Two Romanian Writers to the Test of Translating French Tales
The present paper attempts to analyse (from both a critical and comparative point of view) the styles that two Romanian writer-translators (Caragiale and Sadoveanu) employed in translating French tales into Romanian around 1910, but with different translation strategies that have a range of consequences on the discussion about writing-translating. Our analysis starts from what the two writers had in common: the first being the choice of genre, fairy tales. Caragiale chose Perrault’s fairy-tale, and Sadoveanu translated Maupassant’s hunting and fantasy tales. A second common point is a strong interest in translating freely, or creating personal adaptations. Caragiale, a renowned Romanian playwright and storyteller at the end of his career, chose a number of tales by Perrault, Poe, and Twain. Comparatively, Sadoveanu, a remarkable writer of prose and storyteller, preferred the literary translation of great writers and works—Maupassant, Turgenev and the Psalms. Having compared the source texts with the originals, we have noticed that Caragiale, already famous when translating Perrault, employed a poetics of imitation, playing freely with the source text that he imbues with his own unmistakable style, going so far as to domesticate the text. Sadoveanu, on the other hand, a translator then barely at the start of his career stays closer to the original without stifling his own flourishing hallmark. In the case of both writers, there are various degrees in the conversation between writing and translating: between writer and translator, but in Caragiale’s case, the writer clearly dominates, while in Sadoveanu’s, the translator and writer are inconstant competition.