TRANSLATION AS THE UNFOLDING OF AN INTERTEXTUAL EVOCATIVE RELATION: FUNCTIONS OF ‘INTERPOLATED’ SEQUENCES IN ION BARBU’S RICHARD III

Carried out in the framework of Eugenio Coseriu’s hermeneutic text linguistics, this analysis focuses on an exotic form of transla¬tion, defined and experimented by the Romanian poet Ion Barbu on Shakespeare’s Richard III. Programmatically aimed at rendering the “dynamic schemata” of the original, Ion Barbu’s undertaking does not treat the source text as a self-consistent whole, but breaks it apart and then reconstructs it in alien material, in an endeavour to recapture the semantic process that led to the construction of the original. To this end, Barbu consistently applies a strategy of ‘interpolation’: while the total length of each dramatic (sub)unit is faithfully maintained, sequences with no overt correspondent disrupt all surface parallelism with the original. We aim to demonstrate that the main function of this strategy is to unfold and develop an intertextual evocation of the source text, thus positing the translation as a reconstruction of ‘missing parts’ in the original. This process also reinforces and justifies a typological transformation of Shakespeare’s text, along the lines of Barbu’s own hermetic poetry.