Travelling between Languages and Cultures: In Memoriam Antoaneta Ralian

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Published: Dec 1, 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lincu-2015-0047
Keywords:
memoirs traveling journey reading translation

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Dana Bădulescu
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Abstract

This article, originally a talk on Antoaneta Ralian’s fairly recently published memoirs, is a tribute to our most accomplished and venerated translator from English into Romanian, who started from the big dream of traveling around the world, pursuing and fulfilling it through turning her life into a quest where traveling and translating gave her the greatest joy of living. Hers were times when, during the communist regime in Romania, only the happy few could travel. Ralian was of those few: she traveled (west and east) as a translator, and traveling she translated from one culture into another. Quoting extensively from the book in the light of what made Ralian’s life so rich, I argue (implicitly) that translation itself is a journey and an intercultural activity which shapes and transforms the translator’s personality. In an even broader anthropological sense, it is an essential bridge built across two languages, two cultures and (as Ralian understood it) two persons: the author and the translator.

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How to Cite
Bădulescu, D. “Travelling Between Languages and Cultures: In Memoriam Antoaneta Ralian”. Linguaculture, vol. 6, no. 2, Dec. 2015, pp. 99-104, doi:10.1515/lincu-2015-0047.
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Vol. 6 No. 2 (2015)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Dana Bădulescu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania

Dana Bădulescu holds a PhD in Philology following the defense of the thesis “Impressionistic Modes and Metaphoric Structures in E. M. Forster’s Fiction and Criticism”. She teaches modernist and postmodernist British and American literature, basic elements of literary theory and critical thinking, transculturalism, poetics and translations. She has translated books of history, philosophy, poetry, literary theory, international relations, and, most recently, Bill Bryson's Down Under published in 2014, and Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, which came out in 2015. She has published a series of articles on modernism and postmodernism, key modernist and postmodernist writers and texts. She authored a textbook on modernism, a textbook on the nineteenth and twentieth century British novel and a book on postmodernism. Between October 2010 and March 2013 she was the receiver of a POSDRU postdoctoral grant for a project on Salman Rushdie and democracy. Since 2010 her research has been focusing on today’s migrancy, hybridity, transnationalism and transculturalism. In December 2014, she formed a national research network which joined ISCH COST Action IS 1404 “Evolution of reading in the age of digitisation (EREAD).” Her most recent book Rushdie’s Cross-pollinations was published in 2013.

References

Ralian, Antoaneta. Amintirile unei nonagenare. Călătoriile mele, scriitorii mei. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2014. Print.

Ralian, Antoaneta. “Visez foarte mult şi foarte frumos”. Interviu cu Antoaneta Ralian. ObservatorCultural.ro, Web. 25 May 2015.

Wolf, Michaela. “Translation as a Process of Power: Aspects of Cultural Anthropology in Translation.” Translation as Intercultural Communication. Ed. Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzana Jettmarová, Klaus Kandi. 123-33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997. Print.