Back in Time Travel(s): Translating Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia
Back in Time Travel(s): Translating Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia

Summary/Abstract: Considering translation as a widely intercultural phenomenon and starting from the assumption that “every story is a travel story” (Certeau, 1984), this paper aims to explore how Julian Semilian’s English version of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia responds to the great challenge of rendering the elusive atmosphere of a Bucharest which is recreated – almost alchemically generated – by memory. Therefore,by analysing translation as both a spatial and a socio-cultural phenomenon, this paper investigates the process of translating a city from a twofold perspective. On the one hand, it reveals the author’s perspective – it explores the time and place of the novel’s production, since Mircea Cărtărescu succeeds in “providing us with the clearest approximation of the interior lives of those living in that city through the darkest days of the Ceauşescu regime” (McGonigle, 2005). On the other hand, it is a means of reactivating the translator’s socio-cultural background – habitus (Bourdieu, 1986) – as Semilian recovers, through translation, the Bucharest of his own childhood, magically transformed by the book’s author andmodulated by the passage of time.

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