THE REACTUALIZATION OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE: LANGUAGE IN PERPETUAL CHANGE AND THE RETRANSLATION OF HENRY JAMES’S “THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY”
THE REACTUALIZATION OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE: LANGUAGE IN PERPETUAL CHANGE AND THE RETRANSLATION OF HENRY JAMES’S “THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY”

Summary/Abstract: The phenomenon commonly described as the “aging” of translation has become a central concern in contemporary translation studies. As languages evolve semantically, stylistically, and culturally, literary translations gradually lose part of their immediacy and communicative relevance for new generations of readers. This article investigates the relationship between linguistic change, cultural reception, and the necessity of retranslating canonical literary works, focusing on Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady as a representative case of continual translational renewal within Romanian literary culture. The study combines theoretical perspectives developed by Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, George Steiner, Umberto Eco, and Walter Benjamin with reflections articulated by the Romanian translator Antoaneta Ralian regarding fidelity, stylistic recreation, and the translator’s visibility. The article argues that retranslation should not be understood as the correction of previous translations, but rather as a process of cultural and aesthetic reactualization through which literature remains contemporaneous. In this perspective, translation becomes a historically situated act of interpretation that evolves together with language itself.

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