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

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.