TRANSLATION BETWEEN PRETENSION AND ‘INNOVATION’:

ON IOANA IERONIM’S TRANSLATION OF SHAKESPEARE’S THE TEMPEST

Abstract

This paper is a sequel to last year’s article, in which I discussed a few aspects of my new
Romanian version of The Tempest, the first play to be issued by Editura Art in its forthcoming
Shakespeare series in November 2009. This year I will examine the strategies used by Ioana
Ieronim in her translation of the same play 1, her outspoken convictions underlying these
strategies, the way in which, and the extent to which, she fulfils her readers’ expectations. I
will assess the faithfulness of her recent version to the original text and / or the translator’s
acts of betrayal, illustrating it / them with several examples regarding prosody, vocabulary,
style, denotation and connotation, etc. As every new translation is inevitably related to the
history of previous translations, in a gesture of either acceptance or rejection of earlier texts, I
will also tackle the translator’s moral principles, mirrored by her unacknowledged attitude
toward her precursors (actually, toward Leon Levitchi’s influential version, which has been the
canonical translation of The Tempest in Romania for the past fifty years) – an attitude ranging
from complete disrespect to previous translations to subtle ways of plagiarizing her illustrious
precursor. And, insofar as Shakespeare himself has come to be considered a commodity in the
supply side of culture (cf. Michael Bristol et al.), I am also intent on evaluating the short-term
and the long-term impact of this translation in the Romanian book-market and theatre as well
as in the Romanian academe.