“Betrayal” and Faithfulness in Translation as Intercultural Mediation. Ethical Dilemmas and Strategies in South-Eastern Literary Discourse

Abstract

This paper offers a series of reflections and observations derived from my experience as a (semi-) professional literary translator and as a teacher of translation studies. I openly recognise the subjective nature of any meta-reflection on the ethical challenges faced by the translator as an intercultural mediator. After briefly examining several central theses that have been defended, illustrated, and adopted to produce a translation that is politically correct from both a professional and deontological standpoint, I then list and analyse the major obstacles to the reception of a novel featuring “Romanian subject matter” written by a French author: cultural, historical, and political allusions as well as culinary and civilizational culture-specific elements. The examples come from Lionel Duroy’s novels Eugenia (2018) and Mes pas dans leurs ombres (2023), which revisit the pogroms of Iași, Bucharest, Bessarabia, and Ukraine, leading to the extermination of the Jewish population (1940–1941)—a significant and painful chapter of Romanian history, often overlooked or silenced. These cases enable us to argue more convincingly for the strategies, techniques, and procedures that can be considered when translating a text laden with profound cultural and ideological significance, aiming to help the Romanian/French and Francophone reader to understand sensitive realia and listen to History.

1. Preliminary Remarks

We begin our study by examining the “rate” of faithfulness and “betrayal” of the literary translator faced with the task of translating a novel that deals with the realities of their own country’s history—realities considered “sensitive” because they are repressed, silenced, or little known. Such a task requires, first, extensive additional research, and second, a translation executed in strict accordance with professional ethics and deontology, meaning a faithful and politically responsible rendering of the text’s meaning and its explicit or implicit references. However, from the outset, we must recognise that the boundaries marking where fidelity ends and betrayal begins are never clearly defined. Currently engaged in translating Mes pas dans leurs ombres (Duroy 2023), a novel whose subject matter is “delicate”, we began by carefully reading both its French predecessor, Eugenia and its Romanian translation, Eugenia (Duroy 2018) and its Romanian translation, Eugenia (Duroy 2019), translated by Simona Modreanu), to ensure continuity of subject and style, and to evaluate the translator’s decisions in situations of ethical dilemma. A close reading of the peritextual and paratextual material directly related to the author and the book is essential for the translator’s work, as it helps us anticipate potential dilemmas in our own translational choices. It prepares us, so to speak, for a horizon of expectation: the reception of an aesthetic, a style, ideas, and thoughts that may not necessarily be our own. Only through such critical distance can we achieve a responsible translation, a faithful recreation of the authorial discourse and the narrator’s voice, free of bias, additions, or stylistic artifices that might soften the impact, while consciously avoiding the notorious “belles infidèles” of the seventeenth century.

2. Portrait of the Literary Translator as an Intercultural Mediator

It is worth recalling some general and generous postulates: translation is a matrix infused with both philosophical insight and practical engagement; literary translation is a creative activity on a par with reading and writing. All three sharpen intellectual curiosity, which remains indisputably a source of pleasure. As an active critical reader of the text to be translated—specialists have not hesitated to describe the translator as a “surgeon of the text”—the translator engages with it in ways that range from empathy, even sympathy with the author (the dangerously ideal case), to a love–hate relationship whenever insurmountable difficulties or ambiguities twist the translator’s interpretive efforts. The translator must be able to justify their choices to readers, to defend the importance of one term over its near-synonym, when the nuance is decisive.

Stating that translation is a form of cultural mediation involving implicitness, cultural content, and the untranslatable, and that the translator is an inherently intercultural conduit, is, strictly speaking, a truism. In the early years of translation studies in the 1960s, the Bermanian approach promoted an ethics of translation rooted in openness to the Other, characterised by hospitality, dialogue, decentring, and “métissage”. The ethical aim of translation was seen as fulfilling the expectations of the Other: “the ethical act consists of recognising and receiving the Other as Other” (Berman 1999, p. 74; Meschonnic 2007, pp. 178–79; Benjamin 1971; Andrei 2010, p. 27), regardless of origin or discourse. The ideal ethics of translation thus lies in acknowledging enriching alterity, with the translator as a cultural mediator, tasked with rendering the foreign and otherness in its most human form. However, this noble theory, within the global context of the twenty-first century—marked by ideological conflicts with cultural undertones—clashes with biases and a lack of consensus. There is here a responsible translation, in the ethical and deontological sense, by no means an idealisation; the translator allows the foreignness to show through and limits their explanatory intervention.

The contemporary translator, the intercultural mediator of today, has undergone secularisation and de-heroization. In the Western canon, great creators once practised translation as a noble hobby, with sprezzatura (ease) and with the afflictions of what were called “old spiritual exercises.” Today, however, translation is practised by a fully professionalised and autonomous figure, an author in their own right, who approaches translation as an “activity in itself.” For this translator, the act of translating culture is a mental framework, practical and applied, liberated from a strictly linguistic straitjacket. Bogdan Ghiu has proposed a generalised model of translation in which intercultural translation occupies an essential place, given what he terms “the new global and immanent comparatism.” (Ghiu 2018, p. 35).

As a mediator, the translator smooths out, positively balances, and counteracts asymmetries without making the effort visibly noticeable. In this sense, their role is beneficial. Bogdan Ghiu also emphasises the paradox of mediation: translation is structurally intermediate in multiple ways. Instead of serving as an intermediary to create something new—a bridge towards novelty—it is currently trapped between two prejudices: on one hand, that translation is practically impossible; and on the other, that translation is pointless, since theoretically everything has “already” been translated and only requires interpretation.

Translating culture is thus a genuine challenge, immediately raising the question of ethics, as the act opens a window onto incommensurably rich and diverse worldviews. Once invisible, the translator gains the explicit status of a specialist in intercultural communication. In the two novels under analysis, this mediation is not only intercultural but also intracultural and intergenerational. Mastery of linguistic and cultural codes, however, does not automatically ensure effective communication.

In “Pour une éthique du traducteur”, Anthony Pym (1997) proposed an ethics focused not on translation itself, but on the translator. If the translator understands why and for whom they must translate, they generally know how to translate—a point Pym clarifies with remarkable clarity. The translator, according to Pym, acts as an intermediary within practices of cultural cooperation, not merely a negotiator. A practical reason for this is that knowledge of foreign languages and cultures demands a subjective as well as social shift towards intermediate positions.

An ethics of content would attempt to distinguish what should and should not be translated (blasphemy, sexist language, etc.). But what, after all, does “political correctness” mean? Pym argues for translation—for translating everything—in order to facilitate cooperation. The translator is not a member of a single confessional or national culture; rather, they inhabit multiple cultures simultaneously, moving in an intercultural space at the crossroads of cultures. Consequently, the issue of (inter)cultural mediation raises another: that of ethnocentrism, which “reduces everything to its own culture, its norms and values, and considers what lies beyond—what is foreign—either as negative or merely fit to be annexed, adapted, in order to enrich that culture.” Ethics is therefore understood as a question of conduct—towards oneself and towards others—an agere, a “practice of value.” I defend, “bec et ongles”, the idea that the ethics of translating cultural elements lies precisely in receiving the Other as Other (Andrei 2015, p. 209; Ballard 2005, p. 271). This is the sign of a responsible translation. In the twenty-first century, the core of translational ethics is no longer fidelity (an obsolete notion), but rather the generous concept of linguistic hospitality. This utopian desideratum is sometimes phrased as “fertilizing one’s own by way of the mediation of the foreign.” The translator’s ethics might ultimately be summed up in Paul Ricœur’s formula: “soi-même comme un autre” (oneself as another, Ricœur 2004). This ethics, however, is conditioned and unsettled by pragmatic needs—above all, the need to sell in receptive cultural markets, which welcome novelty. (As a side note, Eugenia was the best-selling title at the 2019 Gaudeamus Book Fair in Bucharest.)

3. Case Studies—Eugenia

The recurring difficulties and challenges faced by the translator can be outlined in several, though not exhaustive, categories. What makes the translator’s role as mediator particularly complex is that the same frame of reference may evoke two entirely different scenes for readers from different cultural backgrounds, as these scenes are influenced by culture and the (mis)recognition of historical realia.

For the Romanian translator of two French-language novels by a French author—novels deeply documented on the extermination of Romanian Jews—the primary ethical challenge is one of over-documentation. Both Simona Modreanu, the translator of Eugenia, and I, in working on Mes pas dans leurs ombres, have had to conduct extensive personal research. Neither of us approached the task with ideological or religious bias, nor with visceral attachments to the text that might have compromised our translational choices. However, the Romanian history of the 1930s–1940s, as well as that of the Ceaușescu regime, seldom mentions the pogroms of Iași and Bucharest. Conversely, scholarship, criticism, and analysis remain discreet, little known, or even contradictory. Testimonies are diverse, perspectives shifting or unstable, depending on whether the account comes from victims who experienced deprivation, famine, or ideological persecution, or from members of the nomenklatura who enjoyed the privileges of the ruling class.

A poignant novel about the “dark decade” in Romanian history—the rise of the Iron Guard and the “green shirts” (a far-right movement encouraged by Nazism), the king’s abdication, and the pogroms against Jews—Eugenia draws extensively on the Journal of Mihail Sebastian. It is Lionel Duroy’s seventeenth novel and was awarded the Prix Anaïs Nin.

Duroy envisions a potential beloved of the Jewish Romanian intellectual who suffered a tragically sad fate (persecution, humiliation, accidental death): Eugenia, the narrator, whose own existential journey is equally extraordinary and narratively daring. Fiction, after all, is a privileged space of unrestricted imagination, allowing liberties that surpass what is plausible. The twenty-first-century reader (French, Francophone, Romanian, or Anglophone) becomes a spectator, whether passive (or active through empathetic transfer), of events that occurred a century earlier. The vast temporal gap, combined with unfamiliarity with Romanian political and historical realities, may hinder the horizon of expectation and the reception of the novel, as well as the plausibility and credibility of the narrator, inevitably tinged with subjectivity.

Eugenia provoked a heated debate, both for and against. The author was sharply criticised for various reasons: historical inaccuracies and chronological distortions (e.g., in the names of figures such as the king’s mistress or Elizabeth Bibesco), unflattering portrayals of Romanian political and cultural figures (from Mihail Sebastian to Mircea Eliade, Nae Ionescu, Armand Călinescu), gaps in his depiction of Sebastian’s entourage, or even the construction of the protagonist herself—an assertive journalist and feminist whose characterisation was deemed implausible. Critics reproached Duroy for objectifying the female voice through a predominantly masculine perspective, turning Eugenia into a quasi-unbelievable figure, a killer in the name of a chimerical truth. He was also criticised for the overly romanticised tone of the novel and for overloading it with philosophical dialogues bordering on essayistic disquisitions, which detracted from its aesthetic coherence. By contrast, feminist criticism defends this historical novel, which employs history as a backdrop or framework (and is therefore not a pastiche), fictionalises it, and renders it “romantic” in places. This aesthetic choice unsettles the conformism of certain Romanian readers, who are disturbed by the recuperative gesture of a foreign author daring to cast an external gaze on a sensitive subject—one that reopens wounds not yet healed, rekindles old conflicts and remorse (regarding Romanian antisemitism). Eugenia’s father expresses virulent antisemitic views (using the strongly derogatory terms “youpin” and “youtres”—Rom. “jidan”), speaking maliciously of the “unhealthy presence” of Jews in Romanian history (cf. chapter 29), and delivers hypocritical disquisitions on Jewish history.

Among the more sensitive issues in translation ethics are the following:

The narrative of the fall of the Goga-Cuza government, the royal dictatorship, the arrest and death of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and the rise of Ion Antonescu.

The rise of Eugenia as the right-hand woman of the newspaper’s editor and her career in the communist resistance under the mentorship of Professor Irina Costinas, considering the need for proportion relative to the French Resistance, which was a more strongly organised movement.

Explicitly sexual scenes, which sharpen the translator’s attention. For example, at the end of Chapter 20, Eugenia fantasises: “Enfin il me prendrait dans ses bras, enfin je respirerais l’odeur de sa peau, sous les cheveux, derrière l’oreille, et à l’instant où je sentirais son sexe me pénétrer, je jouirais. Je jouirais vite, trop vite, du plaisir indicible de lui appartenir.” The verb “jouir” was translated in Romanian with prudish euphemism as “a-și da drumul” (literally, “to let go”), instead of the explicit “a juisa”, which would have been more appropriate in this context. In English, this fragment is exactly: “Finally, he would take me in his arms; finally, I would breathe in the scent of his skin, beneath his hair, behind his ear; and at the moment when I felt his sex penetrate me, I would climax. I would climax quickly, too quickly, from the ineffable pleasure of belonging to him.”

The portrayal of a female sniper, integrated into the network of communist militants secretly returning from Russia, who assassinates a Romanian general, sabotages a train carrying Panzers heading to Stalingrad, and kills numerous SS soldiers. Although it is almost super-heroic, it is not the translator’s role to judge plausibility or to guide readers towards a critical reception.

The depiction of Mihail Sebastian, expansively discussing his sexual life, returning tanned and vigorous from forced labour imposed on Jews by Antonescu—portrayals that raised doubts about documentary accuracy, given clear inconsistencies.

Nonetheless, as translators, we must recognise the powerful effect of the novel’s closing pages, which partly redeem it from its flaws, such as sensationalism, a “glossy” style, inaccurate portrayals of Sebastian’s biography, or implausible depictions of interwar Romanian mores. In its final sections, Eugenia reflects on the hostility of Iași’s inhabitants towards Jews, on the human condition, on war crimes, and on the traumas of a decimated population. It should be emphasised that the Romanian translator paid meticulous attention to faithfully rendering meaning and nuance, especially in the hundred or so pages explicitly addressing the Iași pogrom (June 1941, when over 13,000 Jews were exterminated within days). Similarly, the scenes depicting Jews murdered in the streets carry a profound emotional impact for the readership.

4. In the Translation Laboratory of Mes pas dans leurs ombres—Stakes and Ethical Challenges

The novel begins with Adèle Codreanu, a thirty-three-year-old Parisian journalist, deciding to travel to Romania on assignment from her newspaper. This trip provides an opportunity to explore not only the events of the 1980s–1990s and the flight of her pharmacist parents from Iași but also the Bucharest pogrom, discovered after a chance reading of Countess Waldeck’s book at the Athénée Palace Hotel in Bucharest. From the outset, the text carries a dense historical, ideological, and cultural weight: the deployment of German troops in the hotel, the rise of the guardists turned legionnaires, and the escalation of anti-Semitism. In the opening pages, Adèle (representing Lionel Duroy’s perspective) offers overtly subjective comments on the political climate of 2018, including the current president, Klaus Iohannis, Liviu Dragnea, and Viorica Dăncilă, as well as the Romanian political landscape in preparation for presidential elections with high stakes. Therefore, there is no reason to hesitate in translation as long as the narrating voice assumes responsibility for her statements (remember that the reader inhabits the immediacy of contemporary events, with the novel published in 2023, and the translation scheduled for 2026). As previously emphasised, this aligns with our ethical obligation.

Our first obligation is to verify the accuracy of the history, which once again serves here as a canvas: the existence of Countess Waldeck, the political algorithm of power (Horia Sima, Zelea Codreanu—“saint-martyr” or not, p. 29). Adèle also finds in another book by Aharon Appelfeld (the Jewish writer from Czernowitz, Bukovina) that Bucharest also experienced a pogrom in 1940. She ultimately reproaches herself for historical shortcomings: “[…] je suis issue d’un peuple d’assassins. […] Les Roumains ont préféré tricher, feindre de ne pas s’en souvenir », p. 132)/[…] I come from a people of murderers. […] The Romanians preferred to cheat, to pretend not to remember” (p. 132—a passage we will translate literally (sic!), even as Romanians ourselves).

The situations that demand our heightened vigilance are of the same order: the accuracy of certain events (so heavily criticised in Romania with respect to Eugenia), the explicit lexicon of erotic scenes of pleasure (“Hush, come now my darling, fuck me, fuck me hard, I want it so much,” p. 45; “in the mouth it’s vulgar, a whore’s thing,” pp. 81–82; the scene of sexual abuse in the gymnasium, p. 129; even more daring on pp. 144 and 156), or the register of “mild” insults (“idiot,” “poor fool”). The atmosphere appears highly outdated to Parisians (Arthur rejoins his wife), while the abandoned countryside and the train journey toward Iași, “exotic” and interminable, add to the sense of estrangement.

Adèle sets out on a crusade for “truth,” out of shame at her ignorance, “blindness and discouragement” (pp. 91–92), discovering harsh realities in Moguilev, Secureni, and Czernowitz.

5. Final Remarks

A modern synonym of mediation, translation may be conceived as a hyperonym encompassing interpretation and communication, regarded as dominant meta-principles in social and cultural perception, as well as other derivative concepts. As a worldview or Weltanschauung, and as an inexhaustible and invaluable cultural archive, translation comes to embody the self-consciousness of the contemporary world.

To translate is, paradoxically, both to dress oneself in the emperor’s garments and to cast them off—to take distance from the original, to place leagues between received ideas and those newly offered to us. One may even come to think against oneself, against the brutality of one’s own principles, and allow oneself to be seduced by the light of the inn at the far crossroads. The inn at the crossroads is where translation lays its foundations, in a third language equally distant from the original and from the translator’s mother tongue. Invited there, in this exquisite inn, we are treated by the host, both “amphitryon” and “enemy” at once. How beautiful, how ambivalent, this Latin word “hostis”.

The experience of translation is the human condition par excellence: to be inhabited and dominated by the presence of the Other, who sits within us, who besieges us. The Other is there in our entrails and in our veins, where both letters and ink flow—but above all in lived experience. We remain in the text as in a therapeutic relationship. It belongs to our phenotype as translators—it is our habitus. We resemble those we translate, the translated, the translators, the Others. We translate with all the books we have read or left unfinished, with all our knowledge, our skills, our aptitudes, our talent, our detective flair. Linguistic, stylistic, cultural—but not in the broad, chaotic sense: rather in the narrow and refined sense of specialised culture, culture of sound pedigree. In the case of the two novels discussed above, solid documentation on Romanian history of the 1930s–1940s and 1980s–1990s, pogroms and the apogee of the communist regime, proves indispensable.

We translate with courage and with cowardice, carefully measured out. With the genes we do not know lie hidden in our family tree, like Adèle Codreanu, the metamorphosed heroine of Mes pas dans leurs ombres, with our own script and life story. With much empathy, but above all with even greater curiosity.

The translator carries in their inner ear a plethora of theoretical studies, notes, and observations from professionals, all buzzing perversely. And at times, sins by pride, seeking to be politically correct, while running the risk of becoming politically sensitive. Granted, we concede this—but the translator must never, ever become lamentable, lukewarm, or beside the point. One must avoid, with precision, violence, interventionism, and manipulation. Translation is violence, stigma, unconscious discrimination in thought and in choice; it is sexist, racist, and minoritarian.

We therefore advance the thesis that, mutatis mutandis, the role of the translator as an (inter)cultural mediator will change paradigm: it will be vectorised toward the epistemological, even the political (for translation precisely serves to clear its own intermediary space, to expand borders, to dissolve realia deemed “untranslatable,” to resist, even to oppose), and ultimately toward ethical universality.

“Tell me whom you translate, and I will tell you who you are”—a distorted adage turned truism, suggesting resemblance. And belonging. From here stem the labels and the weighing, in ounces, of who translates what, and how. When we translate, we love to read attentively, with the eyes of a cat who sees in infrared. We love what we read, and we translate within an immanent relation of dependence on the Other: to think with them, to feel their letters, their ink, their thoughts and ideas flowing in our veins. This occurs in order or disorder, in the small or the great circulation through the arteries of the book.

We translate in respect for the Other, in order to understand and accept them in their difference. To translate is to plunge into “différance” in the Derridean and Walter Benjamin sense. And there we realise that in translation, we are all queer. Is this smell of damp hay naively bucolic, or do I sense there the roar of a famished beast?

Remaining invisible. Recently, some translators have invited their readers to enter the translational process through participatory practices, and translation becomes—if only fleetingly—a form of genetic criticism. Invisible? Lately, some publishers have begun to honourably place the translator’s name on the front cover. They set it on a small pedestal, acknowledge it—the “idiot of the family” steps out from the wings. He rises. The translator is a noble servant—allow me the oxymoron—or rather, a servile noble.

Translation is good, even surgical reading. Since I began translating, every act of reading has been deformed: we remain in a state of admiration for the finished product, where strategies, techniques, procedures can be discerned—in the thirst for the absolute, in the pursuit of the perfect translation—and only rarely in the pure Barthesian pleasure of the text. Mastery astonishes us, clumsiness irritates us. We hunt down convolutions and acrobatics; we analyse the translator’s performance as a tightrope walker who has brought clarity, intelligibility, and transparency to the target text, who has lifted the opaque veil of hermeticism, who has made accessible the ideas and thought of the Other by undoing the secret knots of the text, bringing sensitivity and po(i)eticity, seducing.

Translation is understanding, agreement, pact, resonance, empathy (not dangerous sympathy), and chameleonic in its nature at once. A Goethean elective affinity. In resonance, meaning perpetuates itself, sharpens itself, prolongs itself like a sound, penetrates and reverberates further, elsewhere, meets in fraternity, embraces—and they compose together, making semantic love. Chance and randomness become destiny, the sign becomes text, the text becomes discourse. Spiritual exercise, academic practice, or political desideratum—translation remains, all in all, a jubilant activity that not only presupposes a forma mentis, but constitutes one: a profound immersion into the thought of others, as we have said before. Theorists and practitioners alike agree that translation has always existed and that today, with more than 7000 languages spoken on the globe, translation is everything; it fulfils every function assigned to it, but above all, it is “the great mediator of diversity.” (Bellos 2012, p. 21).

Translation is transference, and counter-transference is projection, “identity theft,” liberation and bondage all at once, fidelity and betrayal, confession as well. It’s a “school of tolerance and a source of enrichment for the host language” (Wuilmart 2007, p. 130) and “the translator is an empathetic matchmaker of cultures” (“marieur empathique des cultures”, Wuilmart 1990, p. 238). From the colours it wears, the nuances of the hour or the seasons of translation, from cultural domination and aesthetic stakes, from discrimination and angelic idealisms, from methods, orientations and ideological divides, from the asymmetries of the literary market, from pragmatism, mercantilism, the fickleness of intercultural communication, from alterity and ipseity, from hesitations and slippages, from dilemmas and solutions, from the plurality of interpretations—we all pass under the “fourches caudines”, we cross them; and to this end exist symposia, conferences, and even simple literary feasts.

Much ink will still be spilled on the fragility of the one who has understood that they hold no power, none at all, that they are eminently subjective, that they expose their subjectivity and vulnerability, defending tooth and nail “their version”, and on the one who has realised that they are not the master of knowledge, of power, of the philosopher’s stone, that nothing is solid or unbreakable, that nothing turns into pure gold, except labour.

We conclude by declaring our love for translation, our compliance and congruence in the sisterhood of the ideal translation—art of composition and interpretation together, all at once, as in music. Translation is a vector of openness, of escape from enclosure, of displacement, of de-peripherization, and of the temptation of universality. Through translation, knowledge becomes shared and acquires added value. After all, if “to translate is to betray,” then let it be a powerful treason—authentic, multiple, and operational, and thus the creator of an identity, an alterity, and a hospitable hybridity.