LOS DESAFÍOS DE TRADUCIR LA LITERATURA CONTEMPORÁNEA CUANDO SE NUTRE DEL FOLCLORE: EL CASO DE LA NOVELISTA CATALANA IRENE SOLÀ
THE CHALLENGES OF TRANSLATING CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE THAT DRAWS ON FOLKLORE: THE CASE OF THE CATALAN NOVELIST IRENE SOLÀ

Summary/Abstract: Irene Solà is a complete Catalan artiste (a novelist, a poet and a painter) who is enjoying a great international success, taking into account the different translations (not only in the languages of the Peninsula, like Spanish, Galician and Basque, but also French, English, Italian, Hungarian, Danish, German, Portugues, Chinese and Romanian, among others). She also received important international prizes that recognise her work, like the European Union Prize for Literature in 2020. In her appreciated novels (When I Sing, Mountains Dance and I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness) are mixed together imaginary and fabulous elements, Dantesque visions, beads of local folklore imbued with archaisms and regionalisms that represent a real challenge for any translator. The present article aims to compare the translation into Romanian with the original last-mentioned novel (in Catalan: Et vaig donar ulls i vas mirar les tenebres) in order to show which aspects were more difficult to render and what was the translator’s choice: getting closer to the reader (and therefore dropping the local colour) or getting closer to the original (and therefore taking the risk of a certain opacity and inaccessibity of the target text). Consequently, the analysis aspires to reveal a set of principles that should be applied when dealing with contemporary texts that gets massively inspired from the folklore.

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