The Translation and Reception of Virginia Woolf in Romania (1926–89)
This chapter reviews the history of the reception and translation of Virginia Woolf’s works in Romania during the interwar period, the early 1940s, and the communist era (1945—1989), with a special focus on the reception of Orlando: A Biography in Vera Călin’s 1968 translation. It begins with a discussion of the earliest reviews of Woolf’s works and the first translations of her fiction, pointing out that during the interwar period Romanian critics considered Woolf to be part of a generation of British novelists who sought to push the limits of the genre and experiment with its language and form in ways that were similar to their own. Everything changed after 1945, when reviews and translations of Woolf and other Western authors came to a halt under the newly instituted communist regime and Soviet occupation. Translations began to flourish again starting in 1968, in a system that, paradoxically, both encouraged and censored them. It is this relationship between translation and censorship that the last part of this chapter examines, revealing interconnections of text and image, co-optation and subversion, original and translation.