Literary Translation as a Hermeneutic and Poetic Dialogue in the Cultural Semiosphere
Literary Translation as a Hermeneutic and Poetic Dialogue in the Cultural Semiosphere

Summary/Abstract: As an applied reading endeavor, from a pluridisciplinary viewpoint (hermeneutics, poetics and cultural semiotics) on the notion of “fidelity” – implying possibilities and restrictions –, the present text reassesses the issue of the translatability coefficient in a context in which the cultural semiosphere of the source-language (the Japanese language) is geographically and temporally very different from the target-language (the Romanian language). Operating with the same dichotomies that characterize the art of translation, such as “letter” and“spirit”, “word” and “meaning”, my endeavor tries to point out not only the effort required by semantic reconstruction, in the translator’s attempt to bring forward the deeper meaning of the text, with its inner music, but also the inherent losses that occur in this process. The premise that the act of translation is, first of all, based on interpretation and, only secondly, based on creative transposition is argued in my research through an applied analysis of certain fragments from the recent Romanian translation of the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji (1008), by Murasaki Shikibu. I shall focus on the how “hospitable” the target-language is to the source-language.

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