stronghold surrounded by dubbing countries, is a phenomenon yet ... more Subtitling in Romania, a subbing stronghold surrounded by dubbing countries, is a phenomenon yet to be studied thoroughly by the autochthonous academia. Amateur subtitling or fansubbing, despite its prevalence among the younger generations, has been barely touched upon. What this paper aims to achieve is to shed a light on the manner in which these two audiovisual translation solutions have evolved in this geographic context with a view to highlighting professional and amateur subtitlers’ approach to translating bawdy puns featured in American sitcoms. By drawing parallels between a series of eight vertical and horizontal instances of wordplay based on homonymy, homophony, and paronymy found in several episodes of Sex and the City, this article seeks to test the hypothesis that amateur subtitlers, unburdened as they are by any form of audiovisual regulation, are more likely to produce daring renditions of ribald words and phrases than their official omologues. Through these analyses, this paper also aspires to pave the way for research into this relatively new area of study in the Romanian translation studies literature and to elicit interest in how the autochthonous subtitlers and fansubbers of movies and sitcoms tackle instances of language that bring about moral and translational challenges.
East-West Cultural Passage, 2018
The homophony between the words ‘tale’ and ‘tail’ has served as an ever-bountiful source of punni... more The homophony between the words ‘tale’ and ‘tail’ has served as an ever-bountiful source of punning material for many a century, with some writers as spatially and temporally diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margaret Atwood exploiting their sexually charged punning potential, while others, the likes of Lewis Carroll, harnessing the latent jocular and visual qualities of this particular homophonic pair. It was in William Shakespeare’s works, however, that this punning pair has found the representational plenitude of its vast array of connotations. In Othello, for example, it is a source of toilet humour, in As You Like It, the wordplay on "tail/tale" is part of an extended metaphor of a sexually transmitted disease, while in other plays, such as The Tempest, its punningness is stretched to include words like "tailor," which, in turn, are imbued with ribald connotations. By comparing three such bawdy instances of wordplay on ‘tail’ and ‘tale’ with three Romanian renderings, this article aims to assess the level of translatability of this ribald
punning doublet.
Transilvania, 2018
William Shakespeare’s plays abound with references to astrology. As a contemporary of renowned Re... more William Shakespeare’s plays abound with references to astrology. As a contemporary of renowned Renaissance astrologers and astronomers such as Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus and John Dee, living and writing at a time when the science of the stars was at the height of its popularity, the Bard used the celestial bodies and their movement as a means to foreshadow the development of his plays and to give additional insight into the personality of his characters and their motives. Yet, not a few are the occasions in which the playwright, through his dramatis personae, also contends their influence upon human behaviour. By drawing parallels between his astrological references and their autochthonous translations, what the present article aims at achieving is to elicit scholarly interest in the manner in which Romanian translators have handled this aspect of Shakespeare’s rhetoric.
Synergy: Journal of the Department of Modern Languages and Business Communication, 2018
"He was a savage who had some imagination," Voltaire noted of William Shakespeare in a letter in ... more "He was a savage who had some imagination," Voltaire noted of William Shakespeare in a letter in 1765, foreshadowing his country's tumultuous relationship not only with his works, but also with what is probably the most infamous aspect of his style-the bawdy puns. By analyzing two of Shakespeare's ribald wordplay as they appear in six renditions of Romeo and Juliet, the article aims to highlight how early French translators too sometimes interfered with them, for reasons ranging from perceived untranslatability, through their purported non-Shakespearean origin, to they allegedly being faults of the playwright's time or Shakespeare himself.
JCDS: Journal of Communication and Development Studies, 2018
Over the course of time, several of William Shakespeare's references to syphilis have fallen prey... more Over the course of time, several of William Shakespeare's references to syphilis have fallen prey to the massive changes brought to the English pronunciation and culture. In 2004, prominent British linguist David Crystal began collaborating with the Globe Theatre with a view to revealing what his English sounded like. His study has unearthed, among others, a wide range of puns that are no longer recognized as such by modern-day readers and spectators of Shakespeare's works. What the present paper seeks to prove is that lost puns nonetheless carry the potential to be recreated in languages other than that in which they were originally written. By means of drawing parallels between three lost Shakespearean bawdy instances of wordplay and their Romanian translations, the theory put forward in this article is that translation can also serve as restorer of the source text.
American, British and Canadian Studies, 2017
The translatability of William Shakespeare's titillating puns has been a topic of recurrent debat... more The translatability of William Shakespeare's titillating puns has been a topic of recurrent debate in the field of translation studies, with some scholars arguing that they are untranslatable and others maintaining that such an endeavor implies a divorce from formal equivalence. Romanian translators have not troubled themselves with settling this dispute, focusing instead on recreating them as bawdily and punningly as possible in their first language. At least, this is the conclusion to which George Volceanov has come after analyzing a sample of Shakespearean ribald puns and their Romanian equivalents. By drawing parallels between such instances of the Bard’s rhetoric and three of their Romanian translations, my article aims at reinforcing the view according to which Romanian translators have managed, by and large, to translate the Bard’s bawdy puns into their mother tongue.
Transilvania, 2017
Probably the most infamous aspect of William Shakespeare’s style remains his (over)use of bawdy p... more Probably the most infamous aspect of William Shakespeare’s style remains his (over)use of bawdy puns. Extolled for their rhetorical virtues, yet fervently criticized for their ribaldry by clerics and the critics of the later centuries, his titillating wordplays served a myriad of purposes, far exceeding the strictly humorous ones for which they are mainly used today. Yet, hundred of years would pass since their rapid fall from grace during the reign of Charles II before their stylistic grace was restored and their value rediscovered. In Romania, however, they have been treated less harshly, although not a few have been lost or severely tempered with in the process of translation. By analyzing two of the Bard’s bawdy wordplays as they appear in six renderings of Hamlet, the article aims to demonstrate that Romanian translators have been more daring in their approach to this figure than it is generally thought and to highlight the prerequisites for a successful translation of puns.
Co-authored Articles by Anca Simina MARTIN
Dacoromania Litteraria, 2023
Despite their potential to read as social documents on women’s condition at the turn of the centu... more Despite their potential to read as social documents on women’s condition at the turn of the century, novels written by women writers in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century are, if not systematically overlooked, then severely understudied, at least in semiperipheral cultures, which by default have a young literary history. In this article, we explore two non-canon works, Patimi [Passions] (1903) and În luptă [In Combat] (1906–8), by Sofia Nădejde and Elena Bacaloglu respectively with a view to understanding whether they constitute glimpses into their authors’ lives and the extent to which the ideological convictions of the writers influenced how they portray the plight of female servants, who, as women and domestic workers, have a double subordinate role. In the case of both novels, there is (circumstantial) evidence to suspect that shards of the authors’ autobiographies and convictions made their way into their works, and by looking further into how Nădejde and Bacaloglu tackle the condition of women servants in Patimi and În luptă, a similar phenomenon can be observed: notwithstanding their political ethos – Nădejde espoused socialist views until her literary career started, when her views shifted toward a more conservative stance, whereas Bacaloglu contributed to the emergence of the first fascist organizations in Romania –, the two most prominent women writers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century instrumentalized the female servant characters to give voice to the plight of their upper-class mistresses. This, in turn, bears testimony to the fact that their works operate as artefacts of women’s condition at the turn of the century, and when corroborated with the authors’ autobiographies, they show that the first attempts at feminist literature in Romania did not put forward a progressive perspective on the social mobility of workingwomen.
Transilvania, 2021
The article sets out to establish the ways in which the Romanian novelistic production between 18... more The article sets out to establish the ways in which the Romanian novelistic production between 1845 and 1947 reflects the challenges and accomplishments of successive efforts at modernising the educational system. Therefore, the case-studies we discuss are focused on some of the major implications of Romanian education: the shifts in the literal spaces in which the educational process is being conducted, the access to books and the social prestige accrued through reading, the link between education and the abroad – including the ambivalent status of foreign language education as platform on which the conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is played out –, the opportunities opened by scientific progress, but also the anxieties it generates.
Revista Transilvania, 2021
A post-anthropocentric epistemological assemblage becomes indispensable in the investigation of ... more A post-anthropocentric epistemological assemblage becomes indispensable in the investigation of the ecology of the
Romanian novel. We examine the interactive relationship of various dynamic systems, such as 1) the evolution of the Romanian
novel, 2) the modes of representation of the environment, and 3) the social-political history of the autochthonous space. Using a
wide range of methodological perspectives, this paper also examines the relationship between literature and the Earth sciences,
thus envisioning a new type of literary history where the Romanian novel should be thought as existing within hyper-objects,
such as the climate, agriculture, wilderness, pollution, biosphere, cultural politics, capitalism, or geology. The article finally
addresses the issue of zoopoetics both as an object of study in the MDRR digital archive (1845-1947) and as a reading strategy,
thus, favoring the relationship between animality and narrativity.
Transilvania, 2020
This article sets out to offer an overview and a review of the latest linguistic research into fa... more This article sets out to offer an overview and a review of the latest linguistic research into fake news. To this end, the authors put forward a critical discussion of the paradigms and instruments deployed over the past decade to analyze and identify this textual (micro)genre, from natural language processing techniques to critical discourse analysis. The conclusion of our study is that a proper understanding of the fake news phenomenon can only be achieved by bringing together qualitative and quantitative methods.
Articles in Special Issues by Anca Simina MARTIN
Mihaela Ursa, Simina-Maria Terian, Alex Goldiș, and Andrei Terian (eds.), Humanities at the Crossroads: New Theoretical, Systemic, and Quantitative Approaches, special issue of Transylvanian Review, vol. XXI, no. 1, 2022
This article sets out to chart various aspects of the relationship between Covid-19 fake news and... more This article sets out to chart various aspects of the relationship between Covid-19 fake news and the process of translation by analyzing how several English-language deceptive reports were rendered into Romanian. In Romania, the emergence of the novel coronavirus coincided with a surge of interest in the fake news phenomenon among experts, the wider public, and most notably, the country’s authorities, which blocked fake news websites temporarily in an effort to combat the infodemic. However, neither the Decree which instituted this measure nor the existing research into the phenomenon distinguishes between original and translated reports, which led to criticism regarding the extent to which the intent to disinform is provable in the case of such articles. In the present essay, the author argues, through case studies, that the higher the level of human input and localization, the higher the chances that a translated fake news report can successfully be proven to be part of a disinformation agenda.
PS: The full version of the article will soon be available at http://www.centruldestudiitransilvane.ro/.
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Prefaces by Anca Simina MARTIN
Single-author Articles by Anca Simina MARTIN
of a Romanian critical tradition in the case of Shakespeare’s obscene vocabulary and ribald puns. However, several hypotheses on the evolution of scholarly and translational attitudes towards these instances of language can be extracted from these sporadic comments and the quantitative and qualitative analyses conducted on the translation
of the playwright’s bawdy and wordplay into Romanian. What this article aims to achieve is, on the one hand, to demonstrate that critiques of Shakespeare pun/ bawdy translation long predate contemporary studies of this kind and, on the other, to highlight the premises they give way to, which future research may validate or refute.
punning doublet.
Co-authored Articles by Anca Simina MARTIN
Romanian novel. We examine the interactive relationship of various dynamic systems, such as 1) the evolution of the Romanian
novel, 2) the modes of representation of the environment, and 3) the social-political history of the autochthonous space. Using a
wide range of methodological perspectives, this paper also examines the relationship between literature and the Earth sciences,
thus envisioning a new type of literary history where the Romanian novel should be thought as existing within hyper-objects,
such as the climate, agriculture, wilderness, pollution, biosphere, cultural politics, capitalism, or geology. The article finally
addresses the issue of zoopoetics both as an object of study in the MDRR digital archive (1845-1947) and as a reading strategy,
thus, favoring the relationship between animality and narrativity.
Articles in Special Issues by Anca Simina MARTIN
PS: The full version of the article will soon be available at http://www.centruldestudiitransilvane.ro/.
of a Romanian critical tradition in the case of Shakespeare’s obscene vocabulary and ribald puns. However, several hypotheses on the evolution of scholarly and translational attitudes towards these instances of language can be extracted from these sporadic comments and the quantitative and qualitative analyses conducted on the translation
of the playwright’s bawdy and wordplay into Romanian. What this article aims to achieve is, on the one hand, to demonstrate that critiques of Shakespeare pun/ bawdy translation long predate contemporary studies of this kind and, on the other, to highlight the premises they give way to, which future research may validate or refute.
punning doublet.
Romanian novel. We examine the interactive relationship of various dynamic systems, such as 1) the evolution of the Romanian
novel, 2) the modes of representation of the environment, and 3) the social-political history of the autochthonous space. Using a
wide range of methodological perspectives, this paper also examines the relationship between literature and the Earth sciences,
thus envisioning a new type of literary history where the Romanian novel should be thought as existing within hyper-objects,
such as the climate, agriculture, wilderness, pollution, biosphere, cultural politics, capitalism, or geology. The article finally
addresses the issue of zoopoetics both as an object of study in the MDRR digital archive (1845-1947) and as a reading strategy,
thus, favoring the relationship between animality and narrativity.
PS: The full version of the article will soon be available at http://www.centruldestudiitransilvane.ro/.
in the communist period are frequently, if not almost always, devoted to how Western,
‘imperialistic' literary works enter and are transposed into the minority languages of
the former communist bloc, with the reverse process falling, more often than not, under
the scholarly radar. This is primarily due to the relative absence of information on the
rendition guidelines followed by the Romanian publishing houses that released English
translations of Romanian literary works and the circulation of these renditions in the
West. This article endeavors to offer a skopos theoretical overview of the English translation of Romanian rural novels in the communist period by comparing how translators of such literary texts tackle culture-specific items in their source culture, under the imprint of Romanian publishers and outside communist Romania, and for publishing houses based in the target culture. In so doing, the present study puts forward the theory that the phenomenon of translation in communist Romania was rooted in a purpose-oriented policy.
the supposed interwar edition, the 1990 Barbu Cioculescu/Ileana Verzea rendition and a second 1990 translation, published by the Bucharest-based publishing house A. R. Cugetarea. Through linguistic and translational comparisons with the original, renditions into other languages, and one another, and by analysing the sources in which they are referenced (biographies, dictionaries of Romanian periodicals and novels rendered into Romanian), the study concludes that the first complete Romanian edition of the novel to be fully translated from Stoker’s text is Dan Costinaș’s 2020 edition and that Dracula’s arrival in Romania is, in fact, even more difficult to trace than previously thought.