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The Western European culture in the 18th century builds an impressive reference framework for the intellectual life in Central and Eastern Europe, where the ideals of the Enlightenment had spread rapidly mainly by means of translations of secularized works from all fields of knowledge. Among these, one should mention a series of historical writings that give account of the great monarchs of the time. In the following study we try to illustrate the concept of “cultural translation” by analysing a historical text about Catherine II of Russia. The Moldavian manuscript illustrates the process in which ideas and concepts have circulated in the European space: it is an Austrian (Habsburg) portrait of a German princess that managed to be crowned empress of Russia under debatable circumstances. This portrait written at the court of Joseph II in 1877 was translated in the same year in Greek and through this intermediary entered the Romanian speaking soil, where it was translated a year after. The circulation of ideas and conceptions respectively misconceptions can be illustrated in then textual mutations that occurred during this cultural transfer process from East to West and then to East again. The ideological and political intent of the text can be also seen in the self-aware translation that aimed to bring plusvalue to the Enlightened discourse of its original text.

The Romanian literature of the 18th century is witnessing a remarkable metamorphosis, whereas step by step the Enlightment’s ideas penetrate the Romanianspeaking soil and through various mechanisms replace the medieval order in society, politics and arts. In this time of the Enlightment the small popular book “Bertoldo” from the late Italian 16th century was adapted in French and then in German and through the German intermediary reached Transylvania at the end of the 18th century (Hermannstadt, 1799). In the centre of our analysis we place the concept of “cultural transfer” and that of the “cultural translation”, concepts that help us illustrate the adaptation strategies of the foreign material and the integration principles of the Enlightment’s ideals on the Romanian soil. Working with eloquent examples from the “Bertoldo”-text in a comparative manner we will try to bring to light the interaction of the poetical and ideological functions of the translations from German and its role in forming and shaping a new kind of Romanian cultural and literary sensibility.

Julian/Jutta Schutting, as a self-conscious author, understands the literary activity as a common and democratic act of creation, performed both by the writer as well as by the reader, thus revealing and connecting the multitude of associative meanings of the literary artifact. Until 1989, until her transformation, the writing of Jutta Schutting was a “secret therapy for survival,” by means of which the troubled existence was to be overcome through the creative power and the originality of her work. Back then she described her art as a “hybrid life … neither … nor…, both … and …,” an attempt to transform the personal inner conflict into curative fictional models. This “neither … nor … - both … and …” situation illustrates the androgynous attitude towards this kind of fictionalized models, this tonality being also supported at the stylistic level that escapes any formalist framework of the genre literature. “Gralslicht. Ein Theaterlibretto” [“The Grail’s Light. A TheatreLibretto“] was published in 1989 by Residenz-Publishing House and is explicitly “composed” as a modern interpretation of Wagner’s “Parsifal” in the typical manner of Schutting. The language ceases to be referential and becomes almost exclusively self-referential, because the dialogues do not rely on a situation of communication [communication situation], but are to be regarded as an interactive exchange of monologues. The female character “Kundry” is almost completely absent from the stage [at the level of the stage] and becomes evident only in the dramatic game between the two male characters that regard her and her duality as the principle of the eternal feminine. Kundry remains active only at the textual level and becomes a life example and a pretext in the love-chastity debate between Parsifal and Don Giovanni.