translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views ISSN 2065-3514
(2008) Year I, Issue 1
Galaţi University Press
Editors: Elena Croitoru and Floriana Popescu (First volume)
Proceedings of the Conference Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views
9 – 11 October 2008 “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, ROMANIA
pp. 5 - 10
DIMITRIE BOLINTINEANU’S CONRAD AND
ITS ROMANTIC MODEL
Simona Antofi
“Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania
G. G. Byron, whose literary creation was intensively translated
between 1830 and 1840, represents one of the dominating models for
the Romanian Romanticism in the 1840s. The numerous odes
dedicated to him by the main representatives of the Romanian
literature of the time highlight the acceptance of a new psycho-social
and aesthetic model. Childe Harold’s huge success, among other
things, brings about the model naturalization and implicitly,
modification through Conrad, Dimitrie Bolintineanu’s poem of
Byronian resonance. Thus, the existential archetype of the exiled
patriot (Bolintineanu himself) happily meets the literary archetype of
the outcast, of the damned exiled with further profits for Romanian
romanticism. The Romanian literature of the epoch provides the
initiated reader with a series of poems of lyrical masks which assume
the fertile individualistically problem-creating trajectory of Byronian
heritage. Against this background, Conrad is a most outstanding
artistic product, mixing philosophical-descriptive structures and
laying the basis for a romantic poem of ideas, for a type of hero, for
lyrically marked documentary remakes, through reverie and
meditation on ubi sunt and vanitas mundi, through the sea poetry and
sometimes overrated exotic picturesque.
Despite certain weaknesses pinpointed by the critics such as
excessive lengths and repetitions, prose-like monotonous tone, and
lack of a coordinating principle (Regman, 1966: 121), probably due to
the tenseness which emerges in the poetic text between the
convention of the epic poem and the romantic poet’s lack of rigour,
Bolintineanu’s text tries to find its way towards a creative remake of
the model, Childe Harold, Byron’s well-known poem.
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