Subjectivity in (Re)Translation: The Case of Oscar Wilde’s Tales in Romanian

Based on a corpus of nine tales by Oscar Wilde (making up the two well-known volumes: The Happy Prince and Other Stories, 1888, and A House of Pomegranates, 1891), along with nine Romanian versions of these texts, the present article aims at reflecting on the linguo-semantic expression of emotion (with a focus on subjective adjectives like little, big, poor etc.), as well as making an inventory of the compensation strategies used by translators, taking into account the fact that most Romanian versions are addressed to children, and also that translation criticism, just like translating itself, is a matter of instinct, taste, affinity, finally emotion.


Introduction
Whether we perceive translation as an art, a craft or a science, as a process or a product, as a mere text or an ever-expanding discipline, we cannot but acknowledge the crucial role emotion plays in it, on a number of different levels -some of which we will try to emphasize in the present paper.That translation and emotion are irrevocably linked is readily detectable in our corpus: in the source texts (Oscar Wilde's collection of nine tales, published in two separate volumes, allegedly written for children), as well as -to perhaps a greater extent -in the numerous target texts (reflecting the translators' choices, especially seen in the context of retranslation).
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (the "other tales" being The Nightingale and the Rose, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend and The Remarkable Rocket) and A House of Pomegranates (containing the stories: The Young King, The Birthday of the Infanta, The Fisherman and His Soul and The Star-Child) are two collections of tales published by Wilde in 1888 and 1891 respectively, which he actually wrote for his sons, Cyril and Vyvyan.This very fact, to which we might add Wilde's fateful imprisonment that kept him for ever apart from his children, not long after these books appeared on the market, is relevant enough for the emotional circumstances which led to their creation and which also left an imprint on their reception.
The stories themselves are no less demonstrative about feelings.They are all, one way or another, about unsung sacrifice and often futile trials (The Happy Prince and the Swallow are thrown in a dust heap after sacrificing themselves for the poor; the Nightingale dies a painful death while trying to produce a red rose in the name of love; little Hans wastes a lot of time and effort and ultimately loses his life for the sake of a devoted friend; a grotesque but soulful dwarf dies of a broken heart upon recognizing his deformity in a mirror and having been the object of the Infanta's mockery; the egocentric Star-Child redeems himself through unspeakable hardship, only to die of exhaustion three years after finding his identity and happiness etc.).Wilde's highly descriptive style, adorned with countless epithets, so simple apparently, but so difficult to transpose into another language, brings its own affective charge into play.

The Corpus
The nine Romanian versions we have selected out of over 20 also display an interesting array of translation techniques and strategies testifying to the variety and richness of retranslation.After all, besides various historical, editorial, commercial, political factors, retranslation is also triggered by what Robinson 1 calls ideosomatics (the collective, social feeling of a group or people that a given literary work of art needs to be retranslated due to a growing gap between the original and its latest translation), but also by what he calls idiosomatics (the translator's / critic's / reader's personal, purely subjective feeling, akin to a spontaneous physical reaction, that a new version is necessary).This paper falls, as a result, under the scope of subjectivity as a branch of Translation Studies.And if "subjectivity lies at the very heart of the translator's work" (Hewson, 2013, p. 13), it is above all in retranslation that the said subjectivity becomes manifest (see Skibińska, 2002).The nine versions selected for analysis cover almost a century  2 , thus offering a bird's-eye view on the history of translations from Oscar Wilde, while 1 We employ here Douglas Robinson's terminology as used in The Translator 's Turn, (1991) (especially the first chapter: The Somatics of Translation), as well as in an online article: Retranslation and the Ideosomatic Drift.
2 In selecting the corpus, we relied on classic criteria such as representativity: we wished to illustrate different periods in the history of translation into Romanian.However, the first Romanian version of one of Wilde's tales appeared, by all apearances, in 1911, by the hand of a symbolist writer, Dimitrie Anghel.His version of one of Wilde's least known stories, The Fisherman of His Soul, bears the mark of a literary language still in the making, and it is debatable whether he translated the original text or an intermediate -possibly French -version, that is why we chose to leave it out.We also left out a series of versions which appeared between 2015-2019, which were not fully relevant to our topic, and which will have affected the (manageable) size of the corpus.Of the nine retranslators listed here, only Magda Teodorescu, Andrei Bantaş and Laura Poantă provided versions of all nine tales Wilde wrote, the others preferring either the stories included in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (e.g., Igena Floru, Ticu Archip, Agop Bezerian) or a mixture of stories taken from both volumes.(from 1919(from until 1947 Romania was still a kingdom; Romania was still a kingdom;between 1947 and1989, it went from socialism through communism to Revolution, and from 1989 on -from the Revolution to democracy), they need to be evaluated in their respective contexts (more or less affected by issues such as censorship or copyright laws, which definitely had a bearing on the translators' choices).At the same time, these versions cover different cultural times with different grammatical norms and different mentalities, which explains the spelling variety between the target texts, as well as other syntactic, semantic or pragmatic aspects.

Emotion in Translation
In the present paper we will focus on the way these retranslators dealt with the socalled emotion lexicon, so lavishly supplied by Wilde's tales -a topic rarely dealt with, if ever, from the contrastive viewpoint translation imposes.If we choose to look at it from Johnson-Laird and Oatley's (1989) perspective, as analysable into five coherent categories depending on just five basic families of emotion modes (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust), then Wilde's emotional terminology falls primarily under sadness, occasionally, anger, disgust, and only rarely under happiness.As emphasized by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1980, p. 125), affective / linguistic subjectivity fulfills a primarily conative function.Wilde evidently premeditated a long-term perlocutionary effect on his public, whether young or old: what he aimed at, above all, was to incite reflection on some painful aspects of the society he lived in and of humanity at large -aspects he presented, as in some sort of parable, to the young and to the old, in his (fairy-)tales.By relying on sadness as the staple of his semantic configuration, he allows his readers to access and develop their emotional side through a feeling like, for instance, compassion.
Since the various situations depicted in Wilde's tales, as well as the author's colourful style, can be pinned down to a handful of straightforward categories, emotionwise (i.e., sadness, anger, disgust), and since these texts were designed to appeal to a double addressee (children and adults), they rely on triggering a not too complex3 , but all the more efficient array of feelings on the part of the reader.Things are, however, not always so straightforward when it comes to translated texts, since something is ostensibly always lost in translation.
Charles Bally (1909) used to say that if affectivity is to be considered a constitutive dimension of language, then the most subtle affective nuances can only be perceived in one's mother tongue.This being said, I will look into the way the Romanian retranslators of Wilde's texts chose to deal with the many instances of "subjective adjectives"4 like little, big, poor etc., while fully aware that: [t]he lack of simple, single word translational equivalents for emotion categories between English and other languages suggest that English categories may be a limited "anchor" for explorations of the emotion lexicon across cultures (Lindquist, Jackson, Ferri, & Weinberg, 2016, p. 590).

A Comparative Analysis
The overall picture of the nine Romanian texts selected for analysis shows a number of common characteristics in the treatment of affective terms like little, big or poor, irrespective of the epoch in which they were produced and irrespective of who authored them.Among these, a technical fact, having to do with the morphological differences between the two languages: Romanian uses diminutives much more than English, and it is more enclitically creative than English, that is why, where Wilde says little boy, Romanian translators will employ băieţel or băieţaş, rather than a syntactically literal băiat mic.Secondly, all nine translators choose to redistribute the load of affectivity: in other words, they sometimes omit or neutralise terms which are emotionally imbued in the original, only to accentuate affective connotations in other parts of the texts or by other means.It is what Hervey and Higgins (1992) call compensation in place and compensation in kind, respectively.Take, for instance, Floru's 1922 versions, in which we can find, on the one hand, a rather detached description of the death of characters like the Happy Prince, the Swallow or the Nightingale, as well as various omissions of little (e.g., the little Lizard, in The Nightingale and the Rose, is but Şopârla [the lizard] in her version).On the other hand, additions and double diminutives come to compensate for the lost effect in other passages: Again, the Romanian version is literal, but we have double intensification here, as both băieţaş and mititel are diminutives.
Thirdly, poor Hans (in The Devoted Friend) is almost invariably bietul Hans in the Romanian versions, rather than sărmanul, săracul or sărăcuţul, which are perfectly valid synonyms in the context.They are characterized by the same semantic ambivalence (literally poor, but also pitiful), whereas biet, while perhaps more phonaesthetic and more literary than the other terms in the series, can also suggest meaninglessness, which augments its connotative force.
Sometimes, equivalents of little and poor are interchangeable in Floru's version, with the latter obviously displaying the more forceful overtones of the two: Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant: It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window... Igena Floru's Uriaşul cel egoist: O biată mierlă cânta într'un pom, lângă fereastră... [emphasis added]; lit.A poor blackbird was singing in a tree, by the window.
Conversely, the house the seamstress with an ill boy lived in, so touchingly described in The Happy Prince as either a poor house or the poor house (poor in this particular context, being, however, a much more objective term than poor in poor Hans), is constantly rendered in Romanian by a diminutive: A special collocation in which little appears quite a few times in The Happy Prince is the formula used by the Prince to summon and persuade the Swallow to assist him in helping the poor (i.e., Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow).In Romanian, this bird species, usually identified by the feminine rândunică, already sounds hypocoristically, just like its masculine counterpart, rândunel, which is actually most often used in the Romanian versions of The Happy Prince.Placing mic [little] alongside Rândunel can be perceived as slightly pleonastic, that is why some of Wilde's retranslators chose to neutralise the epithet or avoid the redundancy (e.g., Rândunel, mic Rândunel [Swallow, little Swallow] -a "natural" choice, given that avoiding repetition is statistically one of the most common translation universals).On the other hand, other translators opted for the exact opposite, in order to enhance the Prince's doleful incantation -that is, they chose the path of intensification: Here the translator reduces the occurrences of Swallow; he compensates, however, by adding drăguţ -meaning "sweet", "nice", "lovely" -which, together with the diminutival micuţ, creates a symmetrical, well-balanced highly-connotative rhyming refrain.
The Devoted Friend introduces the protagonist of the story within the story by using the classic fairy-tale formula: "Once upon a time, said the Linnet, there was an honest little fellow named Hans".The little attached to the character's name from the very beginning will actually stick to it to the very end.That is why transferring this little as such in Romanian (as Ştefanovici-Svensk did), is perhaps not the best choice, especially for a translation published in 1929, when very few Romanians understood English, and the rest probably took Little Hans for a proper name.The opposition between little Hans and big Hugh the Miller is also destroyed in the process: Oscar Wilde's The Devoted Friend: Little Hans had a great many friends, but the most devoted friend of all was big Hugh the Miller.Olimpiu Ştefanovici-Svensk's Prietenul devotat: Little Hans avea o droaie de prieteni, dar cel mai devotat dintre toţi era Hugh cel mare, Morarul [emphasis added].
big Hugh the Miller is literally rendered, as is the rest of the sentence, whereas Little Hans is simply transferred.

Archip, on the other hand, vacillates between four solutions for little Hans:
 the paradoxically augmentative un băietan, when Hans is first introduced by the narrator  the too (physically) explicit firavul Hans [the puny / the frail Hans], when the narrator mentions him the second time  the slightly misleading tânărul Hans [the young Hans], whenever the narrator mentions him again, and  the too ingratiating Hans, puiule [approx. baby, sweetheart] or frăţioare dragă [dear little brother], whenever little Hans is used as a form of address by his "devoted" friend, the Miller.This is another interesting example of avoiding repetition, but not just for the sake of it: by using different syntagms, the translator reinforces the contrast between the voices in the text (principally between the narrator's -who is also a character in the frame story, and the miller's -the antagonist).This strategy of intensification is confirmed by many other examples in Archip's text and is very much consistent with what Berman (1991) terms principle of variety (one possible side of the principle of abundance exposited in Palimpsestes), which supposes rendering a highly recurring signifier of the original text by a multitude of signifiers.This emphasis placed on this or that term or turn of phrase is more often than not a felicitous choice on the part of the translator, thus offering a colourful, inciting text to child-readers.Little is almost never rendered in Romanian by the most convenient equivalent, by a readily available word like mic, mititel, or even drag.Oscar Wilde's The Remarkable Rocket: Then a little Frog, with bright jewelled eyes, and a green mottled coat, swam up to him.Ticu Archip's Un foc-de-artificii fără pereche: Deodată, o pîrdalnică de Broscuţă, cu ochi strălucitori de nestemate şi o hăinuţă verde pestriţată, veni înot spre el [emphasis added]; pîrdalnic, a familiar, euphemistic or jocular term meaning "cursed", obtained by metathesis from prădalnic -a demon believed to be a predator of souls.here, flecuşteţ -a diminutive form of fleac [trifle] -is almost derogatory; the translator thus highlights the spiritual evolution of this character, from the beginning of the story, when he was frivolous and vain, until the end, when he died like a martyr.
Even if she constantly avoids translating little by one and the same term, and sometimes loses its hypocoristic meaning altogether, Archip is nevertheless a champion of diminutives, among her many other ways of achieving intensification.Diminutives are equally abundant in Bezerian's translation: the little matchgirl in The Happy Prince, who has no shoes or stockings, appears to be without ghetuţe [little boots] in Bezerian's version; the nightingale's heart in The Nightingale and the Rose is inimioara [little heart]; even the rather dislikable Water-rat in The Devoted Friend is warmly introduced by means of diminutives (e.g., put his head out of his hole / îşi scoase căpşorul [little head] din vizuină).Here, too, for the sake of intensification and contrast, adjective big (as in big Hugh the Miller) becomes an exaggerated uriaş [huge, gigantic] (e.g., uriaşul Hugh, Morarul).
Ştefanovici-Svensk has his share of hypocorisms, too, but more moderate than his fellow-translators: Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince: The boy was tossing feverishly on his bed ... Olimpiu Ştefanovici-Svensk's Prinţul Fericit: Băieţaşul tuşia înfrigurat în pătucul lui ... [emphasis added]; lit.The little boy was coughing, helplessly cold, in his little bed.Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and The Rose: She will dance so lightly that her feet will not touch the floor ... Olimpiu Ştefanovici-Svensk's Trandafirul şi Privighetoarea: Dansul ei va fi atât de uşor încât picioruşele-i nu vor atinge pardoseala ... [emphasis added]; lit.Her dance will be so delicate that her little feet will not touch the floor.
The very same solution (including the diminutive picioruşele) for the previous extract from The Nightingale and the Rose is preferred by Bantaş in his version of the story published in 2005, 76 years after Ştefanovici-Svensk's.In Bantaş's texts, any reference to the Swallow's or the Nightingale's wing is aripioară [little wing]; any bird is păsăruică [little bird]; any reference to somebody's head is rendered by căpşorul [little head]; the flowers in the selfish Giant's garden are always floricele [little flowers]; eyes are often referred to by ochişorii [little eyes]; sometimes he uses three diminutives in a row, in one and the same sentence, as in the following example, even if his version is the only one not addressed to children: Oscar Wilde's The Devoted Friend: The little ducks were swimming about in the pond, looking just like a lot of yellow canaries, and their mother, who was pure white with real red legs, was trying to teach them how to stand on their heads in the water.Andrei Bantaş's Prietenul credincios: Bobocii de raţă înotau de încolo şi încoace pe iaz arătînd ca un stol de cănăraşi galbeni, iar mămica lor, albă ca laptele, dar cu picioruşele roşii ca focul, încerca să-i înveţe să stea în apă cu capul în jos [emphasis added]; lit.The ducklings were swimming about in the pond looking like a flock of little yellow canaries, and their mummy, as white as milk, but with little legs as red as fire, was trying to teach them how to stand in the water on their heads.
An interesting choice Bantaş makes has to do with the titles of Wilde's tales which he transposes non-literally, creatively, in Romanian; The Young King, for instance, is translated by a diminutive, Regişorul [the little king], which establishes from the very beginning a new (affectionwise) line of interpretation for the entire story.All these instances of intensification, however, are also meant to compensate for omitting various subjective adjectives from the text.The little dwarf in The Birthday of the Infanta is always simply piticul [the dwarf] in Romanian, so as to avoid a pleonastic combination of words (other translators, like Poantă, for instance, use a heart-warming diminutive: piticuţul).Another remarkable omission is that of big in big Hugh the Miller: in Bantaş's version of the story of the Devoted Friend, big Hugh the Miller is simply Morarul Hugh [Hugh the Miller].
Two versions of Wilde's tales that are intriguing for their unusual treatment of terms of endearment, at least when compared with the other seven included in our corpus, are the ones signed by Boureanul (1945) and by Teodorescu (2000), respectively.The two translators do not seem to be very fond of diminutives; what is more, they sometimes accentuate the negative connotations of subjective words.In The Star-Child, for example, the mother of the eponymous character is often referred to either as the woman or as this poor woman, which Eugen Boureanul sees as bătrâna [the old woman] and nevolnica asta [this weakling, this good-fornothing woman], respectively.Similarly, the duck trying to teach her ducklings to stand on their heads, at the beginning of The Devoted Friend, is raţa cea bătrână [the old duck].
As for Teodorescu, she omits on a constant and consistent basis not only words like poor, little, or big, but also beautiful, great or fine.Finally, on a more humorous note, if we were to register here not only emotions as they appear in the source text and as they were transferred to the target texts, but also as a matter of feeling on the part of the receptor (either reader or translation critic) of the target texts, we might add a shocking example in terms of register, which definitely moved us as readers of Teodorescu's (otherwise acceptable) version, which omits fair but accentuates foul, ugly, ill-favoured, in a sort of aesthetics of ugliness: Oscar Wilde's The Star-Child: See!There sitteth a foul beggar-woman under that fair and greenleaved tree.Come, let us drive her hence, for she is ugly and ill-favoured.Magda Teodorescu's Copilul-din-Stea: Vedeţi!O cerşetoare împuţită stă sub crengile verzi ale copacului aceluia.Veniţi, haideţi s-o alungăm, că e urâtă şi slută [emphasis added]; lit.See!A stinky beggarwoman is sitting under the green branches of that tree.Come, let us chase her away, for she is ugly and hideous.
But this last example, too, is only meant to underline the one common technique all nine translators used, irrespective of the date of their translation (1922, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1967, 2000, 2005 and 2015), irrespective of their professional background (writers, medical doctors, lawyers, diplomats etc.), and irrespective of the public they were addressing (children, the public at large, or Wilde aficionados): namely, accentuation or intensification (especially when it comes to subjective adjectives like the ones discussed here).According to Berman (1991), accentuation is a good thing, because it helps establish a translation's heteronomy (its loyalty to the original) and at the same time its autonomy.Translating emotion with emotion has, as emphasized by Hewson (2013), its dangers, but also an immense potential that all translators of Wilde's tales seem to have been fully aware of: The dangers are paramount, with the temptation to "outdo" the source-text author by indulgind in original writing, or simply by allowing oneself to translate mechanically or lazily, using wellworn formulae and well-tried solutions.But all is not negative, for the possibilities are indeed exciting for the translator who wishes to explore the creative potential that any act of translation may exploit (p.13).

Conclusion
Statistically and quantitatively, the strategies used by the nine retranslators of Wilde's tales in order to deal with the many emotionally imbued terms could be grouped into three main categories: 1. intensification, ranking first, usually achieved by: a. additional diminutives b. additional terms of endearment, other than diminutives c. additional augmentatives 2. occasional omission, meant either to: a. bypass pleonastic expression, or b. downplay what was possibly considered as overly emotional 3. compensation, either a. in place, or b. in kind.If the emotional quality of the nine Romanian versions analysed were represented as a cline, then we would have at one end Floru's (1922) version, Bezerian's (2000) version and Bantaş's 2015 version (as clearly set to emphasize emotion), and Boureanul's (1945) version, as well as Teodorescu's (2000) version, at the other end (as clearly set to deemphasize emotion).This not only shows the fluctuation of the interest taken in emotion along time, but also that translating it is more than ever(ything) a matter of personal style.
sărăcăcioasă [lit.a poor little house].The many birds populating Wilde's tales are also introduced to the Romanian reader by means of diminutives (e.g., the birds are invariably păsărele or păsărici [little birds], whereas the dead bird is invariably păsărica moartă [the dead little bird]).The clouds in the various descriptions are also almost always norişori or noruleţi [little clouds].
Thus, the Reed in The Happy Prince / Prinţul Fericit is Trestioara [the little Reed] in her version, whereas rainy weather is ploicică [diminutive form of ploaie [rain]]; Hans's face, in The Devoted Friend / Prietenul credincios, is feţişoara [little face], whereas his cottage is căsuţa micşoară [double diminutive]; the little frog's daughters in The Remarkable Rocket / Un foc-de-artificii fără pereche are fetiţe or fetişoare [little girls] a.s.o.
at the same time delineating idiosyncrasies of a given translator or epoch.The following list gives the names of these retranslators, together with the year they published their version of Wilde's tales: Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince: "Will you come away with me?" he said finally to her; but the Reed shook her head [emphasis added].Igena Floru's Prinţul Fericit: "Nu vrei să mergi încolo cu mine?" o întrebă el la urma urmei; dar Trestia dădù trist din cap [emphasis added]; lit. 5 : Won't you come away with me? he asked her in the end; but the Reed shook her head sorrowfully.The Nightingale and The Rose: As the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver [...], so was the rose that blossomed on the topmost spray of the Tree.Igena Floru's Privighetoarea şi trandafirul: Ca umbra unui trandafir într'o oglindă de argint, aşa erà la început Trandafirul care înflori pe cea mai înaltă rămurică a pomişorului [emphasis added].The Romanian text follows the letter of the original, with two notable exceptions: rămurică -counterpart of spray -and pomişor -counterpart of Tree -are diminutives.The Selfish Giant: It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy.Igena Floru's Uriaşul cel egoist: Erà colţul cel mai îndepărtat şi în el stà un băieţaş mititel... [emphasis added].
Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince: One night there flew over the city a little Swallow.Ticu Archip's Prinţul Fericit: Într-o noapte, a zburat peste acea cetate un flecuşteţ de Rîndunel [emphasis added]; Thus, the poor little Swallow is, in her version, micul Rândunel [the little Swallow]; the poor children in The Selfish Giant are simply copiii [the children], and that poor little boy in the same story is băieţelul [the little boy]; an honest little fellow named Hans becomes un tip onest, pe care-l chema Hans [an honest fellow, whose name was Hans]; big Hugh the Miller is just Hugh, Morarul [Hugh, the Miller]; the great lateen sail in The Young King is vela latină [the lateen sail], and the fine red dust is praf roşu [red dust]; the beautiful white rose depicted in The Birthday of the Infanta is simply o roză albă [a white rose] etc.