Ezra Pound’s Translationscape in Eastern Europe: A Case Study on the Romanian Context
Rezumat
Abstract: The present article has two main goals: 1. Statistic. It aims at building a large translationscape regarding Pound’s translation and reception in Eastern Europe; it is a premiere, as no such survey of Pound’s translation in the said region exists. 2. Interpretive. Examining the Romanian case within this translationscape comprising 18 different national cultures and finding an answer to the unexpected opening of Romanian communist censorship towards the publication of a fascist poet. As the translationscape proves, Romania was the only communist country where Pound was published extensively, not only in magazines, but also in several massive anthologies. (The only exception is the German Democratic Republic, which accepted the publication in 1986 of a Pound anthology in Eva Hesse’s translation.) Pound’s fascist cultural and political transgressions proved surprisingly unproblematic in a Romanian communist context where such transgressions were punishable by prison and/or death. Romania’s bizarre geopolitical game between China and the USSR created this no less bizarre situation in which the translation of a fascist poet was used as a cultural argument in Romania’s distancing from the Soviets. Translation was a form of evasion from Romanian nationalist communism into what Wai Chee Dimock has termed as “transnational beauty”.
Keywords: translationscape, Eastern Europe, modern American poetry, Ezra Pound, Pound studies
Citation suggestion: Vancu, Radu. “Ezra Pound’s Translationscape in Eastern Europe: A Case Study on the Romanian Context”. Transilvania, no. 11 (2025): 84-93.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2025.11.10.
Acknowledgement: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC)under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program(grant agreement no. 101001710).
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