Translating and Editing Shakespeare Today

ABSTRACT. The paper surveys the earlier canonical editions of Shakespeare's Works issued in the past decades in Romania and discusses the principles governing the new translations and the editing of the Bard's Works in the new edition launched by Paralela 45 Publishers in 2010.Keywords: translation; canon; censorship; stringency; performability; editing1. IntroductionThe first words of my Ph. D. thesis, completed in 2003, were:The Shakespeare Canon Revisited is the theoretical, or rather, historical and explanatory half of a larger project aimed at reshaping the notion of 'Shakespeare Canon' in Romania. The other half, the practical, 'artistic' one consists of a series of literary translations recently issued for the first time in Romania: The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare and Fletcher, published by Polirom in 2002, as well as Edward III, fragments from Sir Thomas More, and an epitaph, all attributed to Shakespeare, published by Paralela 45 in 2003. (Volceanov, 2005 a: 7)The doctoral thesis thus had a prequel consisting of translations that reshaped the Shakespeare Canon in Romania(n). Later on, it came to have a sequel, too: in 2010 Paralela 45 Publishers issued the first three volumes of a new edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works, the third in the reception of Shakespeare in Romania. The new translations did not pass unnoticed: they were short-listed for the Book of the Year Award (the only translations alongside five original works - novels, monographs and poems) and the Translation of the Year Award, respectively.A literary-and-scholarly is what I called the doctoral thesis and those translations back in 2003. At that time I was not yet aware that a vaster, timeand energy-consuming, project would follow. Looking back over my shoulder, I may ask myself: what are the necessary ingredients for such a successful publishing project? What helps one in reaching a stage when he/she can think of outlining a scholarly edition of one hundred per cent new translations? The answer is simple: a string of accidents, of coincidental events.One must be in the right place at the right moment. Having as an undergraduate a mentor who was a great translator and editor of Shakespeare counted a lot. Leon Levifchi did edit the Univers edition issued in nine volumes between 1982 and 1995. ESPLA had issued the first Romanian edition of the Bard's Complete Works in 12 volumes between 1955 and 1961.The first seeds of my literary-and-scholarly diptych were sown in September 1980, when Professor Leon D. Levifchi returned from the LAUPE Annual Conference held in Aberdeen with a copy of N.W. Bawcutt's New Penguin edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen. It was then I first learned the Shakespeare Canon is an unstable entity. Nearly two decades later, I accidentally came upon Jonathan Bate's ample review of Eric Sams' edition of Edward III. It persuaded me that there was still plenty of work to do about Shakespeare in the publishing as well as in the academic field.The main thing at issue in my doctoral thesis is that the Shakespeare Canon has undergone significant changes in the past decades. Today, it is a more evasive and deceptive, a trickier and shiftier entity than people generally thought it to be. Recent changes in the contents of Shakespeare's Works or of the Shakespeare series issued by book-market leaders such as Arden, Oxford, Cambridge, Norton, Penguin, Riverside, and so on, point to irreversible evolutions in both attribution studies and publishing strategies. These shifts are the outcome of century long debates and disputes that the general public has always been ignorant of.Other happy accidents that contributed to the idea of a completely revised edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works were the favourable reception of the translations that enlarged the Shakespeare Canon in Romanian, with the positive feedback of fellow-academics (Codrin Cufitaru, Emil Sirbulescu), the constant complaints by people working with theatres about the dusty, outdated translations, which are not of much use in bringing to stage a play by the Bard, the reception of an important translation award for my groundbreaking Romanian version of Edward III, the National Theatre's production of Edward III - which gave me the opportunity to meet a great dramaturge, poet, and translator, Violeta Popa and consider, for the first time, the possibility of setting up a translation project team. …