On the Shoulders of Giants: Retranslating Christopher Marlowe’s TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT (Part I)

Abstract

The history of translation has witnessed numerous instances in which retranslation was deemed desirable and even compulsory. The reasons are manifold - from comprehension matters, if the language in a text is outdated, to ideological issues, particularly relevant in the context of a long and rich history of translations in Romanian during communism, or when a translation is too bad to be used in reprints and new editions. Venuti stresses the importance of retranslating canonical texts, of which he mentions the Bible, Homer’s epics, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Shakespeare’s plays, which would “solicit retranslation because diverse domestic readerships will seek to interpret [them] according to their own values” (26). Such a project of bringing Renaissance drama to contemporary readership and theatregoers is William Shakespeare’s Contemporaries, coordinated by Shakespearean scholars George Volceanov and Nicoleta Cinpoes. Among others, four volumes of Christopher Marlowe’s complete works have been scheduled for publication—two have been published in 2022 and 2023 with Tracus Arte Press, Bucharest. The third (2025) contains The Jew of Malta and Tamburlaine the Great (Part I), the latter, in my (re)translation. Aside from the inherent difficulties of translating a text that is over 400 years old, written in blank verse, which should be rendered in a language not entirely suitable for this poetry form, and from the conditions of performability and speakability that should be met in drama translation, this undertaking has also triggered an “anxiety of influence” of sorts, considering that the only available translation to date belongs to the greatest Romanian scholar in English Studies, Leon Levițchi. This paper explains some choices made in departing from the authoritative, canonical translation in an attempt to deliver a Marlovian text for the twenty-first century, free from the constraints that Levițchi’s translation had to observe in the communist era.