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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.
In the concentration on his text, the author Franz Kafka is often reduced to the phantom of a deadly sick and Oedipus-struck inventor of abstract labyrinths in an absurd bureaucratic universe. This talk intends to reintegrate him into the landscape of various conterts of modernicy at the beginriing of the 20Ih century such as: the movement of life-reform, intellectual debates, academic research in the field of industrial accidents, changing erotic relations and the enthusiasm for new technical products. As a result, the author claims that Kafka could well be imagined as a member of the pre-war-society described by Thomas Mann in the "Magic Mountain".