Dialogos culturales hispano-rumanos
Spanish-Romanian Cultural Dialogues

Summary/Abstract: Romania’s “literary dialogue” with Spain has its history, Darie Novăceanu asserts (1989: 23), citing names of important Romanian intellectuals concerned about the Hispanic world. The activity undertaken in Romania in order to get to know the Spanish literature is noteworthy; nevertheless, it is not comparable to the work carried out by other European countries. With the focus from the present “on the last 12-15 years, this activity –without being, for the moment, rich or perfect from a qualitative point of view– demonstrates, however, a new, scientific orientation”, which promises “in the near future, works worthy of competing, advantageously, with those which appear in other countries, more developed in this aspect” (Iordan 1962: 333-334). In his book Spanish-Romanian Cultural Relations (1950) dealing with the two countries; George Uscătescu establishes a "parallelism of destiny". Here, our proposal is to establish another type of parallelism of destiny, by considering the country and its culture from afar (George Uscătescu, in Spain) and from the inside (Tudor Arghezi, in Romania), to see how the country’s dictatorship presents its cultural policy to the world, and also how the translations policy was being dealt with in those times. In this sense, not only the perspective of each of the two authors’ look is interesting, but also the way these ones address the topic, obviously in completely different ways. Anyway, although they are thirteen years away and at about 2,500 km far from each other in a straight line between the places where the authors live, the political situation in Romania is the same for both. Their country is under communism, yet their lives do not develop under the same regime. From afar, the peripheral look allows the vision to expand, but from the inside, trapped in its Communist universe, each look obeys that shade. Secondly, the presentation of the translated literature does not reflect the specific case of the Spanish translations, but it is a presentation with a rather general character of the translations into Spanish in the Hispanic world, in which literature and scientific work get together. Nonetheless, the situation, as it is presented by the BNE and as it is illustrated in this work, is significantly different from the one that the regime of Bucharest tries to present.

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