A micro-centric network:Post-communist Romanian mainstream and indie publishers of U.S. and Canadian contemporary poetry in translation

This essay examines the corpus of contemporary American and Canadian poetry translated into Romanian in stand-alone volumes between 1990 and 2017 and argues that translators had a deciding impact on the selection of authors, as well as on the configuration of the overall translation network. Romanian poet-translators engaged in an outward cultural movement that galvanized both their own writing and the national literature in general. In doing so, they developed various types of agency covering a wide range of translating patters, from no agency at all to full self-reliance, and a poetics of fecundity that testifies to their engagement with global events and with the microcosm of local literature. Engendered by an assumed material precariousness and by an overt desire for permanent change and synchronous alignment with world literature, these practices should be seen from a micro-centric perspective, that is, paramount in establishing positive relationships with U.S. and Canadian poetries and energizing the local literary scene, rather than simply reflective of a ‘minor’ mode of existence in the global and geopolitical arenas

Chaos out of Order:Translations of American and Canadian Contemporary Poetry into Romanian before 1989 from a Complexity Perspective

This essay dwells on Romanian translations of American and Canadian contemporary poetry in stand-alone collections and anthologies between World War II and 1989 against a complexity theory background that sets out to recognize irregularities (or chaotic phenomena) within what is otherwise commonly perceived as an orderly, predictive literary system. Employing a computational social network analysis approach, I examine a corpus of such translations that have been typically considered as part and parcel of a heavily controlled cultural system. The analysis shows that a sizeable part of the corpus were translations projects initiated, carried out, published, and promoted by the translators themselves — the result of a series of interactions in interpersonal and transnational networks of private individuals, rather than the result of established institutional policies and publication agendas. The essay also reflects on the need to carry out agent-oriented research in translation studies within the wider context of the digital social humanities, which present both the theoretical framework and the necessary methodologies for describing translators as agents of change

Transnationalism Undermining the Canon:A Close and Distant Reading of Several Transatlantic Literary Networks in Translation

This essay argues that random acts of poetry translation in transnational context play a significant role in turning any apparently homogenous literary system into a network with many access points. In doing so, they overtly or covertly undermine the idea of a literary canon, since they position, more or less explicitly, such canon against their own literary taste and network of acquaintances. In addition, the lack of financial conditioning makes this kind of translation barters reach literary audiences more easily. Since these exchanges are more commonly initiated by translators working in lesser-known languages, it follows that transnational translation barters level out cultural imbalances by having the translator-poets’ work translated into languages of wider circulation. This contribution presents four kinds of transnational exchanges in Romanian context and argues that more complex translation mechanisms result into a more open, more diverse, and a more dynamic literary scene, in which translators play a prominent role. From a methodological point of view, this essay combines the traditional close reading of the texts and paratexts with quantitative analysis and network visualization to lay out the blueprint of Romanian translations of US and Canadian poetry in periodicals between 2007 and 2017 and quantify the number of random exchanges against a transnational backdrop.Este ensaio argumenta que atos aleatórios de tradução de poesia no contexto transnacional desempenham um papel significativo na transformação de qualquer sistema literário aparentemente homogêneo em uma rede com muitos pontos de acesso. Ao fazer isso, eles minam abertamente ou dissimuladamente a ideia de um cânone literário, uma vez que posicionam, mais ou menos explicitamente, tal cânone contra seu próprio gosto literário e rede de conhecidos. Além disso, a falta de condicionamento financeiro faz com que esse tipo de permutas de tradução chegue mais facilmente ao público literário. Como essas trocas são mais comumente iniciadas por tradutores que trabalham em línguas menos conhecidas, segue-se que as trocas transnacionais de tradução nivelam os desequilíbrios culturais, fazendo com que o trabalho dos tradutores-poetas seja traduzido para línguas de maior circulação. Essa contribuição apresenta quatro tipos de intercâmbios transnacionais no contexto romeno e argumenta que mecanismos de tradução mais complexos resultam em um cenário literário mais aberto, mais diversificado e mais dinâmico, no qual os tradutores desempenham um papel proeminente. De um ponto de vista metodológico, este ensaio combina a tradicional leitura atenta dos textos e paratextos com análise quantitativa e visualização em rede para traçar o plano das traduções romenas de poesia americana e canadense em periódicos entre 2007 e 2017 e quantificar a quantidade de intercâmbios aleatórios em um cenário transnacional

Meet, Greet, Translate: Mapping Happenstances and Network-Driven Translations in Contemporary Literary Transfers

This essay explores the role played by randomness in contemporary poetry translation. I argue that translation happenstance—an instance of cultural transfer that is not part of a pattern and is unlikely to replicate—is a useful concept that explains the decentralized, highly sinuous, and unpredictable context of poetry translation, especially in small, non-hegemonic countries. Happenstances may be one-time occurrences or may evolve into network-driven translations—transfers in which an individual’s circle of friends and acquaintances play a mediation role and which develop according to the agents that join the network. Burrowing into the nooks and cranes of printed periodical publications in Romania between 2007 and 2017, this contribution uses a mixed-method approach to investigate computationally (via distant reading) and via close reading the network of contemporary poets, translators, and publications that engaged in a sustained reciprocal translation dialogue with the United States and Canada and concludes that agent-based network models of historical and bibliographic resources are needed in order to account for the complexity of any literary translation act

Mapping the evolution of early modern natural philosophy:corpus collection and authority acknowledgement

Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing Dictionaries of early modern philosophers and WorldCat) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mapping the evolution of natural philosophy. In particular, we focus on gathering authors and works that were (directly or indirectly) engaged with the teaching of natural philosophy in the early modern academic milieu. We offer a preliminary assessment of the relevance of our corpus by investigating one aspect of this evolution, namely the trends in the acknowledgments of authorities linked with different and competing approaches to natural philosophy (scholastic, Cartesian, and Newtonian). The results not only corroborate existing knowledge, but they also show distinctive features and differences within these trends that were not observed previously, thus illustrating the heuristic potential of our computational method for corpus collection