The short story Les deux excès de l'amour by Jacques Philibert Rousselot de Surgy in the translation by Paul Iorgovici: a text analysis comparing the French original of 1794 with Paul Iorgovici’s version, substantiated with a translation of our own

Abstract

Les deux excès de l'amour by Jacques Philibert Rousselot de Surgy in Paul Iorgovici's translation (Cei doi excessuri a amerii) – a comparative analysis presents, in the context of Romanian culture in the pre-modern era and the unprecedented phenomenon of translations from French, the text of a short story translated at the end of the 18th century by the writer Paul Iorgovici. The analysis was carried out by the method of a line-by-line comparison with the French original, in order to determine the degree of fidelity to the original and some linguistic and stylistic particularities relevant to Paul Iorgovici's work, on the one hand, and to the mentality and the historical-cultural and literary context of his time, on the other hand. In support of the theories developed in the analysis, we used our own version of the novel by Jacques Philibert Rousselot de Surgy, the first "modern" literary translation of this text.