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The Romanian literature of the 18th century is witnessing a remarkable metamorphosis, whereas step by step the Enlightment’s ideas penetrate the Romanianspeaking soil and through various mechanisms replace the medieval order in society, politics and arts. In this time of the Enlightment the small popular book “Bertoldo” from the late Italian 16th century was adapted in French and then in German and through the German intermediary reached Transylvania at the end of the 18th century (Hermannstadt, 1799). In the centre of our analysis we place the concept of “cultural transfer” and that of the “cultural translation”, concepts that help us illustrate the adaptation strategies of the foreign material and the integration principles of the Enlightment’s ideals on the Romanian soil. Working with eloquent examples from the “Bertoldo”-text in a comparative manner we will try to bring to light the interaction of the poetical and ideological functions of the translations from German and its role in forming and shaping a new kind of Romanian cultural and literary sensibility.
The Western European culture in the 18th century builds an impressive reference framework for the intellectual life in Central and Eastern Europe, where the ideals of the Enlightenment had spread rapidly mainly by means of translations of secularized works from all fields of knowledge. Among these, one should mention a series of historical writings that give account of the great monarchs of the time. In the following study we try to illustrate the concept of “cultural translation” by analysing a historical text about Catherine II of Russia. The Moldavian manuscript illustrates the process in which ideas and concepts have circulated in the European space: it is an Austrian (Habsburg) portrait of a German princess that managed to be crowned empress of Russia under debatable circumstances. This portrait written at the court of Joseph II in 1877 was translated in the same year in Greek and through this intermediary entered the Romanian speaking soil, where it was translated a year after. The circulation of ideas and conceptions respectively misconceptions can be illustrated in then textual mutations that occurred during this cultural transfer process from East to West and then to East again. The ideological and political intent of the text can be also seen in the self-aware translation that aimed to bring plusvalue to the Enlightened discourse of its original text.
This article discusses the interrelation between transculturality and transmediality with an emphasis on processes of translation. It focuses on two examples of transcultural and transmedial writing taken from contemporary Cuban literature in Paris: Miguel Sales's recontextualization of Cuban popular music in Paris and William Navarrete's ekphrastic reinscription of his island into the realm of French romantic painting. The case studies are significant in this context because they show how cultural borders are simultaneously set and transgressed at medial crossings—between music and poetry, text, and image. Thus, cultural translations go hand in hand with medial transpositions that include forms of rewriting, recomposition, and revisualization. The connection between moving cultures and moving media also points to the question of “travelling memory” in diaspora.