ABSTRACT
In November 1959, sixteen years after the Soviet army’s entrance into Romania, one year after its departure and in the midst of the tightened political controls that followed the Soviet presence, Lucian Blaga translated Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet XLIII”, which begins, “How do I love thee, let me count the ways” (Browning 1887: 428). Browning’s poem speaks of emotion which has moved from the general love of her “lost saints” to “thee”, a particular object of her desire. Blaga’s translation reverses this transit as he changes the topic from the personal to the national. Through translation, Blaga attempts to reimagine his position and that of his nation in the new political context of Soviet colonisation and a socialist government. He is well placed to make this attempt: born in 1898, he was Romania’s premier modernist poet between the world wars and one of its leading philosophers. Until the Soviet period, he was a member of the Academy and held a university chair in cultural philosophy. He turned his extensive aesthetic and theoretical formation to the question of translation once the new regime prohibited him from publishing anything else. The question of translation, for Blaga, is not only the question of his own voice as a banned writer, but also the question of his nation’s survival in the face of outside domination. Blaga moves translation from a peripheral practice to the centre of his image of Romania, in terms more complicated than can be accounted for through standard hegemony/resistance models of cultural politics.
