Truman Capote’s 'Other Voices, Other Rooms' and Censorship in Communist Romania

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Published: Jun 1, 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lincu-2015-0036
Keywords:
gay literature Communist ethics censorship Truman Capote redundancy faithfulness to the original Mircea Ivănescu

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George Volceanov
Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania

Abstract


The paper presents the censored fragments of Mircea Ivănescu’s Romanian translation of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, published by Univers Publishing House in 1978, as well as the translator’s (or the censor’s?) contribution to the “edulcoration” of certain details that did not comply with the Communist ethics of the late 1970s; it also discusses the reason why the Romanian version underwent a purging process at the time. Another issue tackled in the paper is the appraisal of Ivănescu’s merits and demerits as a renowned translator, in general, and as the translator of Capote’s novel, in particular.

Article Details

How to Cite
Volceanov, G. “Truman Capote’s ’Other Voices, Other Rooms’ and Censorship in Communist Romania”. Linguaculture, vol. 6, no. 1, June 2015, pp. 56-71, doi:10.1515/lincu-2015-0036.
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Vol. 6 No. 1 (2015)
Section
Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

George Volceanov, Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania

George Volceanov is Associate Professor of English Literature at Spiru Haret University in Bucharest and a distinguished lexicographer, translator and editor. He has translated more than sixty books from English and Hungarian into Romanian (John Updike, Gore Vidal, David Lodge, Anthony Burgess, Philip Roth, Lawrence Durrell, F. Scott Fizgerald, Péter Esterházy, Thomas Heywood, John Webster, and William Shakespeare). He is the recipient of several translation awards, including those of the Bucharest Writers’ Association (1998, 2013), the British Council (2001), the “Andrei Bantaş” Foundation (2003, 2008, and 2011), the Romanian Writers’ Union (2014), etc. In recent years, Geo Volceanov has written dozens of articles and essays on Shakespeare’s life and works, contributing, via critical texts and literary translations, to the enlargement of the Shakespeare canon in Romania. He is the general editor of the New Romanian Shakespeare series, for which he himself has translated, or co-translated, so far, The Tempest, Hamlet (the First and Second Quarto, and the Folio, versions), Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, King John, Timon of Athens, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors and Henry IV, Part One. George Volceanov is also the author of several mono- and bilingual dictionaries of (Romanian, English and Hungarian) slang.

References

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Capote, Truman. Alte glasuri, alte încăperi. Romanian translation by Mircea Ivănescu. București: Univers, 1978. Print.

Capote, Truman. Alte glasuri, alte încăperi. Romanian translation and notes by George Volceanov, Iași: Polirom, 2015. Print.

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Romanowska, Agnieszka. “Mourner in the Forest of Arden: On Czesław Miłosz’s Translation of As You Like It.” Romanian translation by George Volceanov. Lettre Internationale (Romanian edition)88 (2014): 16-19. Print.

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