Project title: “TransBrazil: Translating Brazil through the Ideological Looking Glass”
Principal Investigator Dr. Veronica Manole
Funder Babeș-Bolyai University (budget 50.000 lei, approx 10.000 euro) | contract no 32862/20.06.2023 | Implementation 2023-2024
The project aims to contribute to the field of Translation Studies, with an analysis of Brazilian novels translated into Romanian.
My interest is twofold. Firstly, I seek to discover how ideology and cultural policies (Vasile 2011) influenced the selection of authors and titles published in Romania from the late 1940s until the first decades of the 21st century, with an emphasis on the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado. Almost half of the seventeen translations from Amado’s work were published from 1948 to 1957, making it the “golden decade” of Amado’s translations in Romania. A closer look reveals that these translations served the ideology of the “obsessive decade”, as most of them were written during the writer’s militant period, when he was a prominent member of the Brazilian Communist Party (see a brief note in Baghiu 2016).The novels published at a later stage, in the 1980s or after the fall of the Communist regime, are both thematically and ideologically different from his early writings, and their translations doesn’t seem to be ideologically motivated. My objective is to analyse all Amado’s translations in Romanian, in terms of their import in the Romanian polysystem.
Secondly, I am interested in describing the specific role that Communist censorship (for a detailed analysis, see Corobca 2014a, 2014b; Malița 2016a, 2016b, 2020) played in the Romanian translations of two novels written by the Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo, Incidente em Antares [Incident la Antares] (1975) and O Senhor Embaixador [Domnul ambasador] (1981). Published with massive cuts before 1989, the integral editions on both translations will appear only in the early 2000s. In my analysis, I will identify the paragraphs eliminated by the censors and seek to understand the topics considered inappropriate or dangerous at the time.
To sum up, my research seeks to shed light on the role that cultural policies and ideology played in the dissemination of a semi-peripheral literature in Romania, in an attempt of promoting authors or literary works that reflected the Communist propaganda. My research emphasises a semi-peripheral culture (Brazil), which might lead to a more nuanced understanding of the Romanian editorial landscape in the wider context of Eastern Europe as a translation zone (Baer 2011).
Results:
Article 1. Manole, V. (2024) „A tradução na/da semiperiferia: a literatura brasileira na Roménia”. Revista Letras, 109 (1): 50-70. (WoS-ESCI): https://revistas.ufpr.br/letras/article/view/95519
Article 2. Manole, V. (2024) “Ideologicamente falando: paratexto nas traduções romenas das obras realistas socialistas de Jorge Amado”.Transylvanian Review. Vol. XXXIII. Supplement 2: 39-50 (WoS-AHCI): https://centruldestudiitransilvane.ro/transylvanianreview_xxxiii_suppl2_2024_39_47
Article 3. Manole, V. (2025) „Jorge Amado em romeno: do filtro ideológico às exigências do mercado livre”. Alea. Estudos Neolatinos. 27(2) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/1517-106X/2025e68363 (WoS-AHCI)
Conference paper: Manole, V. (2024) „Traduzindo Érico Veríssimo através do espelho ideológico: o papel da censura comunista”, paper presented at the Conference of Associação Internacional dos Lusitanistas, University of Porto, Portugal, 22-26 July 2024 https://www.lusitanistasail.org/congressos/xiv-congresso-da-ail-porto-2024.html
Talk 1. Universidade de Brasília, Brazil (May 8, 2024): I gave a talk on the Romanian translations of Jorge Amado’s work for teachers, researchers and students of the POSTRAD – Posgraduate Programme of Translation Studies at this university.
Talk 2. Universidade da Bahia, Brazil (September 6, 2024): I gave a talk on the Romanian translations of Jorge Amado’s work for teachers, researchers and students of the Translation Studies Center at this university.