A Study of Retranslation and Oscar Wilde’s Tales in Romanian

The first systematic study of Oscar Wilde’s tales in Romanian translation, based on a ‘king-sized’ corpus which spans over a hundred years (1911-2021), this book makes a contribution to research in the ever-expanding, ever-changing field of retranslation, while also offering a coherent template applicable to translated (children’s) literature. A tribute to translators, it also serves to rehabilitate the target text (which seems to be out-of-fashion for many translation scholars) as a literary text in its own right.

The crux of the book, containing an in-depth analysis of a selection of 13 translations from English into Romanian of Oscar Wilde’s tales (included in The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888, and A House of Pomegranates, 1891), playfully resorts to translation metaphorics in order to go beyond the too simplistic ‘Retranslation Hypothesis’ and reexamine (re)translation dynamics from a descriptive, contrastive, historical standpoint, by means of textual and contextual analysis.